It’s late fall when I get the email from the VFA admissions team that I hoped I'd never see, "Please accept our genuine thanks for applying… Unfortunately..."
The VFA rejection strikes a chord deep within me. By this point in my senior year of college, I've created a personal website and blog. I rage through the night writing a heart-felt sob essay about rejection and publish it to my audience of zero.
In the coming weeks, I battle myself emotionally as I work to pick up the pieces of my shattered dreams. The conclusion I come to is that now, like every other time in my life, my competitive advantage won't be smarts or credentials; it will be my attitude and work ethic or nothing. Thus begins my desperate and neurotic senior year looking for love in the form of employment.
As should any heroic quest involving a young person's romantic dreams, my year is spattered with misery, hopelessness, and rejection.
In my nearest days post-VFA rejection, I'm scatter shotting into the ether – GEICO! Amazon! Accenture! LEGO! Tied to my fizzing shots of hope are, of course, absurdly overzealous cover letters, "I am so passionate about LEGOs. I just love them! Hell, you can even cut me into a LEGO! Just hire me! Please. God. Please!"
Without fail, no one responds. As time goes on, I recalibrate. Startups, Andrew! Startups! You're only seeking big-name brand companies because you feel it'll validate your insecurities! Focus! You want to change the world. Don't fall for corporate America and normalcy! Go for the startups!
And more than anything, you worthless speck of dust: Work. Fucking. Harder!
Yes, sir!! I scream into my pillow in the dark of night.
In my startup applications, I take it farther than ever. I hound founders online, mass email company staff, network my way into 40 coffee meetings in Richmond seeking job recommendations, I run Facebook ads to prospective companies, build pitch decks, and completely recreate company websites --andrewsdreem.weebly.com/.
Soon, I'm back at my pillow. Why won't startups love me back!!
The closer to graduation I get with no employment, I become more frenzied. I work to launch my own companies to show that I am a builder and a creator. I try to establish a Dollar Shave Club for dental care, then I get sucked into a house-flipping scam for three-weeks, then a craft beer delivery service, then a luxury car rental service, then a college newsletter. I'm tearing through business ideas faster than MoviePass with Venture Capital money.
Soon, something sticks. I design and 3D print a kickstand so my Chipotle burritos stop falling apart when I put them down. I pitch the maker of the red Chipotle bowl, reach their Vice President, file a provisional patent, and the item enters product testing.
I'm riding an all too temporary high when one day I notice TEDx is having an event in Richmond. I can do that. Marketing is in my blood. I'm the guy who completely rebranded himself at age 18! This is easy and will be great for getting hired at a startup!
In the dead of night, the only time I seem to be alive, I apply. I get denied the following day immediately, but they give me one of the twenty spots at the Open Mic the night before.
Deal, I say, as if I have any leverage.
***
"So why is it that Donald Trump, an individual with zero political experience, is one of the leading candidates in the greatest political competition in the entire world?"
The crowd laughs, and a few scoff. My legs are shaking inside my jeans, but the fact that I hit my opening line without tripping over myself like an idiot gives me a surge of confidence that I can do this. Plus, I got the reaction I wanted out of that Trump line.
By this point in the election cycle, I know Trump's name will trigger people, so I use his name immediately as a cheap bait to wake up the audience.
I'm introducing one of the marketing philosophies that have been bumbling around my head for years. I call it the 'Opposite Effect.' The idea behind the 'Opposite Effect' is borne entirely out of the idea that almost all companies, products, and industries are laden with marketers or salespeople who are all using the same "best principles" and tactics to sell, and annoy, their prospective customers. The Opposite Effect says that you should look at the most bare-bone principles of your field that everyone does, and just do the opposite. And that will, inherently, cause you to stick out and win attention, which, at the end of the day, is the whole point of marketing.
"See, Donald Trump looked at the political spectrum, and he looked far-left and far-right, and moderate-middle, and what's the one thing that every politician does the exact same? They're all politically correct, every single time. So Donald Trump did the exact opposite, and he's winning."
(it should go without saying that being politically incorrect, I don't think, was as much of a "chess move" per se for Donald Trump as I may have thought it was then.)
After the show, I'm on my way out of the theatre when a couple grabs me, "Hey!" shouts the wife, "That was a fascinating idea you had. Can you explain it more, specifically why you think it works?"
