I forgot how to be a beginner. 

Or perhaps, more accurately, I thought I was done being a beginner. 

It happened right around the time I graduated from college although I didn’t realize it until a few weeks ago. Being a curious and ambitious kid, I grew up looking for challenges. From as early as I can remember anytime something sparked my interest I’d dive right in and see where curiosity and practice would lead. I didn’t overanalyze or assess the challenge because the spark of inspiration was enough incentive to fervently devote myself to the activity until I felt I’d sufficiently mastered it. The satisfaction of accomplishing a goal after investing immense passion and hard work was addicting. 

I know how to unicycle because when I was in sixth grade my cousin gave me his old unicycle he hadn’t ridden in years. I spent six days straight practicing until I could ride down my street in one go. It wasn’t necessarily because I wanted to learn to unicycle but rather because I saw the hand-me-down as a challenge and I couldn’t pass up a good challenge. 

The thing about jumping into new things is that there is an unavoidable beginners phase. Throughout junior high and high school, I loved that beginning phase because it was tough. It was test of mettle and courage. My sophomore year of high school I got involved in a business competition called DECA. When I joined I was probably about 40 percent proficient at the competition—I was smart, creative and had a basic understanding of business, which gave me a good foundation but I definitely had no idea was I was doing.

It was a really competitive program and, being a competitive person, I had my sights on rising up through the ranks and being one of the dozen or so kids that got to go to the national competition. That motivation kept me working hard, embracing the long hours and tough challenges. With time and practice, my skills increased and by the time I graduated from high school I’d won nationals twice. I started as a beginner at 40 percent and finished my DECA run in the 90-100 zone.

This is a pretty simple formula that everyone at some point or another has presumably followed. 

It’s a good formula to follow—being a beginner involves passion and hunger with endless opportunities to grow and learn.

The opposite of a beginner is an expert—a person with knowledge and expertise, a person that isn’t making basic mistakes and struggling to find footing a confidence in a certain skill. 

By the time I hit my senior year of college I had left the beginner zone. I wasn’t an expert but, like many seniors, felt like I’d gotten the hang of things. I knew what I needed to know to get a degree and was involved in projects that had started gaining traction. It’s a lot like how I felt when I was a senior in high school—I’d come in at the bottom of the totem pole and worked my way up. 

However, there was an important difference between high school and college. In high school I mentally prepared to go back to being the small fish in a big pond—that pond being Michigan State University. 

What tripped me up with college graduation was that I forgot that I was going to be a small fish again. I mistakenly took my degree as a symbol of expertise and competence that meant I was done being a beginner. Now that I was a college graduate I felt people expected certain things out of me—especially because of my accomplishments in college.

After traveling for year I accepted my first real job and looked forward to moving to San Francisco to start the next chapter. That was nine months ago and I can easily say that past nine months have been the most wonderful, yet challenging, nine months of my life. I finally am able to put my finger on why.

There has been a disconnect between what I think I’m suppose to be doing and what I am actually doing. I feel like I could be doing my job better, living my life better, working on my side projects better. Despite my best efforts I couldn’t shrink the gap and the result was a growing frustration with myself followed by a negative thought cycle about my worth and competence. 

I was talking with a close friend about everything on my mind and her response was, “I think this job and move to SF are really good for you—it sounds like it’s been a very humbling experience.” 

Her words stuck a chord within me and reminded me of Cup 13. My conversation with Dave Isbell focused on humility and sacrifice. I went back and reread the post, which really hit home: 

So I understood what it meant to make sacrifices, but somewhere along my college journey, I forgot. It was easy to do. I’m in college! I have the freedom to do what I want! I’m having the time of my life! I don’t want to talk about sacrifice!

Then graduation day arrives and reality sets in.

Dave sees this happen often. Young graduates go out into the world full of pride and excessive confidence only to be humbled when the burdens of life catch up to them.

