I used to babysit because it was a decent job with little to no responsibility. Just twice a week, and then I’d have enough money to buy pot, coffee, and cigarettes. I skipped school, but always showed up for work.
I didn’t have a lot of self-esteem growing up. I was a smart kid, who hated working hard and failed at a lot of things. I was in and out of therapy and fought with my parents. I was really good at video games. I beat most of my friends at most of what we played, but institutionally, I was a fuck up and I had no interest in going to college.
There was a series of events that caused me to stop smoking weed and cigarettes all the time, but more importantly, in my senior year, my best friend introduced me to the joy of running. I was naturally athletic, but for most of my life, had hated “exercise.” I didn’t like counting push-ups. Conversely, running was calming, long-term, not intense, but still difficult. I could think. When I was done, I felt like I had accomplished something, blissful.
After I graduated high school, by the skin of my teeth, I decided I still wasn’t going to college and my dad kicked me out. Two separate events. I went to live with my mom.
As a young kid, who was consistently shown that he was a failure, I truly believed I was. I believed everything people said: that hippies were stupid idealists, that my ideas were bad, that video games ruined lives, that pot smokers would never get anywhere in life. I was ashamed of myself and did not believe I had any real talent. I was excited to be able to get a job at a Starbucks that I could bike to from my mom’s house.
It was a normal job. I saved up some money. I learned that I didn’t give a shit about making coffee. I didn’t care enough to remember or pay attention to anything that was going on. One of my coworkers got frustrated and spent an afternoon retraining me, step by step, every recipe.
Later that summer, my mom said she wanted me to do something with my life. She didn’t want me working at Starbucks indefinitely. It was a reasonable request in hindsight, but I didn’t understand how to approach it and I felt like she was kicking me out too. I got mad and googled “foreign exchange program.” I didn’t care what I did as long as it wasn’t in America. I hated our country and didn’t want to be anywhere near my mom.
The program had an option for Thailand, which I picked. Thailand got canceled, so they merged two trips together and re-booked us for Kenya. I spent 3 months teaching high school English there. The stark contrast of people having no electricity, rampant corruption, and in some cases no visibly consistent form of food or shelter, was enough to make me realize that the opportunity to tell my mom and dad to go fuck themselves when they asked me to go to college was a pretty large privilege.
I was floundering as a teacher, and most likely floundering as a respectful guest. I had no strong work ethic and no sense of responsibility. I was working as hard as I could, but was failing at teaching in a foreign country at age 17. I was quickly disheartened. I languished at the breakfast table, overeating so I had an excuse for being late. Eventually, I stopped coming to class, and retreated into my room to read all day.
After the program ended, when I landed in America, my dad was happy to see me. New Jersey was boring, and though I wasn’t entirely happy with my dad, I wanted to be in a city, rather than the suburbs. I moved back into my old room and got another job I didn’t care about, working with nice people at a sushi restaurant.
Eventually, my dad did something overbearing that made me gather my small savings and move out. For the next few years, I quit or got fired from a long string of jobs for different reasons. Most boiled down to “I don’t believe in myself enough to take a job that isn’t easy to get and requires no responsibility.” Then I followed up with “I hate this job.” At that age, I was unable to view my life as a series of choices related to my worldview. I was choosing jobs that were available because literally no one else wanted them. I thought the world was just that way, oppressive, uncaring, and devoid of opportunity.
I tried to go to community college and failed again. It was uninspiring and I was working two jobs at the same time. I failed calculus twice and I even failed photography class.
I don’t know why that didn’t stop me. I was still into the idea of going to a real college and learning as much as I could. I loved reading and I felt like college would be the real life version of reading a book.
I went to the library and borrowed tome after tome of college rankings. I didn’t know how to go through stats, so I pulled the top 10 schools out of the categories I thought were important. The ones that appeared in more than one category, or had a good bio, went on my list. Eventually, someone introduced me to the book Colleges That Change Lives. It was a list of 40 funky, weird, alternative colleges, descriptions of how they worked and what kinds of students thrived there. I threw out my old list (weeks of research,) and made a new one derived solely from that book.