"Wow, well, thank you! So," I take a deep breath, "I'd say the psychology behind the idea is that whenever a marketing tactic becomes widely adopted, it becomes overused by bad and pushy salespeople. Bad and pushy salespeople, with enough repetition, cause people to subconsciously associate the subtleties of the marketing tactic with slimy salespeople or tactics. When this happens, they'll build walls to shut down the pitch before it starts when they identify the subtleties."
"Oh, now that is interesting! Do you have any other examples?"
"Pyramid schemes like Amway are probably the best examples if you're familiar with them. The moment you hear, 'would you like to make some passive income outside of your full-time job,' you're just like, 'Oh god! No!'"
"You're funny. So what's the psychology of why doing the opposite works?"
"Well, by doing the opposite, even if it breaks conventional marketing wisdom, especially if it breaks conventional wisdom actually, you'll be able to disassociate from the triggers of those initial walls customers have put up. This allows you to pass by these walls, getting more attention. It's pretty similar to anti-marketing if you have heard of that."
"You really need to stick with this marketing thing. That's brilliant. Maybe politics, too; we need more refreshing people in there. Are you involved?"
"In what? Politics? Oh god, no. I will never in my life work a day in politics. I don't keep up with it all. The Trump thing is just so obvious. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that his success is because he is authentic. You feel like you get a real person with him, even though he is kind of a dick."
"Well, you've got that right. Best of luck to you!"
***
It's midnight on a Tuesday, and I'm sitting on the floor of my apartment in Richmond, VA drunk, alone, and covered in Sharpie. I've spent the last few hours making signs for a yard sale, but I'm now looking at the mess I've made of my kitchen wall. A few moments ago I became impassioned and scrawled 76 words across the wall in massive letters with my Sharpie.
"Here's to the crazy ones, the rebels, the troublemakers…" the quote begins. The quote is a famous one spoken by Steve Jobs for an iconic commercial Apple made in the 80s. The video includes Gandhi, MLK Jr., and many others who have reshaped society.
I graduated from VCU a month ago, and I've been trying to stay optimistic about my dream to join them in reshaping society, but the infinite stream of silence from the abyss that are my applications to startup companies is crushing my spirits. Like any classical love story, the more that dreamy lands like Silicon Valley elude me, the fonder my heart grows. "The course of true love never did run smooth," Shakespeare once said.
To be fair to the entirety of the labor market, I'm being a bit of a masochist. Conventional wisdom says that if you are getting rejected by basically everyone, you shouldn't get pickier about what you quantify as "the dream job."
In the days after my VFA rejection, I would have taken any old job that validated my weak soul. However, now that I have great negotiating power (recent graduate with no job after 275 job applications and a lazy eyelid from a chronic lack of sleep), I've now decided I'm going to strictly hold out for a marketing role at a neurotechnology startup in Silicon Valley that has raised between a Seed and Series C venture capital.
That's right, I've reached the point of delusion.
It was sometime during the winter that I got really stuck up on the neurotechnology schtick. As it went, I was talking to Mario about how I felt directionless and that it was weird that I wanted to change the world without knowing what part or why.
"Just pick something. You can do that. You don't need a reason," he said.
"Wait, really? I can just pick?"
"Yeah, man. Dream your biggest dream and get after it."
Mario blew my mind when he said this. Then one day, I woke up, and like a nationally ranked high school football player, I was ready to make my selection.
"I'm going to record our dreams," I said into my mirror. I've always had vivid dreams since I was a child — totally outlandish adventures with revolutions, alien wars, talking animals, and beyond. The idea of being able to simply playback a dream to a room full of friends seemed to me to be the coolest shit we could produce. So that was that – I was going to make digital dream recollections hip and part of pop culture.
Over those months, I'd also read the biographies of Elon Musk and Steve Jobs. Both of these gentlemen are well known, especially Mr. Jobs, for what is referred to as having a "Reality Distortion Field," or RDF. RDF is a way of referring to the otherwise indescribable ability of these two innovators to seemingly will into existence the absolute impossible. The idea is that by simply believing to an irrational degree it can be done, then committing your whole existence to making it real, you will make it so. I found such solace in their stories of strife and triumph during these dark days that I came to worship them. My friends started to call me Steve, and I invested 10% of my net worth (at the time), or $200, into Tesla to show my faith to Elon.
