Do Cool Sh*t (5 page)
Authors: Miki Agrawal
STEP 3:
Take on new activities and relationships that are in line with what
you
want to be doing and that energize you.
Physically go to a place where people are doing the things you love and excel at or want to excel at. If you want to start a business in technology, you could go to a place like General Assembly (a start-up incubator) or WeWork Labs and connect with people there. Bring a friend the first time if you’re intimidated. If you want to create a design product, find out when design meet-ups are happening on Meetup.com. Another great way to meet new people is through offering your services for free as an intern. More often than not, if you’re friendly and sincere, you will start making great connections very quickly.
If you are a small-business owner or are launching your own business, you can find allies through various entrepreneurship groups in your city. You can contact your local chamber of commerce and join their small-business administration. Go to the businesses where you see good people working and ask them where they found their workers and if they know of other good people who are looking for jobs. Put feelers out on Facebook and Twitter.
This BET System will remove undue stress from your life, give you more time to find and do what
you
love, provide more time to build your business, and put a bounce back in your step. Straying from the group is the way to have the most unique opportunities to make new friends and build key contacts quickly in a new city. Being a sheep in the herd is not where you want to be, and you are only your best when you are surrounded by positive influences.
Take a BET on yourself. . . . Stray from the group.
What Is the Pivotal Moment That Will Drive Change in You?
Most people can look back over the years and identify a time and place at which their lives changed significantly.
—F
REDERICK
F. F
LACK
I
woke up, eyes still half-shut and bleary from the night before. I rarely drank too much, but somehow some college buddies whom I hadn’t seen in a really long time convinced me to have “a couple more drinks” when we’d gone out the night before, which pretty much put me over the edge.
And boy did I pay for it the next morning. My head was pounding. Owie. As my eyes focused, I glanced at the alarm clock. And then did a double take.
What??
Ten o’clock?? How did that happen? How did I sleep through my alarm clock? That
never
happened to me! Adrenaline pumping through my veins, I shot out of bed, freaking out at the thought of being late for my job as an investment banker on Wall Street. I had been there only a few months, and it would
not
look good.
The first thing I did was call a car service, but a strange thing happened. The line was busy. Shit! I dialed again. Busy again! This car service was never this busy, especially at 10:00 a.m. on a weekday. What was going on? I called and called until finally someone picked up.
I shrieked, “I need a car in five minutes to Two World Trade Center, ASAP. I’m late for work!”
All I heard on the other end was a quiet voice. “Turn your TV on,” he said.
I was like, “What? Turn my TV on? I am late for my job! I need a car now!”
Then all I heard again was “Turn your TV on.” And then the voice on the other line hung up. What the F was going on? That was the most bizarre conversation I had ever had. So I did what I was told: I turned the TV on.
It was Tuesday, September 11, all hell had broken loose, and I watched in horror as the news showed clips of the twin towers going down. Of course, that was one of those days where everyone remembers exactly where they were and what they were doing. Everything froze. The world watched.
At the time, I
was fresh out of college, having just finished twelve weeks of rigorous training in corporate finance and was three months into my crazy, nonstop job at Deutsche Bank, which was located directly across the street from the World Trade Center towers.
Most mornings at eight thirty, I would get off the subway under 2 World Trade Center and meet my college friend Laura for breakfast in the WTC courtyard. Laura worked for Aon, which occupied some of the highest floors of the tower. After breakfast, I would walk across the street to my office and begin my long day of looking through spreadsheets and financial models, all the while dreaming of playing soccer and my other secret passion: making movies.
I was supposed to be at the World Trade Center at the time the towers were hit, but I had happened to sleep through my alarm clock for the first time in my life.
As I watched my
TV that morning, I felt helpless. I could do nothing but watch. My phone rang. It was my college boyfriend Zach, who somehow managed to get through to my cell phone to check to make sure I was okay. I had dozens of e-mails from family and friends asking me if I was safe, and one by one, in a daze, I wrote them all back that I was okay.
I found out later that two people in my office had died. Everyone else had run for cover and dove under cars and various structures seconds before thousands of pounds of shrapnel smashed down on the ground. My friend Laura lost more than four hundred of her Aon colleagues. (She went to get coffee when the plane hit her floor, which I only found out two weeks later—I thought she was dead, too.) It was just unbelievable.
I soon found out that all investment banks had “disaster recovery sites,” which were massive warehouses (think boiler rooms) in the middle of nowhere (Piscataway, New Jersey) where the banks scrambled to get rows of desks together with computers and phones in place. We had to spend three and a half hours commuting each way (with rush hour traffic) to get to the disaster recovery site. We all did the best we could to adjust under the harsh circumstances.