I unknowingly did exactly what Dave predicted I would do. He and my close friend were spot on—my anxiety was the result of unrealistic expectations. I realized it wasn’t that I wasn’t competent, I was just overly confident in my abilities and the difference between my confidence and competence were creating the frustrating disconnect. 

This first real job is the first time I’ve jumped into a new project without approaching it from a beginners perspective. I thought I was already supposed to know everything. I thought I was supposed to be good at everything from the start. That’s why they hired me, right? 

I overlooked that my company saw me as a beginner. They hired me because they had faith in my abilities but they knew that there would be a learning curve and over time I would grow into the position. 

Knowing that when I started would have been wildly helpful. I would have looked at the new job as a challenge to be embraced with passion and hustle. Instead, I jumped into the job with unrealistic expectations and lots of self-induced pressure to excel. Had I jumped into DECA expecting to operate at 80-90 percent proficiency I would have been quickly overwhelmed and disheartened. Instead of being excited about getting better I would have been overly critical about not being good enough. I would have quit long before nationals were a possibility.

Excitement to achieve a goal is significantly more motivating than walking around with an excess of anxiety and pressure on your shoulders. It took me nine months to figure that out and since I’ve figured it out I’ve been able to reframe my current situation and tackle challenges with a new sense of enthusiasm. 

It’s an amazing feeing that I didn’t know I’d been missing. 

It’s also an amazing lesson—if you’re always trying new things, you’ll always be a beginner. Regardless of previous success.

Your past experiences can make you better at whatever it is that you’re beginning, but whatever your skills, you don’t get to skip the challenging (and often awkward or uncomfortable) beginning stage. 

If you do skip it you’re clearly not tackling big enough challenges. Plus, you’re missing out on the fun of new beginnings—because with the right attitude, new beginnings are a lot of fun.

It’s just really easy to forget that when anxiety and stress weasel themselves into the situation. 

So on that note: here’s to a beginners’ mindset for all the wonderful challenges life will bring and the adventures that happen as a result.   

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It was a year ago yesterday that I hit publish on the final Cup of my 52 Cups adventure. 

I know this is cliche, but it was a moment I’ll never forget. 

I was staying in a trendy Airbnb apartment in the Mission District, sitting at this beautiful wooden table with incredible sunlight streaming through the window. It was quiet. Calm. Just me, my computer and my thoughts. 

I should have finished the project before December 1st but I kept dragging my feet in the same way one drags their feet when telling a loved one goodbye. I knew the project had to end but I wasn’t ready to accept that fact. The term pet-project was fitting for 52 Cups. The blog required constant attention and nurturing. It nestled itself into the center of my life and I in turn grew wildly fond of it. It followed me around through a milestone year, college graduation and over six months of nomadic living. It became a part of me. 

But on the morning of December 6th, I woke up knowing it was time to complete the goal. I grabbed my notebook and headed to the funky Mexican/American hybrid cafe, Boogaloos, where I ordered eggs, bacon, and my last Cup of coffee. 

It was a slow Tuesday, which made the restaurant a peaceful place to hang out with my thoughts. The plan was to get a rough draft on paper and polish it on my computer later that afternoon. The goal was not to over think it. I knew I couldn’t fit everything I wanted to say in under 1,000 words so I wasn’t going to force the post, I decided to just speak from the heart. 

…

Writing, as I learned early in the project, is a labor of love. After nearly an hour in the coffee shop I returned to the apartment to finalize my thoughts—a process that involved many despairing moments where my elbows ended up on the table with my face buried in my hands wondering why I decided to attempt writing in the first place (this happened at some point during every Cup). When I’d reached the end of the post and felt satisfied with the results, I reached out to my friend Jeannine online. I hadn’t told anyone I was working on the post but I wanted someone to give it a once-over before posting and Jeannine was a willing volunteer. (At the time of asking for her help, I never would have predicted that a year later we’d be taking a trip to Antarctica together, but like 52 Cups taught me time and time again, you never know where a connection will lead). 

