CHAPTER TWO · BETA VERSION

I sent out more than 1,500 job applications when I got home, many of which were well below my skill set and frankly part time & entry level. I landed zero interviews. Not one. The only call I got back across an entire year of trying was from some pest control company looking for door-to-door salesmen, and to this day I am pretty sure that one was a scam.

The part I really need you to hear, if you are post-collapse right now and trying to claw your way back into the working world, is this. All of that happened before they ran a background check. Nobody had even gotten that far. My email inbox was flooded daily with generic rejection notices from countless businesses saying I didn’t make the grade to even bother having a conversation with. As if you needed someone with more experience than a pulse for basic data entry. Truly incredible how broken the hiring and employment system in this country has become.

Picture me. Six in the morning at the kitchen table, kids still asleep, wife still asleep, three cups of coffee deep, applying for a remote data entry job in a town I had never heard of in a state I had never been to for $17 an hour. I applied for night shift work at WalMart, stocking boxes onto shelves. Nothing. I applied to push a broom at Starbucks. Nothing. Mid-level sales, customer service, loading pallets at three in the morning. Nothing, nothing, nothing. Auto-rejected, sometimes inside of twenty minutes, sometimes faster.

The first hundred you tell yourself it is a numbers game. The next couple hundred you tell yourself the resume needs work. By eight hundred you stop telling yourself anything. You just open the laptop and apply, like brushing your teeth. By the time you are into four digits it is just the message itself coming through, loud and clear.

World says no. World says we don’t have a place for you. World says go figure something else out, we are full.

Yeah….

Here is the actual math of trying to come back from something like this. You have to pay rent. You have to eat. You have to have an address, by the way, a real physical mailing address, before you can open a bank account or get a phone line or sign a lease or register a car. You have a parole officer that expects you to be employed yesterday and a federal agent over their shoulder who thinks you are runnin’ game even if you aren’t. You have restitution that, on a part-time minimum wage data entry job (if you could get one), would take you about 66.7 years to pay off. I will be 113 when it clears. And not a single company will hire you to even start.

I am going to say something that is going to make some of the polite people in this country uncomfortable but I am going to say it anyway, because the truth is the truth. The system that locks people up and spits them back out is not built for rebuilding. It is built for punishment, period. It takes your agency away from you for years, calls you sub-human while you are inside, and then drops you off at the curb in a community that has been pre-warned not to touch you. Then when the released person cannot get a job and goes back to whatever it was they were doing before, the same polite people on cable news shake their heads and ask how come the recidivism rate is so damn high. (Hint, look in the mirror.)

I take 100% ownership for the mistake that put me there. I will say that till I am in the ground. But if you are reading this and you came out the other side of a public collapse, whether it was prison, bankruptcy, addiction, a divorce that lit your reputation on fire, whatever it was, you know exactly what I am describing. The world has filed you under “no” and the file is locked. You can feel them looking at you in line at the grocery store. You feel it when a clerk is just kind to you and it lights up your entire day, because that one person, that one moment, was a person who didn’t already know.

The shift, for me, did not come from a podcast, a quote, a book or a friend giving me a pep talk. It came one morning around application number twelve hundred when I closed the laptop and said the obvious thing out loud to nobody. The only person who is going to hire me is me.

That was it. That was the whole thing. Not exactly Tony Robbins material. But sitting there with cold coffee in a mug at the kitchen table, on a Tuesday, with the kids about to come downstairs, it landed like a hammer. Because what it meant, what it actually meant if I was honest about it, was that this wall I had been throwing my body against for a year wasn’t a wall at all. It was a door. And I had been pointed at it backwards the entire time.

If no company would hire me I would have to build a company. If no employer would write me a check I would have to make customers write me a check. If the whole economy of available-employment had decided I was uninsurable, then the only economy left to me was the one I built myself, from the dirt, with nothing.

The truth about entrepreneurship is one where you may go six months, twelve months, eighteen months without making a dime, working twelve to fourteen hours a day on something that may not ever work, on the bet that one day a customer says yes and the whole thing flips. To the powers that be, leaving the house with no money coming in to take a trip was suspicious activity. To me, leaving the house with no money coming in to take that trip was the job. What government officials don’t understand about starting a business could fill the library of congress.

If you are rebuilding right now this is the same gulf you are dealing with at the dinner table, with the people in your life who keep asking why you don’t just “get a normal job.” Here is your answer. The normal job did not call you back. Eleven hundred times in a row.

Despite massive challenges, I built the company anyway. Software, review management for small businesses, an idea I came up with sitting on a bunk in Lompoc with a borrowed pen and a piece of yellow legal paper. Zero budget. Every customer was hand-to-hand combat, handshake to handshake, one cold email and one LinkedIn DM and one awkward phone call at a time. In the beginning I would have settled for enough revenue to cover one bill. Not all the bills. One.

It built. Slow. Then a little faster. Then a real customer. Then another.

Here is what I want you to walk away with, and I am writing this directly to the person who is reading this on their phone in between opening rejection emails on the very same phone.

That wall is not the punishment. The wall IS the message. The hard part is hearing it. If every door in the world is closing on you, that isn’t the world telling you that you are worthless. That is the world telling you to stop walking around looking for doors and start building one for yourself.

I needed to be pinned against that wall to do it. If even one of those 1,500 applications had come through for me, if even one of them had thrown me a part-time data entry job at $17 an hour, I would have taken it. Of course I would have. I would have been on my knees grateful for it. And I would have spent the next ten years grateful, broke, and small.

Instead I got 1,500 no’s.

Thank God.

What This Chapter Covers

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