A week ago, I took my first “Tea class,” where I learned about the basics of teas and the types of teas that Peet’s offers. I drink tea more often than coffee, so it’s no surprise that I couldn’t taste the difference between different types of coffees on my first shift other than “This taste like coffee, and bitter.” With tea, there’s a wider range in flavor for me, and I could better distinguish one type of teas from another.
In the Tea class, I realized that I am opposite from my manager (the teacher) and a fellow “student” (from some other Peet’s) in that they have a better sense in distinguishing coffees than teas, whereas I’m better at teas than coffees.
Then it occurred to me. This ability to tell the difference among a class of similar items happens everywhere with everyone, e.g. designers with typefaces. A lot of my design friends know that I enjoy looking at type and blurting out the typefaces they’re set in, without even them asking me in the first place. That might annoy them, but I feel a sense of pride for being able to identify typefaces; it gives me a sense of expertise and validity in the design field, just as my manager at Peet’s would feel for being able to tell the difference between decaf coffee beans and regular coffee beans by smell alone.
It’s this type of expertise that excites each of us, giving us motivation to continue to pursue our interests, and become even more knowledgeable. Then we share that knowledge with the rest of the world, in sort of a large-scale collaborative learning pool. It’s an open-source community, and through it, everyone can learn not only about coffees, teas, and typefaces, but also about everything else, allowing us to become experts in everything if we choose to.
Flush.
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