Self-Development

“If you don’t have the confidence to ask, you will never have the confidence to convince.”

–Amit Kalantri

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Applying for jobs is like a role-playing game.

It feels colossal, never-ending, overly-complicated, and while you may know some of the rules, ultimately in the end you are at the mercy of a faceless (and sometimes seemingly unfair) “dungeon master” who decides if you meet enough of the secret criteria in order to win the privilege of advancing into the next room.

And perhaps the biggest “injustice” of the game is that you could be the perfect person for the next room in every way, but for a variety of reasons (you don’t live close enough to the room, you get lost in the crowd of all the other people wanting to get into the room, they don’t like how your character’s name sounds), you could never be given real consideration.

But like all good games, this is one that can be cheated hacked, freeing you to advance to the next level more than one way.

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Someone once told me “very few people get their jobs through ‘orthodox’ means,” as in, just applying for a job through an online form, then waiting around for a call or an email. Typically you know someone, know someone who knows someone, or have done something else outside the status quo as a way to “stand out” or otherwise connect with the person calling the hiring shots.

So what if you could manufacture your own connection and possibly turn it into a job interview (with no brown envelopes involved)?

Would you be willing to pay the price of a cup of coffee for it?

I can’t guarantee that the following will work, only that 1) you will stand out; 2) it has worked for me in the past; and 3) there’s virtually no downside to trying.

How To Buy A Job Interview For $3

After tireless searching in your blogger slacks or during working hours at your current job, you have found and applied for your dream position. But with no contacts within the organization, what else can you do to secure yourself an interview? Ask for one.

If you can, figure out who would be your manager or boss if you were to land the position. Often, this person is listed within the job description itself. A staff directory on the website or even LinkedIn can also be great places to figure out managerial hierarchy.

If that’s not doable, see if you can find an email for a member of HR. Larger companies are obviously going to have larger departments—in those cases maybe don’t shoot for the head HR honcho, but possibly someone on the lower end of the food chain that could possibly be one of the first to review incoming applications.

Whoever’s email you can get your hands on, they will be your point of contact for your ask. Even if you ‘miss’ and your email ends up with someone that has nothing to do with hiring for your desired position, chances are it will still get forwarded along to the appropriate party.

The Ask

So while this is a ‘cold’ email, it’s language needn’t be also.

Using a warm and friendly (yet professional) tone, construct an email that:

1. Expresses who you are, that you applied to X position with heavy interest, and briefly (this should not be cover letter part deux) state why you think you’d be a great fit for the position.

2. Acknowledges what you are doing is a little unconventional.

3. Includes an offer to buy the person a cup coffee for the chance to introduce yourself and talk about the job for 20 minutes. Give a range of specific days and times that could work.

4. Acknowledges again your understanding that these things typically have procedures that need to be followed, and that you understand if such a meeting isn’t possible for whatever reason.

So following these guidelines, our breezy email could look something like:

(I advise not copying this text directly for the same reason I screenshotted it—to keep it off search engines and not relegate it to being a standard yet ultimately meaningless practice akin to post-interview thank you notes)

Why It Can Work

There are a few things engineered into this type of request:

It shows confidence and “realness”: By being straightforward, self-aware, and acknowledging that what you are doing is unconventional, it not only shows that you are a bold person, but more importantly a bold person with tact. And emotional intelligence is all the rage in hiring circles these days.

…but you are showing all that, not saying it: thus exuding more about your character than you could likely ever communicate on a resume or cover letter.

You gave a time frame: Twenty minutes is nothing. Everyone has 20 minutes for something, even if it’s enduring someone talking about themselves, in our case. The pressure is off the other person, knowing that if the conversation is a total tire fire they can escape before they even finish their coffee. If you are really bold/confident/desperate, reduce your proposal to 10 or 15 minutes. And going back to point number one, it displays empathy toward their valuable time.

There’s value in it for them (besides free coffee): Sub-communicated through all this is the possibility of saving HR a fair amount of time and paperwork: if they don’t like you over coffee, then they probably won’t bring you in for an interview.

And, in my corporate experience, everyone is always looking for an excuse to escape the office for a coffee meeting.

