How I Got Into Sales

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When I got out of the IDF in October 2008 my confidence was at an all time high.

After eating shit for the better part of two years, I knew that my time to start balling out of control had come.

You have a lot of downtime in the military. You can’t help but have a hyper-active imagination.

Most of our idle time was spent fantasizing about what we’d do when we got OUT of the army.

I think part of the reason Israelis like to travel so much is that they’re forced to serve for 2–3 years in a military that’s run by Israelis.

I was a victim that mentality as well, and by the time I got out I was chomping at the bit to get back into the real world. My personal fantasy was to spend six months in Thailand and India EACH.

I wanted to do a six month kickboxing camp in Thailand.

As for India, I just wanted to go there because it was cheap.

Now, as inexpensive as those countries are when compared to American or even Israeli standards, I still needed a couple thousand dollars to fund my next adventure.

In addition to that, I had also had my fill of Israelis, Israeli food, Israeli politics, and just about everything that had to do with Israel.

Since I was an American citizen, I figured why not go back to my hometown of Los Angeles and start crushing it?

I mean, how hard could it be? Right?

I remember coming back to America and listening to people have normal conversations about t-shirts and whatnot.

I would think to myself, “These people are soft. They have no idea what it’s like to struggle.”

Being in the army is like being pinned down by someone who is 10x bigger and stronger than you. But this person also has 4 arms and is beating the shit out of you with their other two arms.

At first you struggle, but after a while you become exhausted and just learn to take your punishment.

In other words, you break.

And you don’t just break once, you break multiple times. I would say it averages out to about once every 3–4 months, which pretty much lines up with how often your unit moves around. Sometimes more, sometimes less.

But if you’re lucky, army life eventually ends.

Then all of a sudden you’re back in the real world where nobody expects you to wake up in the middle of the night, put all your clothes on and stand next to a bunch of guns for 40 minutes in the freezing cold.

It almost feels like the world is on easy mode. At first.

So I was pretty stoked to come back to LA.

I was like, “Psh, this making money shit is going to be easy as fuck compared to the army!”

Unfortunately, I decided to come back to America at the end of 2008 when the economy was the worst it had been in years. I think the stock market was at like 6000 or something.

I had no university degree (not that it mattered, really), no connections and no real skills other than shooting guns and sleeping in the cold. I had no desire to get into security work or anything like that, as I feared that it would be too reminiscent of military life for me to maintain my sanity.

So there I was, back in America with all the motivation in the world to work and nobody was hiring.

I didn’t know that, so I figured I’d just hit up a bunch of restaurants and bars and see if they needed anyone.

Nope.

Then I turned to where everyone turns first when they look for a job: Craigslist.

Now, as a mature adult I now know that Craigslist is made up of 99% scum of the earth. It’s not like it was back in the early 2000s when normal people used it.

Back then it was pretty trashy as well, but I didn’t know any better. In fact, prior to serving in the military I had never held a job for more than six months.

The most money I’d ever made in a month was something like $3k working as a barback in La Quinta.

So there I was, little naive me, browsing Craigslist for different jobs.

As I checked the different positions, I found that most of them were either too low-paying ($12/hour was considered good at the time), I didn’t have enough experience (I realized later that people just lie about this on their resume), or I didn’t have the necessary skills (hard to lie your way into being an accountant or a lawyer).

I literally checked every single category on Craigslist to see if there was anything I could do.

I noticed that this one category seemed to hit all the right points.

The postings there claimed you could make up to $250k a year, had flexible hours, and that they would even train you.

What’s that category you ask? Sales.

After a brief comparison between the sales category and the rest of the job categories, I came to the conclusion that sales has a lot of high paying jobs.

(As far as I know, Google wasn’t paying its engineers half a million dollars a year at the time.)

When I started applying, I also noticed that the only people who responded to me were the guys advertising the sales jobs. I figured out how to write a nice cover letter to get their attention, plus I think the fact that I was in the IDF made me stand out.

I’ll ruin the suspense for you now: I never made $250k working at any of these jobs. In fact, in the six months that I spent in LA, bouncing from sales job to sales job, I only made $30.

More on that later.

The first place that hired me was, ironically enough, a couple of Israelis who were setting up a kiosk in the mall.

Despite the fact that I would eventually be spending several years in the mall kiosk “industry,” I fucking hated this first position.

It was around mid-December and people were doing their Christmas shopping. The Israeli chick I talked to on the phone told me to meet her there in the morning and wear something nice, so I chose my only nice outfit: a button down black shirt, a pair of black slacks and some black dress shoes.

I showed up at the mall, went where they told me to go and saw a folding table covered in a blue tablecloth. I see this girl and what looked like her mom pulling things out of some big cardboard boxes.