When Jeannine send it back with her seal of approval I read through it one more time, plugged it into Tumblr, took a deep breath and hit publish. 

Then I sat there. 

Waiting for something to happen. 

I don’t know what I was waiting for. As silly as sounds, I had a strange premonition that my computer would explode. 

It didn’t. 

Instead, what happened was silence. The type of silence that reveals a void and simultaneously carries the weight of the world because while you don’t know what happens next, you know life will never be the same. 

That’s when the first red Facebook notification button popped up. Someone liked the post. Then someone else. And another.

And another. 

It was the beginning of a flood of digital well-wishes: emails, tweets, comments and texts celebrating and congratulating the 52nd Cup. 

It was both overwhelming and wonderful to realize something that meant so much to me meant a lot to others. It was a moment filled with gratitude and elation—a moment, or string of moments rather, that I’ll never forget. 

… 

The people I met and stories I heard through the 52 Cups experiment spring-boarded me into one heck of an adventurous year that led me back to to where I was exactly a year ago: San Francisco. Except this time I’m a resident, not a visitor. As much as I loved the nomadic lifestyle I found it increasingly more difficult to write and focus on projects while on the road. I realized I wanted to slow down so I could regain my focus and get back to working on challenging projects. I love challenging projects. 

It’s been five months since I made that decision and while life hasn’t slowed down much, I feel settled into this new city and ready to start a new project where the old one left off. 

Here’s to 2013 and what is sure to be another adventurous year! 

Thank you for following the journey. 

<3 

It’s been an adventurous week as my friend Jeannine and I have worked our way south en route to Antarctica. Here’s an update from our latest (and unexpected) travel extravaganza. 

… 

We’re ready for our second attempt at getting to Ushuaia. 

It’s been a crazy day to say the least. We checked into our hotel this morning at 7 am, slept until noon, hung out around the hotel until 2 am and are now (3:15 am) waiting with other hopeful passengers to see if we can check into our 7:25 am flight.

(We’ve been posting more frequently to our Facebook page, so check there for full details: http://www.facebook.com/thanksgivingwithauntarctica)

Do to a nationwide strike, the airport was shut down for 24 hours starting yesterday at midnight. We were planning on heading to the airport at 4:30 Tuesday morning to catch our 7:30 am flight to Ushuaia (where we get on the boat) but found out through our Airbnb hosts that protesters were shutting down the road so if we didn’t get on the road by midnight, we would make it to the airport the following morning. This was at 10:30 pm and by 11:30 pm we were all packed and in a cab headed to the airport. At 2 am, we discovered our flight was cancelled because all flights were canceled. 

Fortunately, we were able to secure two seats on the Wednesday morning flight and found a hotel room nearby that offered free transportation to and from the airport. In short, the past 24 hours have been unlike any airport experience we’ve had: 

• Arrived at the airport at midnight only to wait near the checkin desks until 5 am 
• Scheduled taxi pick up at 6 am and checked into a hotel room at 7 am. 
• Slept until 1:30 pm. 
• Explored the very interested shopping complex where the hotel was located for a couple hours. 
• Cat napped at 10 pm. 
• Checked out of the hotel at 2 am. 
• Arrived at the airport at 2:30 am with hopes of leaving on a jetplane at 7:30. 

Our days and nights have been all sorts of crazy the past five days. It’s been incredibly fun though. The kind of fun with a layer of anxiety that won’t go away until we’re on a plane getting ready to take off. 

With travel, especially international travel, it’s best to expect the unexpected and roll with the punches, which is what we’ve done and so far things are working out for us, all things considered. 

We appreciate all the thoughtful words of encouragement. We’re crossing our fingers we’re on the plane and in the sky within the next five hours so the adventure south can continue! 

We’ll keep you posted. 

Serendipity: the faculty of making fortunate discoveries by accident

When I graduated from Michigan State University 18 months ago, the whole world was ahead of me. I’d gone to school and gotten my degree. I was ready for whatever came next.

Ready, but uncertain.

