What do you do when the only skill you have is kicking a small round object around an open field with other men?
You go look at the other skills you do have. Some writing. Good at speaking English. Former snow elf at a children's museum. And you become… a tutor?
More like a manny. An extremely kind family in the posh part just outside Philly, and what I actually found there was a great friend in my devious, genius, spastic new baby to sit: a thirteen-year-old boy. Lots of energy. Some dashes of confused rage. An ability to manipulate almost any situation. But above all, a huge heart and an unreal talent for dark jokes.
He was me, with a different childhood.
I needed more money and I had more time (less soccer), so I arrived at the most logical next step available to a man in my position: .
As random as it came to me, it came to the founder. A trip to Mongolia. A friendship with Mongolia's prime minister. An alarmingly similar design to every other bottle on the shelf. Off to the races. The product was Golia, and the pitch — delivered out loud, to strangers, with a completely straight face — was that it was Mongolia's finest.
Vodka is all the same. Nobody in that business will say that to you. So what I was actually selling was a story, at two in the afternoon, to a bar manager who had heard of neither the vodka nor me, and both of those facts were obvious to him inside about four seconds.
A hundred doors a week. Eleven seconds per no. By Friday I knew more about that bottle than a year of keeping it safe on a laptop would have taught me.
But underneath the manny job and the vodka I was doing something else, which I can only see now. Soccer had been the dream since I was a child, and when a dream that size ends you don't stop needing one — you go looking for something to put in the empty slot. What I put in it was a girl. She was Spanish, I met her in Philadelphia, and I made her into my — the thing worth moving countries for. That is the actual reason I got on a plane to Spain. Not a master's, not a plan. A new dream, and I had picked one that could leave.
A no is data, and it's cheap. Go get a hundred of them.
Everything I believe about killing an idea for twenty dollars before it costs you a year started on a Philadelphia sidewalk, not in a book.