A couple of months later, we got word that parts of the Deutsche Bank office building were safe enough to allow one person per group, accompanied by a trained marine, to retrieve critical, irreplaceable documents. I remember my heart racing when our CEO told us about this. I hadn’t been there that day and felt so helpless. I really wanted to do something to help. I wanted to be the person to go in with the marine and retrieve the documents for the group and play a part, however small, in the recovery process.
As it turned out, I was the only one who volunteered to go, possibly because for those who were there on that day, going back in would have been too traumatizing. It was completely understandable.
I went through rigorous physical fitness tests (running a treadmill, breathing into contraptions, etc.), asbestos training (basically a lesson in what asbestos is and how to keep safe from it, as asbestos was a problem in those old buildings), mask-fitting class, and basic physical skills training to make sure I would not be a liability for the company. In the meantime, the bankers in my group put together pages and pages of things for me to retrieve. It was to be an incredibly challenging treasure hunt.
The day finally came. I was more ready than ever to go.
I met a marine at the base of the WTC site where they had set up a temporary headquarters. He handed me a moon suit, which covered my entire body except for my eyes, nose, and mouth, and gave me a gas mask and goggles for my face. I certainly felt like I could have been going to the moon. He handed me a flashlight and off we went.
When we walked into the Deutsche Bank building, I gasped. Where the beautiful fountain and golden escalator stood, it was now a pile of rubble. I’d never seen mounds of concrete and a building in pieces like this before. We climbed up the side stairs and walked toward the former elevator bank area, which used to be all shiny gold and was now covered with three inches of white powder.
We finally got to the floor where I used to work. My heart started to race.
It was bizarre. There were cups of coffee still sitting on tables. White soot covered everything. Some of the cubicles, including my own, were overturned. The marine and I heaved the edge of my cubicle wall just enough to expose some of my belongings. There was even an envelope with my mother’s handwriting on it—she had sent a letter to my office congratulating me on my new job with some flowers.
I felt tears forming in my eyes. I grabbed the letter from my mom, tucked it away in my moon suit, and spent the next four hours hauling ten massive garbage bags full of items one by one from the elevator bank.
By this time, the marine and I had become buddies, and he even let me go to the “unsafe side” of the building, where the WTC debris had fallen through most of the side of our building. That was straight out of a movie. The windows were blown inward, glass was everywhere, every cubicle was smashed down, with papers and white powder everywhere, it was hard to imagine this place as a working investment bank just eight weeks prior.
One of the items not on the list that I found was our vice president’s bicycle. I knew he loved that bike, so I brought that out as well. When I returned the bags of stuff to the team, our VP surprised me by letting me keep what turned out to be a very expensive bike, since he had already replaced it.
This was when I had my epiphany—my so-called aha moment.
I realized that so many people that day lost their lives and were unable to fulfill their dreams or find their true passions. Fortune gave me a chance to pursue mine. I knew I didn’t want to squander this chance by continuing to work at a job I didn’t love.
So I sold the bike, used the money to buy a new laptop, and began to write my first screenplay, since I’d wanted to do something creative as a career for a very long time.
A new chapter in my life was about to begin.
I’d like to challenge
you by asking you two questions:
1. What
thing
are you suppressing and/or looking for?
2. What type of excuses/fears/the unknown are holding you back?
I created a simple two-step system that helped me change my reality:
STEP 1:
Share your goal/dream/passion.
Take that thing that you want to do and start telling your closest friends about it. Tell the people who support you. It could be anything from losing weight to finishing your dream project that you started but got held up by a massive list of day-to-day unimportant tasks. It could be launching that great business idea that’s been percolating in your mind for a long time or taking up that guitar lesson you always wanted to.
The first thing is to figure that
thing
out and start telling your supporters that you want to do it. By telling your friends about it, you are making an announcement to the people who you care about the most and they will support you through it and hold you accountable.
Let peer pressure work for you positively.
STEP 2:
Next, once you have people cheering you on, create a
3-W Plan
(
What? Who? When?
)
WHAT
thing
are you trying to really accomplish? WHO are you approaching to help you accomplish your
thing
? Raise your hand and ask for what you want. WHEN is the deadline to finally make this happen?
Give yourself short deadlines. The longer your deadlines are, the less likely you will complete them. Create a basic schedule for yourself. Set weekly goals and mark them on your calendar and make yourself believe that if you don’t meet your deadlines, you are fired from life. Be disciplined. What’s the point in half-assing what you actually want to do in life?
The world can be molded to anything you want it to be. Start creating the best version of your own story and life by taking the steps now and not later.
