A lesson I’m learning: When life gives you lemons, you do not complain about the bitterness. You take what you have, you get to work, and you build.

I have found myself sitting in rooms at social clubs this past year surrounded by people who measure success by polish. They talk about exits, equity, and returns. I talk about a new species of coffee. About Excelsa. About the possibility of creating something that could one day be worth a billion dollars. I can feel it in my heart. I can feel it in the twenty years of research and the other projects that led here. Not failures, but necessary iterations that shaped this one. Each venture taught me something about how to build, how to endure, and how to believe when no one else does.

But the tools in my hands today are worn out. They are borrowed. They are modest. I do not have the same bright energy I had when I was young. The tools then were new, the vision was louder, the excitement was easier to find. But the losses that wore me down also refined me. What I have now is slower, steadier, more deliberate. The shine is gone, but the steadiness remains. I see things, the world, more clearly now. I measure twice. I move carefully. I understand that progress is often quiet and that brilliance sometimes hides behind repetition, and allowing the mix of seasons to do just as much (if not more) of the work. The tools may not be as bright as they once were, but they still work, maybe even better now, because my hands have learned what matters.

The poet Rudyard Kipling wrote, “If you can stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools.” That line has lived in me lately. Because that is exactly what we are doing. We are stooping. We are building with whatever we have. Even when others do not fully understand it, even when the idea makes a few people bristle or laugh under their breath, I have learned not to take it personally. People react to what they do not yet see. I remind myself that it is not my job to prove anything. It is my job to keep building.

The café is a half-finished garage. The rafters are exposed. The corners hold their own quiet history. The tables were found on Facebook Marketplace. The walls are painted one gallon at a time. But there is soul in it. There is a truth in building something you believe in with whatever materials you can find.

And here is the secret. The polish is not the story. The polish is already owned by someone else. It is pre-packaged, focus-grouped, and optimized for return on investment. But the unfinished café, the rawness, the small imperfections, they tell the story of something still becoming.

Being forced to build with worn-out tools forces authenticity. And being forced to be authentic forces creativity. Every imperfection becomes part of the brand, part of the proof that this is something real.

Maybe that is the lemonade. It is not about turning sour things into sweet things. It is about turning the hard, gritty truth into something meaningful. It is about taking what life gives you and showing that it was enough all along.

So we keep building. One task to improve the experience a day, one educated or delighted customer, one belief at a time.

Because the story is still becoming, and that is exactly where the beauty lives.