It wasn’t a stressful uncertainty, it was an optimistic one. I had decided the previous December that I was throwing all post-graduation plans out the window and replacing them with a two-month trip to Europe. I decided I would figure out the rest of my life when I got home.

The decision was both courageous and crazy, (probably more of one than the other depending on your perspective) but I knew with certainty it was the right choice. Early that year, I’d fallen in love with the quote: 

Sometimes you just have to take the leap and build your wings on the way down.

I trusted that I could jump into the wild unknown and land on my feet. I also trusted that if I didn’t land on my feet I’d put bandage on my pride and accept any job that would get me back on my feet—in terms of worst case scenarios, that’s a pretty mild case.

With that in mind, I packed my bags, boarded a plane and embarked on what would become a whirlwind adventure. My two month European adventure turned into a year-long adventure of nomadic living during which time I visited over 75 cities, took four road trips, surfed for the first time, visited friends, milked cows, spent time with family, went skydiving, had my car stolen, watched friends get married, drank coffee, took pictures, and most importantly: met incredible people.

It was a magical year because it was filled with so many wonderful people.

Over the course of the year, I learned that it is the people you surround yourself with that have the greatest impact on your future. The process of meeting and spending time with a diverse set of people led to unexpected friendships and that took my life in equally unexpected directions.

Case in point: over the course of my nomadic year, Jeannine became one of my best friends and now we’re headed to Antarctica.

It’s an adventure we’re amusingly referred to as Thanksgiving with Aunt Arctica.

Why?

Because it’s a funny pun.

Oh! You’re wondering why we’re going Antarctica. It’s a complicated story and the easiest explanation is that a spontaneous conversation led to an idea that spiraled into a project that start with a trip to Antarctica.

November 16th is the start a two week adventure filled with new experiences and more importantly, new friends. All of which we want to share via stories, photos and video here and on Facebook.

We also want to share a tangible piece of the trip—postcards! There’s nothing better than receiving a postcard from Antarctica, right?

Actually there is: receiving a postcard and helping someone in the process. We have teamed up with charity: water to raise $700 dollars to provide clean water for those without. We will happily send a Postagram postcard from Antarctica to anyone willing to make a donation to the cause. It’s a fun and simple way to give a deserving family something to be thankful for this Thanksgiving.

You can sign up for a postcard here.

This trip to Antarctica is my chance to get back to writing stories about the people I meet and the lessons I learn in the process. If you want all the details of the trip Facebook is the place to find them although I will be posting an update or two here. 

Cheers to another adventure! 

…

If you follow me over at megangebhart.com or on Twitter, you know that the past year and a half has been a wild nomadic adventure for me. The stories I heard and friendships I made during the process of 52 Cups motivated me to trust my gut, give up the job search and just travel. A two-month European adventure turned into a year of rent-free living where I averaged being in a new city every four days. 

It was a fantastic adventure, but it’s time for me to make a long overdue announcement. 

There’s no easy way to say this so I’ll just say it outright: 

             I moved. 

             To an apartment.  

             In a city. 

That means that my days of nomadic living have come to an end (at least for the time being, anyways). 

I moved to San Francisco in late July and you’re probably thinking, What!? You’re just now writing about this? I know, I know. I should have said something about it sooner but I couldn’t bring myself to write the post.  

Not because I’m sad about the move. I fell in love with San Francisco three years ago and after visiting 75 cities in the past year I know there is no other city I would rather be in full-time. I held off talking about it because telling the world I’d moved made it official. A blog post was my way of ending a chapter of my life—the nomad chapter—and it’s always hard to let go of something wonderful. 

But in my heart, I knew it was time to change directions. 

I have some big goals on my to-do list that I kept putting off because the roller coaster of constant travel was too exhilarating.

I decided in June that it was time to put down some roots and started a job search in San Francisco. In mid-July I took an offer to join the Elance team as a College Evangelist. Elance is an online platform for freelancers to find work and I’m in charge of spreading the word to college campuses nationwide. That means my days of travel aren’t completely over (insert sigh of relief).

