In January I applied for more than twenty jobs. Secretary, TV anchor, medical billing, call monitoring, telemarketing, office manager. In February I rebuilt my CV from scratch for the third time in four months and spent a week making cold calls on somebody else’s account, at the end of which the client said he wanted someone older, because the people he sold to didn’t take kids seriously.
In March I sent six emails.
I’ve gone back through that month carefully, because for years I remembered it as the month nothing happened. It wasn’t. It was the month I stopped asking people to give me a job and started, badly and without noticing, building one.
SIX EMAILS
Here is the entire outbox. A thank-you to a rabbi whose classes I was taking on a free trial I never converted. A link I emailed to myself. A complaint to a flower company at one in the morning. And a note to a man who had twice asked me to call him.
That last one deserves its own paragraph. In January I’d filled in a form for a small investment outfit. In February the man there asked me to call him at 1:45. I didn’t. On 16 March he tried again — “trying to recall where we left off. Are you available to speak tomorrow at 1pm?” — and I wrote back within two hours, warmly and immediately: “Sure thing I’ll speak to you then.”
I didn’t call.
Three days later I sent him this: “Hey sorry forgot to call, should I call tomorrow?”
There’s no reply in my records. That’s the whole job hunt for the month — a man trying twice to give a twenty-three-year-old a chance, and the twenty-three-year-old forgetting.
I don’t think that was laziness. I think it was the exact moment I stopped believing the next CV would be the one, and hadn’t yet found anything to believe instead.
THE ONE I DIDNT ANSWER
Mid-month, an email arrived from the production side of the music school I’d trained at. A national programme was placing musicians on more than a hundred stages around the country, shows running July through October. Registration closed in twenty-four hours. The producer apologised for the short notice he’d been away on reserve duty and had only just got to it.
At that moment I was a trained guitarist, running a music-lesson ad in my town, with a payment account named — Im not making this up — “Advanced guitar.”
I have no record of picking up the phone.
That’s the part I find hardest to read. It wasn’t the rejections that cost me that year. It was the two or three doors that opened quietly at the wrong hour, when I was too tired or too unsure to walk through them, and closed again without anyone noticing.
SOMEBODY ELSE’S CONTRACT
On 22 March, at ten to seven in the evening, my wife forwarded me an email from a music venue where she was booked to play in May. I saved every attachment to my drive within seven minutes.
It was a masterclass in what a working artist actually signs. A contract and a technical rider. Your tax-status certificate. A royalties licence, or you pay the society cash after the show, “between 50 and 300 depending on the size of the crowd.” A press photo with the photographer credited — no credit, no publication, and you can be sued. A hundred street posters: you print, we paste. A thirty-second video of yourself inviting people.
The money: seventy per cent of ticket sales to the performer, thirty to the venue, or a fixed guarantee, whichever is higher. Nine per cent overhead off the top. Payment sixty days after invoice, “and there may be further delays not in our hands.” Cancel after signing and the artist pays a penalty.
And a line in bold I’ve thought about roughly once a month ever since: “The success of the show depends on you. You are not a passive performer. You are an active partner.”
I was twenty-three, unemployed, reading somebody else’s revenue split at seven in the evening and filing it carefully. Two months earlier I’d written my wife’s CV alongside my own. I didnt know it yet, but I had already found the thing I was actually good at.
THE BUDGET I HAD NO RIGHT TO WRITE
On 26 March the chairman of a small nonprofit I’d approached in February wrote me four words: “Hey. Did this ever pick up?”
Fifty-six minutes later I sent him the longest email I’d written all year.
I’d been trying to start a team in a sport the country barely played. The reply laid out where it stood: the new municipal field would be finished in a couple of months and I was working on getting it, though the man who supposedly ran it “never answers his phone.” Practices would start after the holiday, in a park, recruiting until July, because July 1st was the deadline to commit to the league. Thirty-five players at 2,500 each. Equipment — pads and uniforms — just under 4500, from a supplier I’d already found. League fees another 15,000. Buses and field time still unpriced. First-year budget: minimum 60,000, hopefully no more than 75,000.
Then the part that wasn’t in any template, the part that was just me: a programme for the boys still too young to play, who could come and train with the team until they were old enough. A thousand for the year.
I had, that month, earned $47.75.
Read that back. A twenty-three-year-old with no job, one guitar student on another continent, and ten interested players, writing out a sixty-thousand budget with a supplier line and a decision date in it. It’s absurd. Its also the first document in my life that looks like something a business person wrote, and almost everything real I’ve built since has started the same way — a plan with numbers in it, written before anyone gave me permission.
SIXTY-EIGHT DOLLARS AND FORTY-SEVEN CENTS
On 16 March a mother six thousand miles away sent $50 through the guitar account for her son’s lessons. After fees: $47.75. That was March’s income. All of it.
On 27 March it was my wife’s birthday. At 12:16 I added a new address to that same guitar account. Nine minutes later I spent $68.47 out of it — the whole month’s teaching money and then some — on a bouquet, expedited, same-day, to my mother-in-law on the other side of the world. Not to my wife. To her mother.
The card read: “Thank you for the beautiful girl you brought to the world today!!”
The flowers never arrived.
At 1:21 the following morning I wrote to customer service: “I ordered flowers yesterday to be delivered in the morning, and they never arrived. I would like to be compensated in full. This has caused me a lot of distress as it was my wifes birthday, I spent a lot of money, and they never arrived.”
Eight minutes later they refunded me in full, and addressed their apology to “Ms.” — having decided, from the flowers alone, which of us I was.
WHAT I TOOK FROM THAT MONTH
A quiet outbox is not a quiet month. What you bought, saved and booked tells the truth about where your head was better than what you wrote.
The rejections don’t cost you much. The doors that open at eleven at night with a twenty-four-hour deadline are the expensive ones.
“Sorry, I forgot to call” is a sentence with a career inside it. Somebody was trying to help me twice, and I was too far into my own discouragement to notice.
Read other people’s contracts. The most useful business education I got that year came free, in someone else’s revenue split, and I only saw it because I was the one filing the forms.
Write the plan before anyone gives you permission. Mine was ten players and sixty thousand of budget and it never happened — and it still taught me more than the twenty CVs did, because it was the first thing I made instead of asked for.
And spend the money on the flowers. Even if they don’t arrive.