How I Did This Successfully (With A Small White Lie) To Land My Last Job

Flash back to January 2013—after my New York internship I was living again at my parents house, working weddings at a country club, barista-ing early mornings, and doing pro bono social media work for an upstart brewpub. I had just written and published How To Get A Job In Sports PR and was still riding that first self-publishing high, waiting for the riches to roll in, $1.99 at a time.

In other words, I was in career purgatory, dragging my feet about doing the inevitable and going to work in an office again, at least for a little while.

Soon after, I received an email from an NYC friend that had recently landed a job in Colorado. Knowing me too well, he prefaced his letter with something like “I know you don’t necessarily want to work in sports anymore, but take a look at this opening we have…I think it sounds like you.” 

Setting aside my cubicle prejudices for a moment, I took a look and he was right. It was an opportunity to both do things I enjoy and to develop additional skills (like public speaking), as well as a chance to live someplace that seemed like it was the median of Ohio and New York City. Ready for any kind of out from my parents’ house (and to a place where a good friend already lived), I was all in.

However, not having an in-state zip code on my resume, I was worried I would be overlooked for more local candidates if I just applied through traditional means (something that I found out later is usually the case) and relied on my friend’s recommendation (since he was still new at the organization).

That’s when some good (albeit unconventional) advice and fortune fell into my lap.

My brother happened to have a spare airline buddy pass that needed to be used, and he also suggested the following:

Send your would-be boss a follow up email about your application, and say it just so happens that you’re actually going to be in town for a week visiting some people. Offer to just buy them a cup of coffee if they’re willing to just sit down for 20 minutes and chat about the job. If they say yes, book your ticket, fly out there, have fun with your friend, and kick ass at the interview. 

Lo and behold, the response I got was something akin to: “Well since you are going to be in town, let’s just go ahead and bring you in for an interview.”

While I was far from the most qualified person for the job on paper, I guess they liked the passion, interest, and potential that I put forth in the interview, and I got the position. This is entirely speculatory, but it’s possible that my coffee email communicated these things too, albeit in a very minute way.

A lot of cogs admittedly need to fall into place for this to work (I would not have been able to afford a short-notice, cross-country plane ticket without the buddy pass, and I would have been screwed if my future boss tried to change times on me at the last minute), but the upside was tremendous and the downside practically non-existent.

Disclaimers, Stipulations, And Other Things To Keep In Mind

This obviously won’t work if your experience is completely irrelevant to the job or you are extremely under-qualified: it’s not a magic bullet that will gloss over any flaws or holes that exist on your resume or cover letter (assuming you actually included the latter and it didn’t suck). But if you do get the yes, prepare for it like an actual interview. For all intents and purposes, it is. Dress respectably, do your research about the position and the company, bring questions and a spare resume.

More often than not, the smaller the company, the more casual and open-minded they are likely to be about a request like this. Hell, if it’s a startup you are applying for, they might just have you drop by a coffee shop or co-working space they normally work from anyway.

Regardless, the easier you make this potential meeting for them to carry out, the harder it will be to say no to. Offer up a wide (yet specific) range of dates and times. If you get a yes, they may just instruct you on where to meet, but if not, be sure to pick a place near their office.

Finally, if you are looking to do this for a non-local job (as I did) you could potentially be buying an expensive plane ticket on extremely short notice if you don’t have passes or points to spare. Being at least a little comfortable with half-lying about your plans while you are in town is also somewhat of a pre-requisite (in my defense I probably would have used the buddy pass to visit my friend anyway).

And oh yeah, actually pay for their coffee.

And If It Doesn’t Work

I literally can’t think of a drawback to trying this (other than spending a lot of money in the long-distance scenario).

Ultimately—and if this sounds too millenial-ese, I don’t care—if an employer would rule you out for trying something unconventional and ‘outside the box’ (how ironic is it that that’s a cliche in itself now?), that’s probably a workplace with very antiquated rules and attitudes, and you are better off not wasting your time pursuing employment with them.

And really, you’d just be right back where you started. Searching for a job, attempting to stand out, and trying get yourself into that room.

Shamelessly inspired by this list of Julien Smith’s. Also check out my lists from 2012 and 2013.

Mainly due to spending an inordinate amount of time on planes and in airports, I easily hit my goal of 20 books again this year. I am trying to alternate between reading non-fiction and more classics, and even added “Read Modern Library’s Top 100 Best Novels” to my bucket list.

