Afternoon coffee is a simple pleasure of my work day.

The smell. The taste. The little boost of energy to finish out the day.

But, afternoon coffee is a dangerous dance.

It’s a dance with your night’s sleep.

With coffee, there is line where you’ve had too much, too late in the day.

Then, you can’t sleep.

The problem is, you never know where that line is until you’re wide awake at 2 am realizing you drank too much coffee.

The line where we’ve pushed something too far is rarely clear. Typically, we don’t know where it is until we’re well on the other side.

The side we don’t want to be on.

Through experience, we begin to take smaller steps forward.

We ask more questions.

We gather more information.

We move a bit slower.

Generally, we become a bit more risk averse.

All trying to avoid blowing through that imaginary line without realizing we’re doing it.

While this might be safe, it’s not nearly as fun.

Sometimes we should just take a leap.

There is a certain thrill of standing at the coffee machine at 3:30 pm.

Will I sleep tonight?

The Fairmont Hotel is a beautiful pre-war hotel in San Francisco.

If you walk in the main entrance, there is a piano player.

A marble staircase. 

And chandeliers they don’t make anymore.

But, if you take that marble staircase down, you reach The Tonga Room.

A tiki bar.

In the middle of the Fairmont Hotel.

Something you would only find in San Francisco. 

Now, The Tonga Room didn’t always exist inside the Fairmont. 

Before it was a tiki bar, it was the hotel pool.

Then, in some meeting in the mid-40s with hotel executives, someone raised their hand and suggested the Fairmont turn their pool into a tiki bar.

The Tonga Room was born.

A tiki bar, with a pool, rain, and a band that plays on a boat floating in the middle of the pool.

Seems like a crazy idea now. I’m sure it sounded crazier then.

The next time you have a crazy idea and are a bit nervous to mention it, just remember the person who raised their hand in a Fairmont Hotel meeting to propose The Tonga Room. 

Who knows, your crazy idea might just work.

You don’t need to refrigerate your eggs.

I discovered this when I walked into my first supermarket in Germany.

I went to go buy eggs for the first time after I moved there. In the section where you pick up eggs, they are all just sitting on a table. Out in the open. Not in a refrigerator.

This concerned me a bit.

Not enough to not purchase eggs, but I was a bit concerned they weren’t in a refrigerator.

I assumed they would be bad. I would get salmonella.

After a bit of research, it turns out eggs don’t have to be refrigerated.

If, and only if, you don’t wash them.

Washing them removes a natural protective membrane on the eggs.

But, if your eggs are super dirty, you have to wash them. And, eggs get super dirty when chickens are kept in cages.

So, if you remove chickens from cages, making them cage-free, you no longer have to wash your eggs.

Then, you don’t have to refrigerate them.

What’s surprising here, is that if you tell egg producers they cannot wash the eggs before selling them, because of this protective membrane, they are forced to have cage free chickens.

And, we know that cage free chickens are more humane.

This brings me to a concept by Jim Collins called the flywheel.

The premise is, we do actions that force us to do a subsequent action that is desirable.

He explains this by saying, if I do action A, I can’t help but do action B. If I do action B, I can’t help but do action C. This scenario begins to gain momentum slowly, because a flywheel is difficult to get started. But, once it gains momentum, it starts to move itself.

In the flywheel scenario, we begin to choose our actions more strategically. We try to understand why we do something. And, does it build momentum that moves us in the right direction.

It is like deciding we are not going to wash our eggs.

What tiny action can you do with a positive subsequent action?