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This is a book review for Michael Gates Gill book that tells the real life story of a nearly broke, former advertising executive takes up a new career at Starbucks and changes outlook on life. This is quite an inspirational read for seniors in particular as this career change was made even more dramatic by Micheal's age.
After a privileged upbringing and a distinguished advertising career, Michael Gates Gill found himself jobless, divorced, depressed, and diagnosed with cancer. To make matters worse, he was an age where she really wasn't that marketable anymore in the advertising business and had been squeezed out of J. Walter Thompson advertising agency like he was a busboy, rather than a 25 year experienced account manager who had spent more than his share of prime life years making the company successful.
After being let go, Michael Gates Gill desperately tried to hold on to his corporate lifestyle through consulting, but found to soon to the clients were too few, and cared very little about giving work to someone who seemed older than everybody else in advertising. Slowly his employment options disappeared, and his personal problems reached new heights. That's when he went for a cup of coffee.
Just like in these tough economic times places like Starbucks are still doing well because the cost of something so small can still bring personal enjoyment and an escape from the real world of stress, this too is what Michael Gates Gill found at Starbucks. It was just that now in this visit, she saw things differently in the chance meeting with the hiring manager at that same Starbucks let him down a new career path.
Career path you say? Well let's the thing about this book. A man of Michael Gates Gill upbringing and corporate experience would undoubtedly find such work beneath them, but at the time it was really his only option. So he took it and ran with it, learning a new trade, people skills, retail skills, and about a corporate culture that was so foreign to him and his tall building experience, that it also brought about a fundamental personal change within him.
This book details the experience and compares his new life working at Starbucks with how he was brought up with privilege, sent to an Ivy League school, and ushered into corporate America like it was a given right and not a privilege. What he finds, essentially, is that his life at Starbucks is the best life he ever had and never realized what he was missing in all facets of his life.
Sometimes moving, sometimes thought-provoking, and sometimes a little long-winded, this book does get around to contemplating some big questions such as your core values as a person. Whilst doing that, it is largely an entertaining and well written book that allows the reader to find the loser in himself and inspires to simply do better. |
