How a Tweet Gave Me a Career
If I asked you to tell me how many possible numbers there are between 0 and .01 do you think you could tell me? Probably not, ‘cause the answer is an infinite amount.
That means that when you take something from a 0% possibility and bring it up to just .01% you’ve increased your percentage by infinity. But what’s more important is that you’ve taken failure from being an absolute certainty to becoming a gamble. Regardless of how shit the odds are, that tiny little action put the ball in your court and you in control of your destiny.
For the last 7 years I’ve tried to find as many 0s as I could and turn them into .01s. Be it in the form of an email, a conversation, Facebook comment or a tweet. The reason was simple:
I knew that eventually one of those .01s was gonna pull through for me and that all it takes is one person to change your whole fuckin’ life.
Almost four years ago my friend Michelle tweeted about a marketing internship at her job. I didn’t know shit about marketing, but I knew she was working somewhere I wanted to be. I took the 5 seconds out of my life to turn the chances of me having an internship that summer from 0% to .01% with a simple “yess!!!” reply. This one tiny action was amongst maybe another hundred others elsewhere. Who knew it’d be the one.
A hundreds other emails, a hundred other texts. Job boards, Craigslist and basically anyone that was in a better position than me in life, I wanted them to know I exist. Something as small as an introduction at a party or a “like” on the gram’, I never passed the opportunity to show someone what I got because I know who I am and where I come from. I live in a world where people are way smarter than me, better spoken, better looking with more connects, money and resources. They can have all that. But they sure as shit weren’t gonna out work me. They weren’t about to sacrifice as much as I was and they definitely didn’t want to fucking win as much as I did. So I took every single little micro opportunity that I could get. Because when you start out as a creative– no one owes you anything …and you have everything to prove.
I know the title says that a tweet gave me a career but that’s actually not the main point of this article (my b). The main point is about people and how a tiny action has the power to put you in a position to be at the right place at the right time around someone that can help you. It’s about how maximizing the volume of tiny actions can increase your odds at success infinitely.
That tweet led me to an internship and that internship led me to a producer who decided to take a chance on me. I didn’t have much experience but I had the heart. It was all I had to offer at that point in my life but it was enough for her to connect me with people she knew in the industry. The rest is history, and for another article, but I honestly don’t know where I would be if it wasn’t for her. She set off the dominos that gave me a life and a future. I think about how, for her, it was just an email introduction but for me ..it was a lifeboat. Thank You, Hannah.
So my main point after all that crap is this: If you’re not doing shit, ain’t shit gonna happen to you. If you’re wondering why you’re unemployed, it’s because you’re busy bullshitting and reading this article instead of crawling through the dirt and sending out resumes, reaching out to people and turning 0s into .01s. It doesn’t happen overnight. It could take weeks, months or even years. But consistency and patience is what separates the losers from the people who deserve to win. The people that make it in any industry are the ones that have the stomach to make it through all the shit first.
Any moment that you spend feeling sorry for yourself is a moment that you could’ve taken to turn a 0 into a .01. And who knows? That could have been the one to change your life.