And, more importantly, my days of adventure aren’t over either. San Francisco is a city that inspires creativity and big dreams. What’s even better is that many of my best friends, and favorite schemers, live here so I’ve got lots of adventures up my sleeve. 

Adventures that I have more time for now that I’m not spending so much time packing and unpacking my suitcase. So be prepared for more excited updates soon. 

Cheers to a new chapter!

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A question I often receive when I tell people out 52 Cups is, “Did you always go to the same coffee shop?” 

The answer is no. 

What started out as a simple experiment to talk to people in my community turned into an adventure that led me to many corners of the world. I met people in:

• 29 cities 
• 12 states 
• 7 countries 
• and 4 Skype meetings (pink dots)

I made a map to show the places I had coffee. Click here or on the picture below to open the map. Each dot has a description of the person I talked to and a link to the corresponding blog post. 

Enjoy! 

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To those that followed the project, I hope you’ve been well. It’s been too long since we last talked.

To those of you visiting 52 Cups for the first time, thanks for stopping by!

52 Cups of Coffee was my yearlong experiment in caffeine and conversation. I wanted to see what would happen if I spent a year talking to strangers so I invited 52 different people to coffee and asked them to tell me about their life and the lessons they’d learned along the way.

The result was 52 fascinating stories that fundamentally changed my outlook on life. You can find the list of people I talked to and lessons learned here, the inspiration behind the project here, and more info about where I was when I started the project here. 

To see what other people had to say about the project, check here, here, and here. This is what I had to say about it at TEDxQueensU. 

…

So what have I been up to since 52 Cups ended? 

A lot of brainstorming. I learned a lot of great lessons through 52 Cups, now it’s time to put them to the test. It’s too soon to release the details, but I’m very excited about it and I think you will be too. 

I’ll be in touch! 

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And if you’d like to get in touch with me, shoot me an email at megan.gebhart[at]gmail[dot]com or find me on Twitter.

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It’s Tuesday morning and I’m sitting at an adorable breakfast spot in San Francisco eating some of the best bacon and eggs I’ve ever had while enjoying a cup of coffee that the waitress will refill at least three times before I leave. 

All throughout senior year, people asked me where I’d be after graduation.  I assumed I would be in a cubicle somewhere climbing the corporate ladder on the fast track to a promotion and increasingly impressive job title and salary.  

Because that’s what you’re supposed to do with an expensive college degree. 

And it’s probably what I would be doing if I hadn’t decided to do this crazy experiment in caffeine and conversation. I called it an experiment because I knew meeting 52 new people would change my life. I just didn’t know how. 

I can tell you I didn’t expect it would inspire me to trade the job search for six months of traveling to 72 different locations in 15 countries. Six months of waking up excited about the uncertainty of where the day would take me.  

Going into my senior year, the uncertainty of where life would take me after graduation created a crippling fear. I was stuck in the mindset that I had one shot to figure out my life. The day after graduation was the first day of the rest of my life and if I didn’t have the perfect plan—and the perfect job—in place I would be setting myself up for irreconcilable failure. 

I don’t know where that thought came from, but I know it was a real fear. I also know that I’m incredibly grateful for those that helped me see the irrationality in my thinking. 

It started during the first 10 Cups. I realized a very noticeable trend: nobody’s life went according to plan. Life throws you curveballs. Sometimes good ones: unexpectedly falling in love, discovering a passion, stumbling into an incredible career opportunity. And sometimes ones that test your strength: losing a loved one, experiencing a breakup, layoffs, unexpected illness or tragedy, major career failure, a downturn in the economy. The list goes on.

Understanding that life won’t go according to plan leaves you with two choices: let the fear of the unknown overwhelm you or embrace the uncertainty. 

I’ll tell you from experience that the former is easier than the latter. For two reasons. 

