The Coffee Shop That Wasn’t: On the Value of Work
When I graduated from Georgetown, I had a dream that puzzled the people around me: I wanted to open a coffee shop in Qatar.
It was more than a whim. I imagined a cozy, sunlit space where conversation lingered in the air like the scent of cardamom and espresso. A place where ideas could meander, where books and people mingled, and where I could begin something that was mine. But when I told an older friend — an established lawyer with a corner office and the quiet authority of someone who had followed the “correct” trajectory — he looked at me with a mix of concern and disbelief.
“Valedictorian of Georgetown,” he said, shaking his head slowly, “and you want to open a coffee shop?”
His words weren’t cruel, but they were loaded. They mirrored a broader cultural anxiety: that choosing an unconventional path — especially one perceived as lower on the socioeconomic ladder — is a waste of education, potential, and opportunity. Especially in much of the Middle East, where I was raised, the value attributed to entrepreneurship pales in comparison to the respect reserved for corporate work at elite institutions. There, status is not so much earned as it is granted — by the right surname, the right gender, or, in some cases, the right passport.
I didn’t open the coffee shop. Not then.
I followed the rules instead. I excelled in school, in a system designed not to ignite creativity but to reward obedience and precision. In many parts of the world, education is a currency — and I collected as much of it as I could. Two master’s degrees. A JD. Prestigious corporate roles. But each step, while respectable, felt like a deeper entrenchment in a lane that was never mine to define.
And yet, I now understand that my persistent yearning toward entrepreneurship — toward the unknown, the risky, the self-directed — was not a phase or a misstep. It was a form of rebellion. It was a subconscious attempt to reclaim agency in a world where the lanes are predetermined and the rewards are rarely distributed on merit alone.
The Myth of the “Good Job”
We live in a world that measures worth by titles, institutional affiliations, and LinkedIn profiles that sound impressive over dinner. The “good job” is a cornerstone of modern respectability. But that very notion is both modern and fragile.
In his 1974 essay “The Hidden Injuries of Class,” sociologist Richard Sennett explored how working-class individuals internalize societal hierarchies. Even when economic conditions improve, the psychological weight of status lingers. The “good job” is not just about income — it’s about legitimacy, identity, and being seen. It is a mirror through which others assess our value and, in turn, how we evaluate ourselves.
In that light, my friend’s reaction to my coffee shop idea wasn’t simply disapproval; it was worry. In his eyes, entrepreneurship — particularly the small, personal kind — was a deviation from the roadmap that granted external validation. It was a form of disappearance from the realm of the seen, the respected.
But this way of thinking is profoundly flawed. It turns work into performance. It strips it of intrinsic meaning and ties it to ever-shifting external measures of prestige.
Schooling as Sorting
Schools were never meant to nurture wild thinkers. The modern schooling system was born out of the Industrial Revolution, designed to prepare children for factory life. Bells mimicked shifts. Desks in rows mirrored assembly lines. Even today, students are rewarded for compliance, punished for curiosity that doesn’t fit into a rubric.
When you are interdisciplinary — when your interests span law and literature, science and spirituality — you are often told that you’re unfocused. The system doesn’t know where to put you. In contrast, true innovation has almost always been the child of cross-pollination.
Take Leonardo da Vinci. He was an artist, yes, but also an engineer, anatomist, and philosopher. His notebooks are not separated by discipline — they are a tapestry of insights drawn from a boundless curiosity. Or consider Steve Jobs, who famously credited a calligraphy class for inspiring the elegance of Apple’s typefaces. Or, more recently, the field of behavioral economics, born from the marriage of psychology and economics and now fundamental to understanding how real people make decisions.
The lesson here is simple: staying in your lane may keep you safe, but it will rarely make you original.
The Rules Were Made for Goliath
I recently reread Malcolm Gladwell’s David and Goliath in The New Yorker. He argues that underdogs win not by mimicking the powerful, but by leveraging the very things that make them different. They play a different game.
If you’re small, your advantage is speed. If you’re new, your advantage is fresh perspective. If you don’t have institutional backing, your advantage is freedom. These advantages aren’t always visible at first glance, but they matter immensely in a world where the big are slow and the small are nimble.
Entrepreneurship, especially today, is not just an economic activity — it’s an act of resistance. In a global economy where a few players dominate and the rest are squeezed into labor that serves those hierarchies, starting your own venture is a declaration that your value does not need to be validated by others.
But to succeed, you have to know the rules better than anyone — and then learn how to bend them. You have to study the market with the precision of a strategist and move with the instincts of an artist.
Wealth and Work
Where I grew up, work was never just work. It was survival, status, and sometimes, silence.
In the Arabian Gulf region, wealth is concentrated — often in the hands of those who inherited it, married into it, or were positioned favorably by historical circumstance. Entrepreneurship exists, but it is frequently romanticized only when it is wildly successful, not when it is mundane, messy, or middling.
Given the cultural disdain for risk, education becomes the safest path to upward mobility — especially for those of us without powerful family names. But even education, impressive as it may be, does not always lead to open doors. I was an expat, and a woman. No number of degrees could overcome those markers in the social hierarchy of that region. So I left.
In the US, there is a different kind of self-organizing — one shaped by market logic rather than lineage. Here, the game feels legible. You could, at least in theory, change your status through effort, insight, and timing. Work here carries an inherent value; it is the currency of aspiration.
Still, even in the U.S., the valorization of certain types of work over others persists. Tech founders are celebrated — until they fail. Artists are romanticized — until they go broke. We say we admire risk-takers, but often only when they’ve already won.
The Deep Value of Work
What, then, is the value of work?
Not in terms of salary or social capital, but its deeper essence?
The philosopher Hannah Arendt distinguished between labor, work, and action. Labor is what sustains life — eating, cleaning, surviving. Work creates things that outlast us — buildings, tools, books. And action? Action is where we appear before others, where we take initiative and make meaning in the public realm.
Most of us live between labor and work. Rarely do we touch action.
Entrepreneurship, when done with integrity and vision, allows for all three. It sustains us, creates something that can endure, and asserts our presence in the world as autonomous actors.
This is the value of work that no title can encapsulate. The value of making something from nothing. The value of waking up and knowing that your efforts are building not just profit, but purpose.
The Wisdom of Detours
I didn’t come to this understanding on purpose. Life nudged me there — through detours, heartbreaks, and lessons I had to learn the hard way.
I built a career the way one might build a fortress — methodically, cautiously, with every credential a brick against precarity. And yet the fortress never felt like home. It was solid, but not mine.
Only later did I realize that my coffee shop dream was never really about coffee. It was about creating something of my own. About designing a space that reflected who I was, not who I was supposed to be.
That instinct — to shape, to build, to reimagine — is the core of what work should be.
A Note to Fellow Professionals
If you are reading this as someone with decades of experience and a name that means something in your field, I offer this reflection not as a dismissal of what you’ve built, but as an invitation.
You know better than anyone that success is not always synonymous with satisfaction. That performance can crowd out purpose. That somewhere along the way, work might have stopped being a source of meaning and started being a source of maintenance.
But it’s never too late to ask: what kind of work would make me feel alive?
Perhaps it’s starting something small. Perhaps it’s mentoring someone who reminds you of a younger version of yourself. Perhaps it’s writing, creating, slowing down, or rethinking your legacy.
The lanes we were given are not the only ones we can walk.
And the coffee shop you never opened might still be waiting — disguised not as a building, but as a metaphor for the life you can still choose to live.