I applied to 10 schools and got rejected by all but 3. One college was very expensive, had no serious academic programs, and accepted almost any applicant. Another was interesting, but not compelling enough. The third was Evergreen, which is in the middle of a rain forest, and is an incredibly different, interesting, and overwhelmingly weird place to be. They accepted me on academic probation, which was hilarious because they had a 97% acceptance rate at the time. I had great SAT scores, but I also had some quarterly GPA’s that were around 0.5 or less. I worked harder than almost everyone in my class, aced my first trimester and continued that work ethic through most of my schooling. I completed a 4-year degree in 3 years.
The year I graduated was also Evergreen’s 50th anniversary. Matt Groening and other famous alumni were being shown all of the ways in which the school had improved since they graduated. This tour included the new room the school had built for specialized theater and art projects. It also happened to house the experimental audio installation I was working on. My partner and I started explaining our work. Matt Groening stood in the room for a second, grunted, and then left. I was taught, later in life, that most affronts are not personal. At the time, I was lucky enough to be working under a deadline. I didn’t have the time or energy to think about the fact that the creator of the Simpsons literally did not give a shit about the most successful project I had worked on.
I had done well in school, finally graduated, written a terrible book — but a book nonetheless — and learned enough music theory and software to have created a sound installation that was at least impressive to our class and their visiting parents. But, I still had no serious self-esteem. I had trouble connecting with people emotionally, trouble treating women properly, and difficulty seeing myself as being valuable to any kind of organization.
Part of these difficulties were due to the fact that I really couldn’t see anything that exemplary in myself. Another part was that I had no experience inside of a real organization to be able to understand how dysfunctional many of them are, and how little initial understanding most entry level positions require. I didn’t believe I could belong at a successful organization.
After graduation, I collected money from my mom for living expenses and sat around in the house looking at Craigslist ads every morning. Almost all of the ads were for CNA’s. My friends explained that being a CNA meant wiping shit off of old people’s asses and getting paid 10–15/hr to do so. I felt like my college degree had to get me something better, but I didn’t have any real understanding of how to look for a job. College had also been really fun. Most of the jobs I was able to get seemed boring and meaningless in comparison.
Eventually, I decided I would teach English in Vietnam. I used my mom’s money to pay for CELTA classes in Seattle (1.5–2.5 hours away with traffic.) I was going to use the English teaching certification to get a decent paying job in Vietnam and live there as an underachieving expatriate. The class was incredibly intense. My days generally were 2–5 hours of driving, 8 hours of class, 5–7 hours of homework, and then sleep as much as possible in between. I had recently bought a car that came with snow tires, but I hadn’t taken care of them properly. Dry rot causes snow tires to burst after extended use during hotter seasons. In addition to going crazy with stress and almost falling asleep multiple times on my morning commute, I ended up changing 3 blown tires on the side of the highway that month. By the third tire, I had written a tire changing song to pass the time.
During my last week of the class, I went to a nature film festival at the Olympic Film Society and saw a bunch of inspiring short films on snowboarding. I realized that if I was going to Vietnam, I wasn’t going to see snow for a long time. I called up my best friend who was working on a mountain in Colorado and made arrangements to crash with him while I found a job. I got hired over the phone. It was late in the season and I didn’t know this at the time, but all the jobs left were the ones that nobody wanted.
I ended up working with people addicted to drugs, ex-meth dealers, alcoholics, and some South American exchange students peppered in. They were all nice people, I just didn’t go to the after parties. I was getting paid 10/hr and working 30 hour weeks in a town that had higher prices for everything, because everything had to get shipped up an 8000 foot mountain pass. The upside was, I had some days off to snowboard. The downside was, I had no money. After expenses, I had $20 per month to spend on whatever I wanted. The first month, I spent it on a ruler, a compass, a boxcutter, and glue. Then, I went down to the grocery store and dumpster dove giant cardboard boxes that used to house wide screen TVs. I used my new tools to construct furniture from the cardboard. The next month I bought a case of beer. For art, I tacked old cereal boxes to the wall.
I eventually quit my job as a cashier manager. Apparently, I said something like “I can’t work here anymore, this job is crushing my soul.” I tried to get another job at the mountain only to learn that I had been banned from working on the entire resort for a year, specifically requested by my manager. I spent the rest of the season taking an online coding class from HavardX.
