My Father Taught Me to Pursue Excellence. Coffee Taught Me About Satisfaction.

An obsession with excellence creates an unfortunate binary: all or nothing.

My dad was the man in charge of excellence. At the office, they gave him a title for this work: Quality Control Manager. And because he worked at Maxwell House Coffee in the 1970s, they gave him a nickname, after a character made famous by another coffee company: El Exigente.

When I was growing up and my father was in his middle-management prime, a competitor company ran a series of popular television commercials featuring El Exigente, “the demanding one.” Debonair and discerning, El Exigente traveled Latin America to inspect and select the best beans from the growers there. In the commercials, the camera shows El Exigente running his fingers through mounds of beans, evaluating them in pursuit of “coffee-er coffee.” When he indicated approval, the entire breath-bated town erupted in celebration.

My father did occasionally fly overseas to coffee-producing countries, but usually he drove to his office in New York or a plant in New Jersey, where he designed processes to maintain the quality of a bunch of mass-market coffee brands being sold to American restaurants and grocery stores. Magazines like Food Technology and Chemical & Engineering News came in the mail, and he actually read them, placing within their pages scraps of yellow paper as bookmarks. Work at home involved him pencil-scratching through pads of graph paper at the dining room table piled high with charts and reports.

As a little kid, I embraced the more glamorous notion of Dad as El Exigente. I liked to imagine the blank-labeled samples of instant coffee lining our pantry were top-secret product advancements, ultramodern versions of the coffee-est coffee. I conjured images of him at work being brought trays of hot brew, slowly sniffing and sipping each cup, being relied on to choose the very best.

He was also in charge of excellence at home. My mother and we kids were subject to his judgment, and it wasn’t hard to fall short of his standards. It was Dad who checked if you had dried and put away the dishes after washing them. Whose expert nose would turn up theatrically when I, at ten years old, didn’t bathe myself thoroughly enough. Who critiqued how we peeled or didn’t peel a potato (an offensively unpeeled spud was once launched across the table from his fork).

Don’t get me wrong. My father was loving, genuinely affectionate, and often unduly proud of us. And he got better at these things as he aged; his continuous improvement plan meant he became a daddy-er Dad after retirement and up until he passed away. But coming of age in the house on which Maxwell House paid the mortgage, producing an inferior result from a sloppy process meant a likely upbraiding.

We were kids with a lot of chores but only one real job: schoolwork. My father’s demand for excellence was most fiercely felt when it came to our academics—more accurately, to our grades. Parents back then tended to accept the professional assessment of teachers, and if my teachers gave me an A, it was presumed I’d earned it. With El Exigente, an A was expected; anything less was a disappointment. By the time I graduated from high school, I had internalized the notion that hard work and smarts were something, but if they didn’t produce excellence as measured by someone else, they could transmogrify into nothing.

Though our kitchen was filled with coffee, mugs, grinders, coffee makers, and percolators, I didn’t start drinking coffee until college. My friends and I competed to see who could drink more of the stuff after dinner in the cafeteria, who could stack more cups atop saucers atop cups and slow-walk them to the table while vocalizing the circus song “Entry of the Gladiators.” Once fully dosed, we would head to the library for a night of studying. The cafeteria coffee probably didn’t taste all that good, but we wouldn’t have cared. It didn’t need to be excellent, just to be the fuel for excellence. Inside that college library, I felt, for the first time, the flush of satisfaction in deep thought and hard work. But the anxiety around the goal, the elation of the A, still loomed large. So large that it could wipe away that feeling.

By the time I graduated and worked in an investment bank, I was probably addicted to coffee. One of my former officemates recalls how each morning she’d watch my hands shake until they were steadied by my second cup. Growing up with my father was good preparation for the world of international mergers and acquisitions, where you needed to be on constant alert and could easily get chewed out for a typo, a miscalculation, or a misplaced page in the draft of a client presentation. Early in my days there, it seemed the senior bankers saw the newbies as either geniuses or idiots. Not a lot in between. Neither the prep nor the career were very good for the soul.

After too long, I left the corporate world for a career that would bring greater satisfaction. The people I knew who were happy were educators, and I appreciated words more than numbers, so I decided to become a secondary school English teacher. Then I worked at my own dining room table strewn with papers. Saturday morning over cups of coffee was the best setting for grading student essays: I was at my freshest, most relaxed, and most charitable. Still, I was often discouraged by hastily written rough drafts or sloppily proofread final ones. How could so many students fail to integrate quotes after the many times we’d gone over how to do it? How, in spring, were some essays still composed of one monstrous paragraph stretched over three pages? Why did a great writer not hand in a great essay? Why did a good writer not hand in anything at all?

