So the dating phase of any potential acquisition is crucial. You have to check the sink for dirty dishes. You have to spot the toenail on the dining table. Look at the reporting structure and the way they hire and fire employees. Dig into what perks everyone gets. Talk about management philosophy. Make concrete plans for exactly what’s going to happen postsale.

Are you going to integrate or keep your cultures separate? What will you do about overlap? Where will this team go? Who will work on this product?

But always know that you won’t be able to predict the future. Things will change—maybe in your favor, maybe not. And so, eventually, you just have to do it. Sign on the dotted line. Trust that it’ll work out.

My advice is to always be cautiously optimistic. Trust, but verify.

Assume people have the best intentions, then make sure they’re following through on them. And take the risk. Leap. Buy the company. Sell the company. Or do neither. Just follow your gut and don’t be scared (or, rather, be scared but make the decision anyway).

You once asked me what it means to be a writer. So here goes.

Seven of my friends are dead. Four from overdoses. Five, if you count Xavier who flipped his Nissan doing ninety on a bad batch of fentanyl.

I don’t celebrate my birthday anymore.

Take the long way home with me. Take the left on Walnut, where you’ll see the Boston Market where I worked for a year when I was seventeen (after the tobacco farm). Where the Evangelical boss—the one with nose pores so large, biscuit crumbs from his lunch would get lodged in them—never gave us any breaks. Hungry on a seven-hour shift, I’d lock myself in the broom closet and stuff my mouth with cornbread I snuck in my black, standard issue apron.

Don’t let your ego get in the way of making the best possible decision. I was stung when Roy and Stanley sued the board for choosing me as CEO, and I certainly could have gone to battle with them and prevailed, but it all would have come at a huge cost to the company and been a giant distraction from what really mattered. My job was to set our company on a new path, and the first step was to defuse this unnecessary struggle. The easiest and most productive way to do that was to recognize that what Roy needed, ultimately, was to feel respected. That was precious to him, and it cost me and the company so little.

Shortly after the modern Starbucks was founded in 1987, this story was the heart of Schultz’s presentation to the Starbucks board of directors, along with his recommendation to establish full medical benefits and stock option ownership for all employees as long as they worked twenty hours a week. While the board initially dismissed the idea as unaffordable, especially for an early-stage company, Schultz’s ability to use both analytical and emotional reasoning won the day. He argued that such a program would pay for itself in three years if it reduced by half the high employee turnover common to the specialty retailing and food service industry. And he pulled on the heartstrings of the directors by talking about the kind of company that he wanted to build, one that he wished his father could have worked for. In the end the board approved the proposal, and the Starbucks Bean Stalk program was born. To this day the program (which incidentally was so successful in reducing employee turnover that it paid for itself in one year) is at the core of the company’s culture and organizational strategy.

Much later, a guest at Eleven Madison Park would tell me that while most people save the best bottles of wine in their cellars for celebrations, he drinks his best bottles on his worst days. I thought of my mom’s funeral immediately when he said that, because that was exactly what we did that night. The party was perfect; she would have loved it.