The Promise of a Pencil: How an Ordinary Person Can Create Extraordinary Change (3 page)

In their second week staying at our house, my brother was home from college and drove Sam and Cornelio to Greenwich High School, the public school I now attended. Their eyes lit up. They had traveled thousands of miles to attend a great school. They saw the chance to realize their American dream and asked us
to take them in as their legal guardians within the United States so they could attend our local public high school.

Given my dad’s background as an immigrant, the boys’ story resonated with him deeply. We had hosted hundreds of kids overnight at our house, but something about Sam and Cornelio was unique. They were both so genuine and humble, and they embodied the kind of integrity my family valued so much. My mother and my sister were completely won over by them, and Scott, who was scheduled to return to Emory in Atlanta that fall, was especially hyped about the idea.

One night, my parents asked to speak with me privately. They told me about the boys’ request for us to take them into our family and informed me that the final decision was up to me. “It’s going to fall on you to chaperone them, tutor them, and assimilate them into school. You’re also applying to colleges this fall, so we know you’re under a lot of stress, and this decision is going to impact you the most right now. The rest of us are willing to take them in, but it’s your choice.”

When you come from a lineage of Holocaust survivors, you grow up with an understanding that everything was once taken away from your family. The only things that enabled them to survive and then radically change their lot in life were the strength of their willpower, the help of others, and a commitment to education. Sam and Cornelio had demonstrated willpower and a hunger for education in abundance. They just needed a little bit of help. People with nothing to gain had once stepped in to help my family, and now I had the opportunity to pay it forward.

Later that night I told my parents that I wanted us to take in the boys as well. My parents soon became Sam and Cornelio’s legal guardians within the United States. They enrolled in Greenwich High School with my sister and me—and became our two new brothers.

Our Shabbat dinners on Friday nights looked a little different with two huge African kids towering over the table, but the real transformation that took place within our family was much more profound. While my parents gave these boys an incredible opportunity to change the trajectory of their lives, what they gave us was much more. They changed us. They certainly changed me.

For the first time, I began to fully understand that there was a vast world outside of the towns and neighborhoods I had come to know. I started to think about what it would be like if our roles had been reversed and I had grown up in Mozambique rather than them. I wondered if I would have had their same courage to leave home and venture into unknown lands.

The more I learned about the challenges they had overcome, the more I grasped the qualities necessary to change one’s path. Sam and Cornelio were the only ones among their friends and family to depart from the life that was expected of them. They did not follow the norms of their peers. They chose to be different. And in doing so, they proved that through struggle, sacrifice, and service, staggering personal transformation is possible.

W
herever you grow up, your surroundings are your measuring stick. Although my parents were a dentist and an orthodontist, many of my friends’ parents were investment bankers, hedge-fund managers, and CEOs. We knew as kids that among the parents in the crowd at our local football games, a handful of multimillionaires usually could be counted. Once I fully grasped that some of my friends’ parents made tremendous amounts of money while others made very little, my love of competition and numbers soon morphed into a new obsession—Wall Street. By the time I was in middle school I was fixated on working in finance and becoming a billionaire.

In middle school I opened an E*TRADE account to buy and sell shares of Gap and Nike. By the time I was sixteen I started working at a hedge fund during my summer break, trying to learn everything I could about the financial markets. When I was nineteen,
I worked at a fund of funds and went to New York City, not to see a show or buy knockoff watches on St. Mark’s Place, but to visit the New York Stock Exchange and spend time on the trading floor.

During those same years, I developed an entrepreneurial instinct and started a revolving door of small businesses. My first paid job at age twelve was manual labor, cleaning people’s yards and moving their furniture for $6 per hour. But I soon realized that with the rise of eBay, I could burn and sell rare CDs of live concerts for $40 each. I immediately quit carrying lawn chairs into people’s basements and was soon making thousands of dollars a year shipping CDs around the country. My parents made it clear to us that we weren’t going to have any trust funds waiting for us one day. If we wanted something, we would have to work for it and pay for it ourselves. So I was never comfortable working just one normal job. If there was a small business to be started, I was constantly evaluating how to make it happen.

My desire to become an investment banker led me to study economics at Brown. I had been recruited to several schools to play basketball, but chose Brown because I could fulfill my dream of playing a Division I sport while also pursuing my academic interests. I immediately began taking courses in sociology, management, and entrepreneurship, including Engineering 90 (affectionately known as Engine 90) with Professor Barrett Hazeltine, the same class that gave rise to the juice company Nantucket Nectars. Each student was required to write a business plan for a potential company, and for the first time I started to learn the formal side of the management world.

My path toward a lucrative job in finance was progressing well; I was a student-athlete on my way toward the life I’d always dreamed of, filled with cars, boats, and a luxurious house. I was working multiple jobs on campus, the basketball team was on its
way to one of the best seasons in school history, and I seemed to have everything on track. My family and friends thought my grand plan was aligning perfectly, but internally I was beginning to ask fewer questions about money and more questions about meaning.