As I got closer, I could see what they were: Christmas themed candles.

You know, Frosty The Snowman, Santa Claus, that kind of shit.

Still, I was optimistic. After all, they were Israeli so I was sure they’d help me out. They did say that I would be making $300 a day.

Needless to say, that day was a fucking disaster. I started out pretty motivated, but got quickly demoralized as I realized that nobody wanted to talk to me.

Not being a very materialistic person myself, I didn’t realize that I should size people up to see what kind of purse they’re carrying or if they’re wearing nice jewelry before stopping them.

I didn’t sell shit that entire day EXCEPT to this one black guy in a soldier’s uniform.

I’ll never forget it, but I said something to him and he stopped in his tracks and gave me the most surprised look I’ve ever seen.

I couldn’t believe that someone was actually talking to me, but I managed to bring him over and have a retarded conversation about candles.

What the fuck are you supposed to say about fucking candles? That they look nice? They weren’t even scented or anything.

He asked me how much they were (they didn’t have price tags) and I told him twenty dollars.

Once we started talking about money, the Israeli girl swooped in and took over.

A few minutes later, she managed to talk this guy into buying one. We went to the cash register together and she asked me in Hebrew, “How much did you tell him?”

I go, “$20.”

She made a face and goes, “Psh, no way! The cheapest is $80.”

Then I was like, “Uh, but I already told him — ”

She swiped his card before I could finish the sentence. Fortunately this guy was either too dumb or too shy to make a fuss, and he signed his credit slip, took his stupid candle and went on his merry way.

I go, “You charged him $80 for that? These really cost that much?”

She nodded confidently. “Yes. They’re worth it! Look!”

I rolled my eyes. They were shitty Chinese candles. Some even still had the “Made In China” sticker.

Typical Israelis.

For some reason I didn’t leave right there and decided to stay the entire day.

It was fucking agony, save for the two hours at the end when some hot American chick showed up and we chatted for a bit. She also was supposed to work there, but was quickly over it within about ten minutes.

After that day I figured I should probably set my sights a bit higher and shoot for some kind of office job.

I had once heard, “People who work while seated make more money than those who work while standing.” Or some shit.

Following that gig, I worked at this “advertising agency” in Beverly Hills.

I put the air quotes because I never actually saw the two guys in charge do anything. They would just sit in their offices and chill, for all I knew.

During the interview, these two guys gave me a piece of paper with a few lines of text and told me to read it.

Once I did, they told me that my job was to go home and memorize everything, give them a call later and recite it.

I naively actually tried to memorize the damn thing, gave them a call and stumbled through what little I actually remembered.

I remember at the end of it, one of the guys goes, “Amazing! You’re hired!”

Thinking back I don’t think he gave a shit that I did poorly, he just wanted to hire someone.

After all, these were all commission-only gigs so they didn’t actually have to pay me anything out of pocket for me to sit in their office and cold call people.

Speaking of which, the job was obviously fucking terrible.

They didn’t even have any leads. They told me to google different doctor’s offices in Los Angeles, call them and try to pitch the doctor on why they should advertise with us.

I would sit next to this fat Lesbian chick who’s name I can’t remember. Lizzy maybe? Let’s call her Lizzy.

Lizzy had tattoos all up and down her arms, a military-style hair cut and was the textbook definition of a butch lesbian. She even walked like a man.

She had worked in the entertainment industry doing God knows what, but apparently had all these connections in that world.

Even though she would sit in the office with me, she never actually called anyone because she would just make deals with people she knew personally.

In fact, she would just go out every night to parties, get drunk and schmooze.

I on the other hand, was relegated to the torture that is cold-calling.

One of the bosses, Adam, gave me some direction on what to say on the phone. He was this short, intense Jewish guy who struck me as a real asshole.

He’d be like, “Get them on the phone and get them EXCITED about what we’re selling.”

And then I’d be like, “Okay, well what are we selling?”

He goes, “Try to get them to commit to a fifty thousand dollar retainer for our services.”

My jaw hit the floor. Fifty thousand dollars? To do what, exactly?

Their master plan was laughable, now that I think about it. Through Lizzy’s connections, they had created a premium-looking magazine. It was loosely-based around the entertainment industry, but was basically just two hundred pages of ads of local and big businesses.

I think all they were doing was running ads in their own magazine and pocketing the difference, which was considerable.

I remember Adam telling me one day, “It costs us $250 to make this magazine.”

What a fucking scam. Or a great business plan. I can’t decide which.

I’d call these doctors and be like, “I can put your business in front of 30,000 of the most affluent homes in Los Angeles.”

That was my entire pitch, because after that I had no idea what to say.

Only once did anyone respond with anything other than a variant of “thanks but no thanks.”