Here’s 40 of my favorite takeaways, quotes, and passages from the 20 books I read in 2014 (italicized where taken straight from the author):

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The Happiness of Pursuit by Chris Guillebeau

1. What people say about an adventure or quest that involves perceived risk:

Successful outcome: brave, courageous, confident
Failed outcome: stupid, risky, naive, arrogant

2. Research shows we enjoy planning a vacation as much as taking the vacation. Anticipation is a powerful force.

Sex at Dawn by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha

3. No nonhuman primate [that lives in groups] is monogamous, and adultery has been documented in every human culture studied—including those in which fornicators are routinely stoned to death (Leviticus 20:10). In light of all this bloody retribution, it’s hard to see how monogamy comes “naturally” to our species. Why would so many risk their reputations, families, careers—even presidential legacies—for something that runs against human nature? Were monogamy an ancient, evolved trait characteristic of our species, as the standard narrative insists, these ubiquitous transgressions would be infrequent and such horrible enforcement unnecessary. No creature needs to be threatened with death to act in accord with its own nature.

4. Scottish researcher Tony Little found women’s assessment of men as potential husband material shifted if they were on the pill. Little thinks the social consequences of his finding may be immense: “Where a woman chooses her partner while she is on the Pill, and then comes off it to have a child, her hormone-driven preferences have changed and she may find she is married to the wrong kind of man.”

Influence by Robert B. Cialdini

5. Research on elementary school children shows that adults view aggressive acts as less naughty when performed by an attractive child and that teachers presume good-looking children to be more intelligent than their less-attractive classmates.

6. An example of the foot-in-the-door technique is when residents of a town were initially asked by volunteers to accept and display a three-inch “be a safe driver” sign (a trifling request) on their doors. Two weeks later, volunteers asked them to put up a lawn sign and had good compliance. Importantly, this technique worked just as effectively when the first request was related to state beautification, not driver safety at all — signing the beautification petition changed the view these people had of themselves. They saw themselves as public-spirited citizens who acted on their civic principles. There is internal pressure to bring self-image into line with action. There is an external pressure to adjust image according to the way others perceive us.

Talk Like Ted by Carmine Gallo

7. If you can’t explain your big idea in 140 characters or less, keep working on your message.

8. Scientists have produced a mountain of evidence showing that concepts presented as pictures instead of words are more likely to be recalled. Put simply, visuals matter—a lot. If you hear information, you are likely to remember about 10 percent of that information three days later. Add a picture, however, and your recall rate will soar to 65 percent. To put that into context, a picture will help you remember six times more information than listening to the words alone.

 The UltraMind Solution by Mark Hyman

9. Depression is not a Prozac deficiency. The real problem with conventional medical training is that doctors are not trained to be healers, but to be pharmacologists (except for surgeons). This problem is a direct consequence of the myth of diagnosis. We are trained to name the disease, and then assign a medication to treat it.

10. The unique combination of all your genes combined with the toxic environment in which you live makes you sick. Our environmental influences pull the trigger and cause sickness. If you had those genes but lived in a more pristine time without toxins, you would likely not get sick. Each one of us is susceptible. Some of us break down at very low level of toxicity–like those with autism or Parkinson’s, they are the yellow canaries warning the rest of us that something is wrong with the “air”.

The Subversive Copy Editor by Carol Fisher Saller

11. Style rules aren’t used because they’re “correct”. They’re used for your convenience in serving the reader.

12. Stet (or “let it stand” in Latin) on an edited paper tells the writer to ignore an edit.

Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon

13. All advice is autobiographical.

14. There is a kind of fallout that happens when you leave college. The classroom is a wonderful, if artificial, place: Your professor gets paid to pay attention to your ideas, and your classmates are paying to pay attention to your ideas. Never again in your life will you have such a captive audience. This is actually a good thing, because you want attention only after you’re doing really good work. There’s no pressure when you’re unknown. You can do what you want. Experiment. Do things just for the fun of it. When you’re unknown, there’s nothing to distract you from getting better. No public image to manage. No huge paycheck on the line. No stockholders. No e-mails from your agent. No hangers-on. You’ll never get that freedom back again once people start paying you attention, and especially not once they start paying you money. Enjoy your obscurity while it lasts. Use it.

