The Coffee Bean summary

After listening to Abe pour out his woes, Mr. Jackson simply nodded and said, “I know how you feel.” Then, he did something you might not expect. He didn’t dispense any words of wisdom or guidance. Instead, he gave Abe a homework assignment – and a rather random-seeming one at that: boil a carrot in a pot of water, observe it for a while, come back tomorrow and report what happened. 

That night, Abe carried out the assignment, and the next day, he met with Mr. Jackson after class to share his observations. He’d found that after about ten minutes of being submerged in the boiling water, the carrot got soft. 

So what’s the alternative to being a carrot? Just act tough and grit your teeth as the water boils you alive? Well, that’s not what Mr. Jackson would advise. On the contrary, his next lesson pointed out the fallacy of this approach to life.

Once he got Abe to understand the moral of the carrot assignment and to see how it applied to his own troubles, Mr. Jackson asked a follow-up question: What would happen if you boiled an egg instead of a carrot? 

By the end of his second conversation with Mr. Jackson, Abe had learned two lessons: he didn’t want to be the carrot, and he didn’t want to be the egg – but what could he be instead? 

Well, if you remember the title or introduction to these blinks, you already know the answer, so there’s no use trying to maintain the suspense: the answer is the coffee bean. 

After he finished his third conversation with Mr. Jackson, Abe was so inspired by the lesson of the coffee bean that he shared it with all of his football teammates. They were pretty jazzed too and went on to win the big game and reach the state championship. 

They ended up winning that game as well – but Abe injured his knee after he fell to the ground while making a play that helped ensure the team’s victory. It was a serious injury, putting him on crutches and requiring surgery. For all he knew, his dream of playing college football might be dashed. 

Abe worked as hard as he could at his sales job, but it seemed to be no use. No matter how much he poured himself into it, his sales numbers kept going down. 

But it wasn’t just Abe who was floundering. His coworkers and his company as a whole were in the same trouble. Week after week, they kept failing to reach their sales goals and revenue targets. The market was tough, and there were major macroeconomic and technological changes happening in their industry. As a result, they were being squeezed by external forces beyond their control. 

As a high school senior, Abe was a mixture of a carrot and an egg who became a coffee bean, metaphorically speaking. But then, at his sales job, he reversed back into his carrot and egg-like ways. Fortunately, he was then able to transform himself into a coffee bean once again, saving his company and becoming head of sales and marketing in the process. 

There’s an important lesson to be learned from all of these reversals: the choice between being a carrot, an egg or a coffee bean isn’t something we do once and then are done with it – locked into our choice forever, for better or worse. No – we make the choice over and over again with each new situation we face.