After I gave my pitch, this guy goes, “How much for a 12 month campaign?”

I go, “Uhhhh… a 12 month campaign?”

I shot Lizzy a look, my eyes pleading for help. She scooted over, grabbed the phone and started blabbing about how great the magazine was.

He didn’t buy.

Somehow I lasted for two weeks before quitting.

Fortunately, while subjecting myself to these “character-building” experiences, I didn’t have to pay any rent.

My parents had since left Los Angeles for La Quinta. Since I had no desire to live in a small town that was 80% old people and 20% Mexicans, I asked my mom’s brother if I could stay with him.

Now, this was a big deal at the time. I had stayed at my uncle’s house before moving to Israel and it didn’t go very well.

I had been dealing drugs for the better part of three years. After sticking mainly to prescription pills and weed, I found a hookup for ecstasy and crystal meth.

I started going to raves every weekend to “work,” which basically meant sell a few hundred dollars worth of pills, take a few hundred dollars worth myself and dance until I was ten pounds lighter.

It was simultaneously amazing and terrible, but that’s a story for another time.

Thanks to the hard drugs, it was only a matter of time before I fucked up and got arrested. All of this happened while living at my uncle’s house, so he and my aunt and cousins got to witness my downward spiral.

Almost three years later, he had softened his heart and agreed to let me stay there again.

To be fair, I had cleaned up my act considerably. I still smoked weed, but hadn’t popped any pills in a while. I might have rolled a few times (yet another story for another time), but the experiences were tightly controlled where there was little to no chance of a negative repercussion.

Anyway, despite the fact that I was an overall “better” person after my military experience, I still got some flak while living at my uncle’s.

My cousins (his kids) were all doing much better than me, if judged by normal standards.

My oldest cousin, Sylvia, was in medical school. Nuff said.

The middle cousin, Zach, was going to school in San Diego. He’d joined a fraternity, was hardcore into Alcoholics Anonymous, and was banging hot sorority girls like it was his job.

I suppose it also helped that he was working out at an MMA gym and a six pack so strong it looked like you could grate cheese off of him.

My youngest cousin, Adam, was going to college in Las Vegas. Adam has always been a baller though.

That said, even though I wasn’t their progeny, my aunt and uncle still felt somewhat responsible for me because a) I was family, b) they didn’t want me to fuck up and get arrested again while living in their house, and c) I was living in their house.

My uncle would always tell me, “GO BACK TO SCHOOL.”

All the fucking time. Like a broken record.

While I can appreciate his suggestion so many years later, at the time I didn’t wanna hear it.

I wanted to do whatever I deemed the right choice for my own life. If it was wrong, it was wrong.

But I wanted to do what I wanted to do, and I wasn’t going to let him or anyone else change my mind without trying first.

That sounds all well and good, of course, but when you are naive enough to take commission-only sales jobs off CRAIGSLIST and actually expect to make as much money as the ad claims, you probably shouldn’t be making your own decisions.

Still, I kept chugging along, moving from job to job and crossing my fingers that the risk would pay off.

My next job was in Van Nuys at this place called First Vision Financial.

By now I was savvy enough to realize not to believe the hype from the ads. I knew I should be more picky when making my decision on where to work, so when I took the job at FVF it was because they impressed me during the interview.

I remember going in and talking with this guy who said his name was Ben Jackson.

Now, his name was definitely not Ben Jackson. This guy was as Armenian as they come, but salespeople sometimes change their names to ones that are easily understood in order to reduce the friction of the sales process.

I told him I was part Armenian. Who knows if he believed me.

During the interview, he goes, “Sell me this pen.”

I was like, “Uhhhhh… it’s a really good pen. You can write with it, and uhhh…”

It was pretty bad, but Ben was a cool customer.

He goes, “That was really good. Most people get nervous when I ask them to do that, but you didn’t. You’re going to be really good.”

He had a very calm delivery. Very smooth. Not your typical hyper-active salesman.

Then he says, “We’re not like one of those places that hires everybody. We’re going to train you here. We’re going to make sure you know exactly what to say when you get someone on the phone.

“And you’re going to make money. It’s going to take three months for you to get paid just because of the nature of the product we’re selling, but once you get going you’re going to be making a lot of money.”

That sounded great to me, especially the part about being trained. I still had the idea in my head that the profession of sales was a high-paying one, and really really wanted to learn how to actually do it.

Ben said they’d teach me. I took the job.

When I went into work the following Monday, I met the rest of my hiring class.

There was this guy named Afshin, a typical nerdy Persian Jew from Beverly Hills. He was so skinny, had terrible acne and thick black-rimmed classes that made him look even more nerdy.

I told him that I was in the IDF and after that we became pretty good friends.