Zero to One by Peter Thiel

15. Creative monopolists give customers more choices by adding entirely new categories of abundance to the world. Creative monopolies aren’t just good for the rest of society, they’re powerful engines for making it better. Even the government knows this: that’s why one of its departments works hard to create monopolies (by granting patents to new inventions) even though another part hunts them down (by prosecuting antitrust cases). It’s possible to question whether anyone should really be awarded a legally enforceable monopoly simply for having been the first to think of something like a mobile software design. But it’s clear that something like Apple’s monopoly profits were from designing, producing, and marketing the iPhone were the reward for creating greater abundance, not artificial scarcity: customers were happy to finally have the choice of paying high prices to get a smartphone that actually works.

16. Like acting, sales works best when hidden. This explains why almost everyone whose job involves distribution–whether they’re sales, marketing, or advertising–has a job title has nothing to do with those things. People who sell advertising are called “account executives.” People who sell customers work in “business development.” People who sell companies are “investment bankers.” And people who sell themselves are called “politicians.” There’s a reason for these redescriptions: none of us wants to be reminded that we’re being sold.

20 Something Manifesto by Christine Hassler 

17. A twenty something is someone who is constantly evaluating and analyzing his or her life and continually coming up with the answer “I don’t know.”

18. “It isn’t what I want to do forever, but it feels right, right now.” If you can say this, then 9 times out of 10 you are doing the right thing, and you shouldn’t worry about what’s next until you can’t say this honestly anymore. So many twenty somethings that are perfectly content but feel pressure to figure out their next move.

 

The Millionaire Next Door by Thomas J. Stanley and William D. Danko

19. Seven common denominators upon those who accumulate wealth:
1. They live well below their means
2. They allocate their time, energy, and money efficiently, in ways conducive to building wealth.
3. They believe that financial independence is more important than displaying high social status.
4. Their parents did not provide economic outpatient care.
5. Their adult children are economically self-sufficient.
6. They are proficient in targeting market opportunities.
7. They chose the right occupation.

20. To build wealth, minimize your realized (taxable) income and maximize your unrealized income (wealth/capital appreciation without a cash flow).

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

21. In old Colombia, if it felt good: fuck it. Even if it is your aunt or sister.

22. I want to name my dog/kid/something Melquíades one day.

Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

23. Enjoyment appears at the boundary between boredom and anxiety, when the challenges are just balanced with the person’s capacity to act.

24. The essence of socialization is to make people dependent on social controls, to have them respond predictably to rewards and punishments. And the most effective form of socialization is achieved when people identify so thoroughly with the social order that they no longer can imagine themselves breaking any of its rules. One must particularly achieve control over instinctual drives to achieve a healthy independence of society, for as long as we respond predictably to what feels good and what feels bad, it is easy for others to exploit our preferences for their own ends.

The Adventures of Johnny Bunko by Daniel Pink

25. You can do something for instrumental reasons–because you think it’s going to lead to something else, regardless of whether you enjoy it or it’s worthwhile. Or you can do something for fundamental reasons–because you think it’s inherently valuable, regardless of what it may or may not lead to. And the dirty little secret is that instrumental reasons usually don’t work. Things are too complicated, too unpredictable. You never know what’s going to happen. So you end up stuck. The most successful people — not all of the time, but most of the time — make decisions for fundamental reasons. They take a job or join a company because it will let them do interesting work in a cool place — even if they don’t know exactly where it will lead.

26. “What’s the most powerful force in the universe? Compound interest. It builds on itself. Over time, a small amount of money becomes a large amount of money. Persistence is similar. A little bit improves performance, which encourages greater persistence, which improves performance even more. And on and on it goes. Lack of persistence works the same way — only in the opposite direction. … The world is littered with talented people who didn’t persist, who didn’t put in the hours, who gave up too early, who thought they could ride on talent alone. Meanwhile, people who might have less talent pass them by. … That’s why intrinsic motivation is so important. The more intrinsic motivation you have, the more likely you are to persist. The more you persist, the more likely you are to succeed.”

Animal Farm by George Orwell

27. Farm animals should not be allowed to unionize.

28. Read a classic book that you missed out on in high school and it’s damn-near guaranteed you will hear or read some sort of reference to it the week following that you wouldn’t have picked up on before.

Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut

29. “We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane.”