It was my channeling of Steve Jobs and Elon Musk on this particular night in my kitchen that pushed me to make one of the more radical decisions of my life at the time.
It spawned out of the belief that if no one would hire me, I clearly wasn't trying hard enough. That's how the thinking behind RDF works — if you're losing, it's on you. And the solution is to Work. Fucking. Harder!
That's when it hit me. I spoke it aloud from my kitchen floor like a manic hippie in the 80s. "I'm moving … me? Yes! Me! … I'm moving … Ha! Ha! Yes! …. I'm moving to San Francisco!"
Alexa – Play San Francisco by Scott McKenzie.
***
We're on probably hour 16 of driving through the great golden cornfield seas of the American Midwest, and I have to say I'm not sick of it. Because I don't have a job awaiting me in San Francisco, I decided to bring my car, so I could make some coins as an UBER driver. To make an adventure of it, I invited Julie, my mother, with me to see some fun landmarks.
I've called my mother by her first name ever since high school. Like with many bizarre linguistics, it began as a joke, but now it's all I know. In an attempt to parry my playful name-calling, Julie began calling me Harold. Then I started calling her Ludwig the Owl. None of it makes any sense, but that's probably what makes us both relish our monikers so deeply. For purposes of clarity, though, we'll stick to our given birth names – Andrew and Julie – in these pages.
"We need to pull over in Abilene," Julie says as we sail through the corny plains of Kansas.
"Okay," I say without wondering at all what's in Abilene. We continue on without speaking while the Beach Boys serenade our ears.
Everybody's gone surfin'
Surfin' USA
The drive has been a peaceful one. You'd think 16 hours of corn would drive you a little nutty as if trapped in a Halloween maze, but there is something spiritually soothing about the sense of 'I'm goin' somewhere.'
I feel this soothing sense even more exponentially every time I remember that I'm leaving Washington DC for good. Leaving Washington DC, the suburbs, and everything that has represented home have been a powerful desire of mine since I was 11. I feel bad saying that aloud. It's not that I hate anyone, especially not my family nor the people I grew up with, but spiritually I've always felt a calling to be out there, you know, doin' things. And specifically, not doing those things here in DC.
Growing up around DC, it's difficult to not associate the entirety of the area with the swamp-like, immovable political gridlock that is most definitely the epicenter of not doin' things, USA. The stench of the dead aspirations of the seemingly infinitum of residents who daily report to the nation's largest bureaucracies and cubicle farms hangs in the air like a virus. Biased as it may be, when I watched popular Hollywood hits like The Office or Office Space, I read them as the PSAs they likely were: "PSA Americans – are you sure this is how you want to live?"
Ironically, while in Kansas, a state that is unfairly the butt of many jokes in those depressing cubicle farms, I feel like a pioneer, and I'm loving that new self-image.
"Turn here! Turn here! This is Abilene," Julie shouts from the passenger seat.
As I cruise the car down the streets of Abilene, the first thing I see off of I-70 is a bowling alley named the 'Tornado Alley.'
"This place is so midwestern right now; I can't handle it," I say in awe of Abilene, a town of 6,000.
Following my mother's direction, I pull into a parking lot with a small white house a little bit off of the road.
"You see that?" She says, "That's the childhood home of Dwight Eisenhower!"
"Oh, like the president?"
"Yep! Isn't it incredible this little town produced a president? And to think, he was born in 1890. Can you imagine how small this town was back then?"
"It is definitely cool," I say "there's something patently American about a president and war general spawning out of the cornfields."
"Yeah, well, it's one version of the American dream," Julie says, "any normal person can do anything they wish."
The one looming 'snafu' over my exciting trip across America was that I had nowhere to live once I arrived in San Francisco. Because I had no job or fixed income, no one in San Francisco would rent me a bedroom.
Somewhere around the border of Colorado, a startup friend from Richmond texted me:
"Hey Frawley, congrats on the big move to SF! I heard you haven't found housing yet. You should look into hacker houses. They're like tech dorms made for founders and techies. They usually don't require income for housing. Plus, that type of forced community is great for mental health, especially in a new city! It would be perfect to start off in."
"Wow!! Holy crap, I didn't even know those existed. That's perfect, actually. I'll look them up tonight!"
That night I apply to one I like and quickly get an email saying that Mike, the "Director of Happiness," would like to interview me.
Oh boy.