(1/2) You're spiraling again.
Will 200 calls a day make the depression go away?
Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Circles” (1841)
Intro.
When I graduated from college in 2012, I desperately wanted to work in music.
So, while the majority of my peers in the business program were applying to roles in finance, consulting, or Miller-Coors (I went to school in Wisconsin), I was cold-calling and cold-emailing talent agencies, management firms, and record labels. With no family connections, notable alumni, or relevant experience (besides freestyling at parties and writing raps in my spare time), I was naively surprised to learn that nobody called me back or responded to a single email. The fact that an unconnected and inexperienced kid was writing them from the middle of nowhere in Wisconsin probably didn’t help either. Welp.
Despite my resounding failure, come graduation time, I had a few months left on my apartment lease and was determined to get a job — any job — to avoid being the guy living in my parents’ basement. And so, after a full semester of failed cold-call attempts, I got the one job any monkey capable of handling a telephone could get — telemarketing. The irony.
You’re either spiraling up or spiraling down.
The sales floor was a madhouse — rows upon rows of over-caffeinated twenty-somethings, shouting identical scripts to at extremely suspicious restaurant owners all over the country, hellbent on convincing them to give us their credit card. Picture “Wolf of Wall Street,” but with lower stakes, less money, and none of the fun stuff like narcotics, prostitutes, or midget-tossing1.
Anyway, it was on this sales floor that I was introduced to Max, the de-facto sales trainer. Very quickly, it became clear why this kid only a year or two older than me was in such a leadership position. He was a persuasive force of nature, a sales freak, the LeBron James at turning “no” into “yes” and having you think it was your idea. We’d listen in on his sales calls, and he’d put these unsuspecting restaurateurs in an absolute blender. They couldn’t give him their credit card number fast enough. It was insane.
Max’s maxims.
Meanwhile, between our own 200+ outbound calls per day, it was inevitable that you would hear Max marching up and down the rows, screaming “always be closing!!!” or “laser-f*cking focused!!!” or “you’re either spiraling up or spiraling down!!!”
“You’re either spiraling up or spiraling down,” I’d think to myself in between the latest colorful variation of “go f*ck yourself” from yet another under-slept restaurant owner with the audacity to balk at an impromptu thirty minute sales pitch. It was easy enough to roll my eyes at the generic motivational trumpeting from Max, but the thing he’d said about the spirals always struck me as deceptively profound.
And in part two, I’ll tell you why.
Let’s figure this sh*t out together.
If you’ve spent too much of your life raging at the world for not understanding you — while raging at yourself for not letting it — subscribe and let’s figure this out together.
Thank you for reading,
Daniel
Did I just wreck my SEO? Oh well.
This felt deeply familiar. I had my own version of this story about a decade earlier trying to break into film/tv— cold emails, interviews, that particular mix of hope and fluorescent-light reality, the “any job” job (long distance phone service).
That line — “you’re either spiraling up or spiraling down” — feels truer and truer the older I get, though this season of my life looks more like a spiral inward toward myself than a straight line “up.”
I wanted to keep going 👏✨ great writing.