About a year ago, my friend Josh taught me how to make a “proper cup of coffee.” He stays with me whenever he’s in town for a stretch, each time brightening my doorway with his genuine nature and overall contentment with life. And each morning, he would patiently make his cup o’ joe in the shiny red Mr. Coffee maker that sat on my kitchen counter. Finally, after one visit he told me candidly, “Next time I’m here, I’m going to teach you how to make a proper cup of a coffee.” Sure enough, around six months later, he was back in town so I reminded him of his promise and asked what I needed to pick up in order to improve my home coffee consumption process. Did I need some special fancy attachment for the coffee maker? His response: “No, throw that thing away.” So I did. (Well, OK, to be fair, I put it in the basement with the rest of the things I planned to get rid of, and then finally about 8 months later gave it to a friend.)

Later that day, I came home to find a little white porcelain cone thingie and a bag of triangular filters sitting on my counter, along with a pouch of heaven in the form of tiny, brown, finely-ground coffee beans. After two trips to Target to get a good electric hot water kettle, I was now ready to learn how to make “better coffee.” Slightly trepidatious maybe, but ready. But it was amazingly simple: heat the water in the kettle, rest the porcelain cone thingie (which I learned is called a V60) over a mug, add a filter along with a scoop of coffee, pour the hot water over it and voila! Hot, fresh, locally-roasted coffee that didn’t taste anything like a hundred years of scalded coffee dripping through a cheap red coffee maker.

It turns out it’s just as easy to make a good cup of coffee as it is to make a lousy cup of coffee… it all boils down to choices. We can choose to semi-blindly do things the way they’ve always been done, unquestioningly. Or we can be open to the idea that we still have a lot to learn, even if it’s something as simple as improving the quality of our morning caffeine fix. And please don’t misunderstand me here- it’s not just about enjoying tastier java. (I mean, it kind of is, but it’s not.) It’s about the enjoyment I get out of knowing that this one simple thing I do every day adds value, not just monetarily but in the overall scheme of living life well – and it might be silly, but it adds to my happiness. And it’s about setting the bar a little higher for ourselves overall; it’s about focusing on quality and inherent value over familiarity and convenience. So often, we sacrifice quality in exchange for a quick fix, and don’t even realize we’re doing it.

Just as I learned how to make a better cup of coffee, I also discovered the importance of stopping once in awhile to look at what I was doing, and being open to the idea that maybe it could be done just a little better. And that coffee lesson is just one of the many ways in which my friends, maybe without even meaning to, have opened my eyes to new things, places, ways of looking at life… and sometimes in the simplest of ways, they have shown me how to do things “a little better” over the years. And for that I’m ever-so-grateful.

Since last February I’ve passed my newfound coffee wisdom on to at least half a dozen other people, even accompanying several of them to their local baristas to purchase the right accoutrements for optimal coffee enjoyment (the most important of which is high quality beans- I can’t stress enough that crappy beans will turn out crappy coffee, every time, no matter what the method). I like to get mine at Press because once I tried their Wood Burl coffee, there was simply no turning back. It’s a little pricier than the average pound of Folgers, but I’m telling you- it’s absolutely worth every penny, and is still cheaper (and way better) than a daily cup of Starbucks.

Bottom line: it’s our responsibility to pass along our own unique snippets of wisdom to as many people as we can who will find value in them, and remain open to learning from others who might have something to share with us at the same time. And eventually, we touch people’s lives in subtle ways that help us all live a little better, and make us realize that in order to live a quality life it’s well worth learning a few new tricks along the way. When it comes down to it, couldn’t we all benefit from a better cup of coffee?