I've never thought that I want to own a coffee shop, but I've sometimes thought about being a barista (i.e. "Barista FIRE"). I make my wife a latte every morning, and it can be fun and satisfying. I imagine being focused on perfecting a simple craft, and then being able to turn it off at the end of a shift. My work, in comparison, feels like I'm trying to solve impossible problems, and it never ends.
However, I suspect that the reality of being a barista is dealing with lots of demanding and angry customers, frustrating corporate management practices, and more cleaning than making coffee.
Warrant officers, not NCOs. But yes, this is the crux of it. New lieutenants go to flight school alongside new warrant officers, and then their day-to-day responsibilities rapidly diverge. The lieutenant becomes an administrator who, at best, struggles to keep up with the warrant officers in the cockpit for a few years. At worst, the lieutenant ends up in jobs (as a captain and major) where they don't even have flight-hour minimums anymore.
> You you can’t be in love with a particular idea or business. You have to be in love with the idea of running a business.
I'm saving this quote. I'm a career Army officer and the application to my world is that newly minted officers compete like mad to get into their preferred career fields / communities, because some like "Aviation" (e.g. flying helicopters) are hot and others like "Ordnance" (e.g. managing the lifecycle of ammunition and hardware) are not, but then find that 90% of their careers end up being the same HR and logistics middle-management with attendant meetings and paperwork and bureaucracy. The result is that the hot career fields actually tend to have the worst rates of retention, as officers become disillusioned when reality doesn't meet expectations, among a few other reasons. So prospective officers should really be in love with the idea of leading organizations of all various types.
I tend to be cheap, not even just frugal, but it's worth it to me. During my first winter in my own place, I set the thermostat to the low 60s F to save money. After about two weeks I concluded that feeling perpetually uncomfortable in my own place wasn't worth whatever money I was saving. It felt like trying not to drink water when thirsty to save money. Warmth is just such a basic human need. Better to save in a number of other ways. I definitely wouldn't do this to my wife and kids now.
By the time we implement any of these things, if ever, they certainly won't be. I work on military networks and applications, and it's hard for me to believe that I'll see any of this within my career at the pace we move. This is the land of web applications that only work with Internet Explorer, ActiveX, Siverlight, Flash, and Java Applets, plus servers running Linux 2.6 or Windows Server 2012.
The idea of "Just-in-Time" access control where "a user is granted access to a resource only while she needs it, and that access is revoked when she is done" is terrifying when it takes weeks or months to get action on support tickets that I submit (where the action is simple, and I tee it up with a detailed description of whatever I need done).