Michael Gates Gill’s career path is a study in downward mobility. The Yale graduate and son of the noted New Yorker writer Brendan Gill spent decades putting on a suit and reporting to a plush corner office in an advertising firm, pulling in six figures. Today, at 67, Gill puts on an apron and reports to a Starbucks, where he toils as a barista, pulling in around $10 an hour.
But if you were to assume that Gill is miserable over such a reversal of fortune, you’d be wrong. In fact he’s happier today than he ever was as a corporate executive, and credits Starbucks for showing him “a work environment better than I had ever believed possible.”
That’s among the revelations he reports in his new book, “How Starbucks Saved My Life: A Son of Privilege Learns to Live Like Everyone Else,” which he calls a practical guide to “going from the ruling class to the service class.”
“Office life is a willful state of denial where nobody cares about anyone, so finding the concept of courtesy at a Starbucks was a nice surprise,” Gill told @work.
Gill’s path to self-fulfillment through latte-slinging began when he was fired from his advertising job in his early 50s. He started a consulting business and ran it for a decade until, in short order, his business crashed, he got divorced and he was diagnosed with a brain tumor – without health insurance. Whiling away his time worrying at a Starbucks on West 93rd Street, he was offered a job out of the blue by the store manager, and took it.
That the job proved a revelation is one happy ending to Gill’s saga – another came when Tom Hanks optioned the film rights, planning to play Gill in the movie. But Gill nonetheless continues to put his milk-frothing abilities where his mouth is, working part-time at a Starbucks in Bronxville, where he lives.
We caught up with Gill for some nuggets of his hard-won career wisdom. Herewith, then, are nine things a former ad executive learned by serving coffee.
* The major difference between having a high-powered job and working behind a counter at Starbucks is that as an executive, you get this false feeling of being a master of the universe. One of the gifts of working at Starbucks is that I can just be another guy who can’t control the universe. Letting all that arrogance go is such a relief.
* Working in an office is like being in an ivory tower, and after a while you feel like you deserve to be up there, and after a while longer you start to think that people in the service industry must be dumber than you. I never would have lost that attitude if I hadn’t lost everything.
* Another gift of working at Starbucks is seeing all those eager faces, sometimes lining up out the door, wanting their drink done right. And my job has a genuine usefulness, not a phony usefulness, like making up some advertising jingle.
* To be able to master a basic skill set is to feel good about yourself. I was terrified for weeks that I wasn’t up to the mechanics of the job, so the sense of accomplishment is still very real.
* I live much more simply now, and I find a lack of stuff such a reassurance. No more pinstriped suits. In fact, no more trips to the dry cleaners! A pair of khakis and a black shirt, and I’m good to go.
* America is so planned, with planned careers and planned retirements. But life is about spontaneity, and presenting coffee is about being creative – creating a few enjoyable minutes in somebody’s day.
* I’d like to say I leap out of bed at 4 a.m. to go to work, but I don’t. But at the end of my shift I’m very happy, and it’s only 1:30 in the afternoon. In advertising I was thinking about work all the time, but with Starbucks my time is my own, so when I get off, I’m done for the day.
* Most people are so safe in their offices and they don’t want to deal with reality, down at the street level, because they don’t think they can handle it. But they can. You just have to take that leap of faith in yourself.
* I’m not comfortable presenting myself as an expert, because I did what I did out of desperation. But when you reach a dead end, leap for a new life. It’s exhilarating and redemptive in ways never expected. Why not put yourself in a totally new environment? They say look before you leap; I say leap before you look.