After the ski season, me, my best friend, and my girlfriend at the time went on a road trip, climbing in Moab and camping in Taos. Then, we parted ways, and my girlfriend and I drove to Rhode Island, where my dad and stepmom had recently moved. We crashed with them temporarily because, well, I’m bad with money, and I had none left.
My girlfriend, was looking for her own apartment, but I’d assumed we’d share it, so I moved in with her without her permission. I still hadn’t gotten over the whole professional self-esteem thing and was working as a sandwich maker or pizza-slice-heater-upper wherever I could. The difference between the soul crushing jobs in Providence and the soul crushing jobs in Pittsburgh was that in Pittsburgh, people could be mean. They could be jaded, but it was this kind of undertone of dissatisfaction with life. In Providence, my bosses were very success driven, in some cases more competent at some aspects of their jobs than their Pittsburghian counterparts, but due to that same drive, were also aggressively negative and tended to run their employees into the ground pretty rapidly. Disclaimer: not all employers are like this, just the few I happened to work for at the time.
I had also been tooling around, working on films in New York for no pay, and investigating the local Providence design and startup scene. Those other areas proved to be far more compelling, but I didn’t yet have the experience or credentials to be taken seriously.
Through my newfound skill of networking and my new drive to actually achieve something of positive value for myself, I was able to land a job doing customer service at a local print company. They were technically, just barely, still a startup. I held a few internships on the side. I stayed with the company long enough to pick up a few things about how to build a corporate structure, corporate growth, how to get really good at dealing with people, and how to self-initiate projects that you see as important or valuable. I also picked up the habit of reading obsessively on how to create a flexible business culture.
And now we have reached the present, where I am seeking meaningful employment.
Ironically, I glossed over the most important part of my professional development, because it is one that doesn’t speak for itself on a resume. Emotional intelligence was woven into the fabric of my education at Evergreen. We were taught to sit in circles and listen to each other. We were taught to express our opinions and listen to criticism. We had to work on projects with and eat next to people who we criticized or who criticized us.
My life has been almost a continual experience of failure. My band, currently, has a minuscule following. The martial art I currently practice has taken me years to achieve competency. There are reputable people who do not respect my opinions or my approach to life. On paper, my work history is a complete mess.
But I do things now like meditate, take my goals seriously and put serious effort into achieving them, learn new skills that allow me to overcome obstacles in my path, socialize with people who are interested in or involved in the same pursuits I am, relentlessly refuse to accept any failure, large or small as an absolute reflection of who I am as a person, practice self-affirmation and gratitude, and engage in patterns and routines of behavior that positively affect my life. I set goals that are meaningful to me and approach them with all of the vigor that hasn’t yet been beaten out of me.
If you want to see my real resume you can go here. If you are like me, or relate to this story in any way, remember this simple and very trite aphorism:
“It is not the destination, but the journey.”
Each day is an opportunity to improve. In each moment, there is something beautiful. You are not a failure if you fail to achieve unrealistically high goals that were influenced by media, family members, and peers. You are not a failure if people are unable to understand you. You have the capacity to get better at anything, including explaining yourself to strangers. You can find people who respect and support you. When you see an issue and are able to improve upon it, that is a real moment of triumph. That is a moment of autonomy, of drive, of ambition, of vision. That moment is more important than a bullet point on a resume and that moment is something that you carry around just for yourself.
Faith and gratitude are not things that we are born with. They are things that we must painstakingly learn. I have only learned them by breaking rules. After so much failure, I had to learn to have faith in myself and gratitude for the beauty of the present.
As life is best lived with friends, and I consider the authors who write my favorite books to be my friends, I will leave you with a quote, and a list of seminal friends.
“The true measurement of a person’s worth isn’t what they say they believe in, but what they do in defense of those beliefs,” he said. “If you’re not acting on your beliefs, then they probably aren’t real.”
― Glenn Greenwald, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State
Fiction
The Adventures of Kavalier and Klay by Michael Chabon
Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon
Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin
The Stranger by Albert Camus
The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Nonfiction
Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Steven Dubner
How To Love by Thich Nhat Hanh
Better by Atul Gawande
The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver
Radical Acceptance by Tara Brach
The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo
The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron
Business
Follow Basecamp on Medium
Maverick by Ricardo Semler
Team of Teams by Stanley McChrystal
The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt
Good to Great by Jim Collins
You can buy them on Amazon, but you should rent them from the library.
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