Why did a great writer not hand in a great essay? Why did a good writer not hand in anything at all?

Eventually, I recalled a conversation with my father in which he had shared his frustration with being responsible for the quality of a product over which the customer had ultimate control: Consumers at home or servers at restaurants would brew the coffee he’d fretted over, not him. They could brew it well or screw it up. If they screwed it up, it would still be his fault.

This had new meaning now as a teacher. It had been a kind of torture, wondering what I was doing wrong in those early years of teaching. After all, if my students couldn’t or wouldn’t write as well as I expected, wasn’t it my teaching that had failed? The worst part was that I had to assign them grades. I couldn’t just run my fingers through the beans, approve the coffee-est and reject what wasn’t, and move on. Most of my students didn’t get the only nod they sought: the A.

They all wanted it. Many expected it. In the affluent, “high-achieving” schools where I taught, the not-A indicated failure. I often heard students tell each other “I failed that test” when they had scored a B+. Over time, in such a school or work or home culture, the grade, the raise, the praise become less potent. They give less of a high, causing less celebration in the village. To get an A begets relief more than joy—an inevitable degradation of emotional response in a world where excellence, or at least its label, is the only win.

So it turns out I didn’t suck at teaching. My students didn’t suck at learning. No, I might not have been the best teacher, but I was a good one. And they were, each year, a hundred new-to-me adolescents smack in the middle of adolescence. Some with early talent and interest in English class and some without so much, practicing writing like laureled academics and best-selling authors. I could plan and deliver lessons and provide feedback. I could endear and encourage and cajole. The rest was out of my control. Ultimately, their work was their product, not mine.

Learning to write is hard. It takes at least a lifetime. Some of my students were already good writers. Some of them would become great ones, going on to careers as journalists and authors and scriptwriters and songwriters. Some of them would never write all that well, but they were good, often great, at other things. Some of them were already good at being happy. Some of them became so, despite a culture that expected excellence or the constant measurement of it, whether that measure was valid or not.

I had to learn to be satisfied with what I could do—and what I couldn’t. I had to learn to focus on the joy in all of the writing: in the messy process and the sloppy product. In the surprising idea half-buried in the overwrought language. The compelling hook at the beginning of the unfinished paper. The sense of humor in the scribbled excuse note. An obsession with excellence creates an unfortunate binary: all or nothing. But the pursuit and process of learning can bring satisfaction. At least, to me, it can.

When my mother passed away a few years ago, I had to sort boxes of memorabilia at our old home. I came across a photo of my father in a Maxwell House factory. It’s a staged promotional photo, maybe for the company newsletter. In it, wearing a crisp suit and shined shoes, our El Exigente has arrived to oversee a group of men who are packaging coffee samples for testing. The claustrophobically small lab area is bounded by what looks like chain-link fencing. It’s hard not to identify with these caged, uniformed technicians hard at work, hands busy and heads down, about to receive his commentary on their work.

You may think, You know what I don’t associate with excellence? Maxwell House. And for sure, with the rise of specialty coffee in the 1980s, the desire for “coffier coffee” outstripped what traditional supermarket brands could offer. My father retired in the second half of that decade as US consumers began to think of themselves as their own El Exigentes. He lived to see Starbucks stores spread across the country through the 1990s, controlling so much more than he could, but he dismissed the phenomenon, insisting they “burned the beans.”

Now, artisanal-coffeehouse culture has many drinkers making blithe pronouncements about which brands and types and origins and brewing methods are excellent and which are not. To today’s coffee snobs, to say you drink Maxwell House is to, perhaps, confess that you don’t care about coffee and maybe aren’t that attached to life itself. But maybe making someone dissatisfied with something they enjoy (or appreciate, or find familiar, or have time for, or can afford) is to be avoided more carefully than a cup of supermarket joe. I’m haunted by the question of how many were turned away from the joy of writing because in the end, I always had to assign them a grade.

I’ve cut way back on coffee now, but I’ll never give up the morning cup, still and always and ever and paradoxically a source of comfort and a kick in the ass. That essential experience: the dip of the scoop in the grounds, the aroma filling the kitchen as it brews, the feel of my hand around a warm mug, the sense that I’m about to have a day. I might get something great done. I probably won’t. But there’s a whole day.

I’m a snob about snobbery, I suppose. But I’m no snob about coffee unless it’s truly weak and watery. I tend to buy cheap and brew strong. Heat the milk, at least 1 percent, and use a lot of it. These are some of the things in my control. But I won’t tell anyone how to make their own. There is no best coffee to buy, no best way to brew it. That’s not my coffee, not my brew. It’s their satisfaction.