How to be a Coffee Bean

Prologue: The Origin Story of The Coffee Bean

If you've read The Coffee Bean, you know it's a short book with a powerful message: a simple lesson about the power to transform your world from the inside out.

You may have even heard that I was first introduced to the story of the coffee bean in the summer of 2009, while I was in Dallas County Jail. I was awaiting transfer to a Texas maximum-security prison to serve a life sentence for organized crime and was filled with overwhelming fear of the unknown, when another inmate shared it with me. He used the example of prison as the pot of boiling water, illustrating the three options I had: be like the carrot, which turns soft; be like the egg, which turns hard; or be like the coffee bean, which transforms the water into coffee. He told me that the power was inside me, and I believed him.

What you may not know is how The Coffee Bean book came to be, exactly 10 years later, in the summer of 2019. Well, the back story actually starts in 2010, when Chad Morris walked into a bookstore in Destin, Florida. At the time, he had just left a successful career as a Texas high school football coach to take a job as offensive coordinator for the University of Tulsa football team.

That day, while on vacation, he was looking for a good book to read with his quarterbacks. Immediately, a book caught his eye because it had a whistle on the cover. This spoke to him as a coach, so he grabbed Jon Gordon's Training Camp: What the Best Do Better Than Everyone ...