*  *  *

As my sophomore year was coming to a close, I went to a nearby dorm to watch a movie called
Baraka
with my friend Luke. He’d told me, “This film is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen and will change the way you look at the world.”

Baraka
means “blessing” in many languages. The movie had no formal actors, no plot, and at first I had no idea what was going on, but I knew it was spectacular. The film was a series of scenes shot all around the world that showed stunning geographic wonders juxtaposed with ceremonies and customs of indigenous cultures. The film spanned twenty-four countries—the towering ruins in Indonesia, the killing fields in Cambodia, the chaos and color of India.

One scene in particular captivated me. It began with a mass of people wading in a river of dirty water, praying, giving oblations. A man was carrying something ornate on his shoulders with smoke rising from it. A woman cupped the river water in her trembling hands, clearly in reverence to its holiness. Fires burned all around the riverbanks. In the last seconds of the scene something charred appeared. It took me moments to recognize it, but then it hit me. At one end was a face; at the other end was a foot. It was a human being burned.

I felt as if I had been kicked in the stomach. I had no idea where this scene was filmed or why it was happening, but I knew it was real, and it was spiritually significant. All I could think was,
If everything I’m seeing in this film is actually happening somewhere on the
planet, right now, at this very moment while I’m sitting in this dorm room, then I need to go to these places and see this with my own eyes.
How could I grow up in Connecticut, attend college in Rhode Island, and then move to New York City without seeing other cultures besides my own?

I bought the movie and invited others over for viewing parties. Every time I watched it I discovered something new and felt a deepening desire to explore the vast expanses beyond my insular surroundings.

I searched the Web for the location of the holy-river scene and discovered it was in Varanasi, the spiritual capital of India. The city sits on the left bank of the Ganges River, the holiest water in India. The river is considered a god itself, and according to Hindu legend the area was founded by the god Shiva. Younger Hindus wash away their sins in the religious waters while the elderly and the sick hope to die in Varanasi as a way to achieve nirvana. I knew I needed to go there.

I left the basketball team knowing I needed some time to myself, and started to explore my spirituality and faith. I wanted to understand why I should believe in my religion over all the others, so I began to meet weekly with a rabbi to study the Torah. I also began intensely researching different faiths and spiritual beliefs, spending time in the library, where every month I would focus on reading the texts of a different religion: Taoism, Hinduism, Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, and so on. Rather than assuming everything I had been taught was true, I reversed my approach to challenge all of my existing assumptions and only decided to adopt that which I could believe on my own.

While high school encouraged conformity, college taught me it was okay—even desirable—to question what I thought I knew. It was an awakening. For the first time, I began to explore and celebrate
my quirks and unique interests. I read books like
On the Road
,
1984
, and
Man’s Search for Meaning
, each of which encouraged individuality and discovery of purpose. The music I listened to changed from modern pop acts to artists whose lyrics were just as powerful as their instrumentation, like Bob Dylan, Richie Havens, and Van Morrison. Their lyrics became my scripture. I began to see that success in life isn’t about conforming to the expectations of others, but about achieving personal fulfillment. Your twenties are the time to both accept and fight your way into the person you’re destined to become. Through the books I read, the music I obsessed over, and the late-night conversations I shared with friends and strangers, I began to craft my identity separate from the whims and expectations of others.

Going through so much personal change led me to explore the possibility of spending time abroad the next year. I looked at various locations in India as well as South Africa and Southeast Asia. Eventually my dad made an alternative suggestion: “You should look into Semester at Sea [SAS]. One of my patients just got back and raved about it.”

Although at first I was skeptical, the more I looked into the program, the more impressed I was by the opportunity to travel to ten different countries and then backpack independently for the first time.

I wanted to be challenged. As strange as it sounds, I wanted to know what it’s like to be truly uncomfortable. So many of the people I admired—the musicians, the artists, the writers—created their greatest works not during a period of happiness and contentment, but during a period of struggle. The majority of the songs I loved were anthems inspired by war, unrequited love, or civil revolt.

Many of us spend our entire lives in the same bubble—we surround ourselves with people who share our opinions, speak the
way we speak, and look the way we look. We fear leaving those familiar surroundings, which is natural, but through exploration of the unfamiliar we stop focusing on the labels that define
what
we are and discover
who
we are.

The next month, I applied to SAS and was accepted. I didn’t tell anyone besides my parents because I knew that some of my high school and college friends would want to join. I loved and respected those friends, but I wanted to be alone on this journey. I wanted to see how I would react without the familiarity of my past dictating the steps toward my future.

In the days leading up to my departure I nervously scribbled in my journal, “The experience of a lifetime begins. . . . I’m going to leave everything behind, my biases, my expectations, my comforts, my friends, and my family. I don’t know exactly how these 100 days will affect me, but I know I’ll be a changed man.”

True self-discovery begins where your comfort zone ends, and mine was about to end far more quickly than I’d anticipated.