Lots of Dreams

On collaboration, courage, and the kind of people who keep our ideas alive.

Nearly everywhere you look today two brand names are lashed together by the stylish little “×”. It’s supposed to signal partnership, a promise that something new will be born where those strokes cross. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it’s just ink.

I’ve come to believe that real collaborations, the ones that matter, start long before any press release. They appear at the back of the mind like a shape in fog, gathering detail so slowly you’re not sure when it first arrived. When that half‑formed thing finally steps into the light you’re faced with a familiar interrogation: Do I share this? With whom? Will the idea grow stronger in their hands, or dissolve into polite compromise? Will it still be mine?

I’ve signed the paperwork more than once. Each fresh venture looks glorious on a business plan until the 18‑hour days and the midnight dread set in. Success is never guaranteed, but there’s one return on investment I can bank on every single time: I will learn something.

That lesson often arrives wrapped in advice—solicited or not—from friends, family, clients, influencers, and the well‑meaning ghosts of long‑dead writers. Everyone knows what you should do; few have ever tried. Sorting the wisdom from the noise is its own full‑time job.

So it’s important to hire experts for the tasks that would swallow my days: accounting, legal filings, the paperwork jungle that keeps dreams from dying of bureaucracy. And hunt for collaborators who excel at the parts I don’t, who see the same horizon and are willing to march toward it.

Jannik

In 2017, Jannik - my friend of more than 20 years, unexpectedly passed away in his sleep at age 39. He was older than me by 6 years, and like my big brother in every way but blood. My friend who believed in me. Who encouraged me to go after my dreams. To do more. Who was as excited as I was to start a brand together after I’d spent years learning how to make shoes by hand.

He was also a talented attorney who was at ease dealing with things that I knew little about.

I think about Jannik often. I try to remember things he said, advice he gave. I try to imagine what he might say if I could tell him about how much my life has changed over the past 8 years. That I’ve moved to another country. That I’ve learned a second language. That I’ve gotten married to an amazing person. And learned so much about coffee. Something I had always been passionate about but never thought was something I could find a career in. That I’m a pretty damn good coffee roaster. That I may have found my métier.

The crappy thing is that often I can only remember the things he said jokingly - “Well, keep playing the lottery” or just an off-handed remark - “It smells like piss in here.”

Yet the sentence that anchored itself in me surfaced during a conversation with another friend who’d lost his career to injury. “Eventually you realize that dreams die,” he said. The words out of my mouth surprised even me: “That’s why you have to have lots of dreams.”

I think Jannik planted that response in me years earlier. He charged ahead fearlessly, certain there would always be another idea worth chasing. Losing him was a brutal reminder that projects can end overnight, but dreams don’t have to.

Finding the right people

It is hard—sometimes impossibly hard—to locate the folks who glimpse your vision as clearly as you do. But when you meet them, you feel the click. They don’t shrink your ideas; they sharpen them. They add their own colors to the palette and hand the brush back to you.

I’m fortunate to have found a few of these people: my wife, who agreed to share life with a relentless dreamer; mentors who cheer from a distance; coworkers who stay late to cup one more roast. Their belief steadies the compass when the path slips into fog again.

The coffee project

And now—our countryside coffee roastery that’s been unspooling across these essays—still lives closer to fog than daylight. Yet every week it coalesces a little more: a converted barn, bees in the hedgerow, hazelnut trees for house‑made milks, Bolivian coffees roasted meters from the garden. It has already introduced me to extraordinary, generous people. Good people.

We don’t know where this road ends. That uncertainty once kept me up at night; now it feels like the point. The road itself is lined with chances to learn, to meet new friends, to prove Jannik right: if we keep enough dreams in circulation, one is always ready to bloom when another falls away.

Here’s to the miles ahead and to the companions who make the walk worth it.