First, it takes a lot of faith (and confidence) to embrace uncertainty and believe you can handle what life throws your way. Faith I only found because I had a weekly conversation with people from various backgrounds reaffirming that, with the right approach, life works out. 

The second reason is that finding the faith is only half the battle. The second half is executing the approach. If you are open to go where life takes you, you will end up in incredible places. However, you can’t sit back and expect a great life, you have to go out and make a great life. 

The magic of sitting down with strangers—of putting yourself in a vulnerable position and taking time to genuinely learn about another person—is that you can put a story behind the advice. The advice becomes real and it becomes personal. I have a catalogue of anecdotes I now carry with me. 

On days filled with obstacles I think about Piotr Pasik traveling to Europe and playing indoor soccer despite having limited mobility due to cerebral palsy. When my dreams feel too big I think about Tom Izzo’s determination as a graduate assistant for the MSU basketball team, living off a measly $4,000 salary at age 30, because that’s what he had to do in order to one day become the head coach. 

When I think about what I want in a career I think about Torya Blanchard and what she calls her fight club moment—the moment she decided she was going to quit her job and cash in her 401K to start a (now-thriving) restaurant in Detroit. Then, when the fear of taking a risk sinks in, I hear Seth Godin’s voice in my head saying, “You’re not failing enough. I failed countless times before I was 30—and that’s what led to my success.” 

Dave Isbell’s words echo the importance of staying humble while Dave Murray’s remind me that life is about more than creating a great life for yourself, it’s about giving back and creating a great life for others as well. Encountering a vibrant six-year-old evokes memories of my conversation with Abby, an adopted Native American girl in a town without much diversity, who taught me that everyone has an interesting story but too often we make assumptions instead of asking questions. 

When I hear of tragedies I think of Betsy Miner-Swartz losing  both of her parents to cancer in a year’s time and how she used the love and support of family and friends to make it through the pain, one step at a time. Then I ask myself when is the last time I told my loved ones how much I love them—because it’s easy to forget they could leave us at any moment. 

This is just the tip of the iceberg. Every Cup changed me. 

The best way to describe the change is a quote from Cup 51, Elaine Rosenblatt: 

People need to learn to stop looking at life from the outside in and start looking from the inside out. 

When I started 52 Cups, I was so concerned with living up to other people’s expectations—concerned with people the person others wanted me to be. Over the course of this project, I’ve realized that is no way to live life. I have to look inside and figure out who I am and decide where I want to fit into the world. 

That’s why I decided to travel. 

I followed my love for travel and hoped it would lead me to the next step. And it did. When I stopped looking for the perfect job and focused on what I loved, the perfect job found me. Michigan State’s Alumni Association offered me a six-month position where I travel to various cities and connect with young alumni—a great position for a traveler with a love for good conversation.

And what happens once that job is over? 

I don’t know. 

But it’s okay. 

Because I know that if I can continue to figure out what I love to do, find the courage to do it, and do it well— life will work out—and I’ll have a lot of fun in the process. 

… 

It’s amazing what a little caffeine and conversation can do—if you’re willing to find out. 

When I set out to meet 52 new people, I didn’t realize the most important person I’d meet was the person that 52 Cups made me.

Before I post Cup 52 I want to take a moment to say thank you. 

This may have been “one girl’s experiment” but it was anything but a solo venture. The beauty of this project comes from the wonderful people that have been a part of it. 

From the 52 people willing to sit down and share their stories with me to the readers that kept me writing during the days I really didn’t want to write; you have made a profound difference in my life. And to my wonderful friends with unwavering encouragement, fantastic recommendations, and much-needed advice; please know I couldn’t have done this without you. 

Of course, I’m not done yet. I’ve still got Cup 52 to post this week. 

But I couldn’t finish the project without taking a moment to say, 

Thank you. 

It might just be two little words, but those two words hold a whole lot of love and appreciation. 

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Person: Elaine Rosenblatt 

Drink: Grande Americano

Date: October 19, 2011

Location: Starbucks in Skokie, IL

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