30. Want to be an entertaining writer? Strip everything in the world down to the most basic elements you can, and voila.

Purple Cow by Seth Godin 

31. Most companies are so afraid of offending or appearing ridiculous that they steer far away from any path that might lead to this result. They make boring products because they don’t want to be interesting. When a committee gets involved, each well-meaning participant sands off the rough edges, speaking up for how their constituency might not like the product. The result is something boring and safe.

32. In your career, even more than for a brand, being safe is risky. The path to lifetime job security is to be remarkable.

A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink 

33. Last century, machines proved they could replace human backs. This century, new technologies are proving they can replace human left brains. Management meta-guru Tom Peters puts it nicely, saying that for white collar workers “software is a forklift for the mind.” It won’t eliminate every left-brain job. But it will destroy many and reshape the rest. Any job that depends on routines–that can be reduced to a set of rules, or broken down into a set of repeatable steps–is at risk. If a $500/month Indian chartered accountant doesn’t swipe your comfortable accounting job, Turbo-Tax will.

34. There are three types of beings–those who create culture, those who buy culture, and those who don’t give a shit about culture. Move between the first two.

A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

35. Catherine Barkley is one of the more annoying characters in literature I have ever read.

36. The dialogue between Frederic and Count Greffi is some of the best I have ever read.

Poke the Box by Seth Godin

37. We reward those who draw maps, not those who follow them. 

38. The original Starship Enterprise was conceived by Matt Jefferies. It looked like a cross between a frisbee and a can opener. Clearly wrong. But Matt had the drive to deliver. He took the wrong start and revised and improved and innovated until the Enterprise we know and love came to be. The hardest part, it seems to me, was the first one, the wrong one. Poking doesn’t mean right. It means action.

Lexicon by Max Barry 

39. There are (mostly) no squirrels in Australia.

40. “I just think it’s missing the point to get upset about bias in Fox News or MSNBC or whoever. I see this all the time: I mention to someone that I watch Fox and it’s like I just slaughtered a baby. They ask how I can watch that, it’s just propaganda, etc etc. And they know this not because they’re ever sat down and spent any time with it but because their favourite news channel, i.e. a Fox competitor, sometimes plays a clip from a Fox show and it makes Fox look really stupid.

Well, you know what, Fox does that, too. If I only watched Fox, I’d think you must be really stupid, watching that other show I see clips from on Fox sometimes.

But I don’t just watch Fox, because the way to beat biased reporting isn’t to find the least biased one and put all your trust in that. First of all, they’re all biased, from the language they use and the framing down to the choice they make about which stories to report. The gap between the most biased news show and the least is pretty small, all things considered.

But more importantly, relying on a single source of information means you can’t critically evaluate it. It’s like you’re locked in a room and every day I come in and tell you what’s happening outside. It’s very easy for me to make you believe whatever I want. Even if I don’t lie, I can just tell you the facts that support me and leave out the one’s that don’t.

That’s what’s happening if you’re getting all your news from one place. If you stop listening to someone the second you hear a word or a phrase you’ve been taught belongs to the enemy, like “environment” or “job creators,” that’s what you’re doing. You might be an intelligent person, but once you let someone else filter the world for you, you have no way to critically analyse what you’re hearing. At best, absolute best case scenario, if they blatantly contradict themselves, you can spot that. But if they take basic care to maintain an internal logical consistency, which they all do, you’ve got nothing. You’ve delegated the ability to make up your mind.”

December 2011. The month that taught me just how quickly it can all change.

Six months out of college, I was waiting tables at a Broadway-style dinner theater in my hometown (which sounds classy until I tell you that it was also a buffet). Although I was applying aggressively to positions within the field, I wasn’t really sure if I wanted to continue working in sports. With four related internships being the only things on my resume, however, I also didn’t have the background to do much else.

That November, I had stumbled across a position that, in my mind, would forever determine if I wanted to continue to working in the industry—a communications internship with the league headquarters of Major League Soccer in New York City.

I applied to that internship like I had dozens of others, and as with the majority of those applications, I didn’t expect to hear anything back. The position paid $300/week, would have me working on Fifth Avenue, and the idea of living in one of the most expensive cities in the world fresh out of college was equal parts invigorating and intimidating.

To my surprise, I received an email a few weeks later wanting to set up an interview.

