The First Crazy Idea

The calendar went quiet on a Tuesday.

By Thursday I was researching vintage food trucks on Facebook Marketplace and drafting a business plan for a mobile craft cocktail company.

This is not a metaphor. I was genuinely going to do it.

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Here is the thing nobody tells you about high achievers and free time: we do not know how to have it. We are not wired for stillness. The moment the structure disappears, the brain immediately starts building new structure around the first thing that sounds exciting, regardless of whether it makes any sense.

I love craft cocktails. I had spent 25 years entertaining clients, hosting dinners, learning the difference between a proper Old Fashioned and a lazy one. I had opinions about bitters. I knew what a smoked Negroni was before most restaurants did. In my mind, this was practically a qualification.

The concept was elegant in my head: a beautifully designed mobile bar that would show up at corporate events, private parties, upscale gatherings. Craft cocktails with a story. An experience, not just a drink.

I told a few people. They were politely supportive in the way people are when they are not sure whether to encourage you or intervene.

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And then, somewhere in the middle of sourcing vintage trucks, I hit a wall.

Not a logistical wall. Not a financial one. A motivation wall.

I kept asking myself: if this works, what does success actually look like? Me, behind a bar, making cocktails for someone's corporate holiday party? Is that what I want my days to look like?

The answer, when I sat with it honestly, was no. Not because there is anything wrong with that life, there isn't. But because I realized I am not someone who is driven by passion alone. I need to know that what I am building is going to matter. That it is going to change something, create something, leave something behind.

A mobile cocktail bar, however beautifully executed, was not going to do that for me.

The lesson I took from the cocktail business was not that the idea was bad. It was that I had been answering the wrong question. I had been asking 'what do I want to do?' when I should have been asking 'what do I want to build — and why?'

That distinction turned out to be everything.

The food truck never happened. But the question it forced me to ask eventually led me somewhere I never expected.

More on that soon.

With love, Beth