Creating my own MBA

Posted on September 29, 2025

I’m going to keep saying this: Great South Bay Coffee is a lot of things. I contain multitudes, and so does my business, I suppose. But the big motivation for starting something was, and continues to be, about learning.

When someone’s looking to change careers, a reasonable piece of advice is to do something like get an MBA or some other professional degree. You can get yourself into new professional networks, get a shiny new credential, and maybe even learn something. But I’ve been in college my entire adult life and I’ve seen how that sausage is made. To put it politely: it’s not for me.

But just because I’m not taking classes doesn’t mean I shouldn’t be taking notes. And that’s what this blog is about. Writing is thinking and this is a place for me to think about what I’m learning in this venture.

So here’s one thing I’ve learned: the biggest barrier between where you are and where you want to be isn’t a big scary wall. It’s friction.*

There are a lot of sources of friction. Too many to list right now and so I’m going to apply a lesson I’ve picked up this year: make things doable.

A voice in the back of my head wants to exhaustively list out and categorize all the sources of friction–psychological, financial, regulatory, etc., etc., etc. But if I listen to that voice, I won’t ever finish this blog post, so I’m going to leave that for the future and go enjoy the asters blooming in my backyard before the sun sets.

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*Obviously that’s not true for everyone. Lots of people who want to be living the American Dream, for example are prevented from enriching their lives and mine by literal walls.