I prepared for that phone call like I was about to have a one-on-one with the president. I made my parents leave the house for the afternoon, had a full spread of notes laid out across the dining room table, and threw on my best suit and tie, down to the socks and shoes. And I nailed it. The very next day I received a call offering me the position.

But that wasn’t the most important phone call of my life.

Because after taking the weekend to ‘work out the logistics’, I turned down the offer.

I was at my brother’s apartment in Chicago when I had to make this call. Disappointment and a little confusion came over the line when I revealed that I was turning down a position that was obviously a dream one for me. I chose to listen to everyone that told me it wouldn’t be possible, or ‘smart’, to live in New York on that amount of money.

Over the next day I felt literally sick to my stomach. Soft, involuntary “Fuck!”s would escape from my mouth, and I was inconsolably solemn. A sinking feeling that I had made a terrible mistake consumed me.

While I like to think I was nearing the following conclusion anyway, the next morning my brother surprised me over breakfast by saying, “I think you should call them back.”

I can vividly remember plodding into his bedroom for privacy, staring into his mirror while sitting on the edge of the bed, and taking in every detail around me as I dialed; the creaky hardwood floors, a dusty copy of Blink on the dresser, the noisy Belmont Avenue traffic outside. I knew that my life was either about to change forever, or I was going to have a new “What if I had. . .” that would inhabit some dark corner of my mind the rest of my life.

Despite the nervous shakes in my voice, my new supervisor was thankfully still happy to have me on for the next six months as her new intern.

And because of that phone call, it all did change, and quickly. I had some amazing experiences in one of the greatest cities in the world, grew immensely as a person, and made friends that I will talk to for the rest of my life, including one that helped me land my first full-time job.

I also learned that if something even remotely seems like it could be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, to take it. It probably is.

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What was an event in your life that changed everything in an instant?

 

Shamelessly inspired by this list of Julien Smith’s. Also check out my list from 2012.

While I failed to stick with my goal of 25 pages a day the entire year, I did improve my speed reading ability drastically in 2013. This year also had me traveling more than ever before, allowing me to significantly up my reading rate compared to 2012.

I have been making an attempt to read more fiction, and thanks to awesome pages like this and this, my personal reading list has just about tripled in size. 

Here are 40 takeaways from the 20 books I read this year:

Happiness and obtaining it has been written about a lot in recent years (I’ve admittedly read my fair share of these things), like there’s some secret and complex formula that we all must decode and follow in order to obtain this holy grail of emotions.

Even thinking about writing a post about happiness, how to get it, and posing like I’m some authority on it makes me feel so pretentious I need a shower, but I did hear one great analogy recently that I wanted to share.

Happiness is a bucket with a hole in the bottom.

You can put all kinds of things in your bucket to fill it—food, drink, material goods, romantic partners, a job, pretty much anything—and while it can get considerably full, there will always be that hole, slowly draining everything that comes in.

It often takes a long-term effort to fill that bucket, as in the case of establishing a career you love. Sometimes something as simple as a phone call from an old friend can fill it. And occasionally everything can be going so well that the hole seems temporary clogged.

Conversely, a bad job or relationship can be a complete drain on everything else that is deposited into a bucket, into a life.

For as long as I can remember, I was always waiting for the day that I would ‘arrive’—the day my bucket would be permanently full. I would look at the lives of those much older than I (especially my brother and sister) and think they had it all right then. I wanted their fun dorm and friends, their tight after-school hangout group and spot, their collection of framed memories on the wall.

Then when I got to those once-desired ages, I found myself wanting their grad school life or young professional career in the big city. I impatiently wanted to ‘come into my own’, and I wanted it all figured out right then.

But only recently has it hit me that I will never arrive.

Paradoxically, realizing this has made my life feel more whole than it ever has before. Contentment—having a full bucket—comes by virtue of no longer needing to seek external gratification; the bucket’s saturation remains steady.

To borrow a Buddhist idea, Contentment is the ultimate goal because when it is achieved, there is nothing more to seek until it is gone again. This of course cannot be maintained for very long, as then there would be no balance in life. In other words, my bucket will never stay completely full, and if it did, there would be no incentive for me to do anything.

Arrival and coming into oneself is something only visible in the rear-view mirror. It’s a nice thing to look at now and again, but look too much and you will wreck and destroy what’s in front of you. Focus on enjoying and developing what is had here and now, and the bucket stays brimming.