There was Brandon, a tall light-skinned black guy who looked like he was really good at basketball. He was about my age and very friendly.

Then there was some Mexican chick, let’s call her… I don’t know, Maria.

Apparently Ben actually did plan on training us, because he told us early on that we wouldn’t be making any calls that day.

He and his equally Armenian partner, “Jack Diamond” were going to coach us until we were ready to pick up the phone.

They handed us printouts that were something like 5–6 pages long and filled with text.

Ben says to us, “By the end of this training, you guys are going to know all of this by heart.”

Then he goes, “But before we get started, I want us all to do something. You may think it’s a little corny or stupid or whatever, but I promise you that if you do this, you’re going to succeed. Everyone close your eyes.”

We all gave each other a nervous smile, then did as he said.

He goes, “I want you to imagine yourself as successful. You have as much money as you could ever want. What does your office look like? How big is it?

“Now think about your house. How many rooms does it have, what neighborhood is it in? And your car…”

On and on he went like this for maybe 10 minutes. Obviously you can’t measure the effectiveness of something like this, but at the time I remember thinking that it actually did help to motivate me.

Once we opened our eyes, Ben says, “Listen. The one thing you need to know about this job is that it’s not about being pushy, it’s not about anything like that. This job is a bout being creative.”

I didn’t know what he meant at the time but would soon find out.

Ben goes, “Okay, so the first thing I want you to do is read through all these pages. Just read it. Don’t worry about memorizing it or anything like that, just read it to yourself. Five times.”

We did as we were told.

Oh, at this point I should probably mention what we were selling. Ever hear of loan modifications?

By now it was early 2009 and the housing market was in freefall. A lot of people (my parents included) had taken out these shitty loans that start off at a low rate, then get higher and higher over the life of the loan.

Eventually, the interest builds up to the point where the homeowner owes more than the house is worth.

A loan modification, as I understood it at the time, was something you could do to fix this. I had no idea HOW it worked, but I figured that if it was important then Ben would tell us about it.

Speaking of which, he was an excellent trainer. I’m not sure if he had trained people before, since he, Jack and a secretary were the only ones working in the office. But he knew his shit.

If I were to sum up what he did, I would say that he instructed us to incrementally learn the pitch and practice it. Sounds pretty basic actually now that I think about it, but it was very effective.

After we had read through everything, he had us read the first page out loud.

“Make sure you stand up when you do it. Any time you get someone on the phone, you stand up.”

Standing up when you get someone on the phone is pretty common in phone sales. It does help. It also helps during training.

After we did the first page, we went on to the second, third etc.

The pitch would go something like this:

“Hi Bob,” Ben always told us to use their first name, like we were equals.

“This is Tony from First Vision Financial. I’m looking at your FILE here, and it says you live at 444 Elm Street. Is that correct?”

Then they’d say, yes, no whatever.

“Okay. Well your FILE says that…”

We’d have this form in front of us, and our job was to have the client answer all of the questions over the phone so we could fill out the form in one call.

Ben had all kinds of tips for us.

When it came to filling out the form, he told us to ask the questions in an entertaining way.

In other words, don’t just say, “Are you married, single, or separated?”

He’d tell us to say, “So Bob, are you married or happy?”

HAHAHA.

The guys would always say, “I’m married.”

Some losers would say, “Both.”

Ben had this whole little spiel. He’d tell us to say things like, “Man, me and my wife have been married for three years and we fight ALL the time! Everything man, from taking out the garbage to what we’re going to watch on TV. I just wish I knew what I was doing wrong.”

And without fail, every single time that would lead into a long conversation with the people on the other end giving you all kinds of advice on how to have a happy marriage.

This of course gave us the opportunity to “get to know them,” which really just was a way for us to keep the conversation going as long as possible.

On our first day of training, Ben had asked Jack in front of us: “How long do you stay on the phone with a client if the conversation is going well? Like average.”

Jack thought about it and said, “45 minutes.”

We all gasped.

“For the first call?” I asked.

Yep.

Jesus Christ, I could barely have a 45 minute conversation with someone I actually knew and liked. What the fuck was I supposed to talk about with strangers?

The marriage thing helped, but you could talk about literally anything as long as you kept them on the phone for long enough.

In fact, as a general rule, the longer you had them on the phone the better. I had conversations with people that were up to an hour and a half, sometimes more. Just shooting the shit.

Out of our new class of hires, I was the best. Well, if you want to judge it by how many apps we got in. I think I did 8 in my first week.

In order for an app to be valid, you had to keep the customer on the phone, fill out the form and then at the end get him to give you his social security number.

I was assured that this was not a scam, but that the reason you needed them to give you their social over the phone was because it was part of the loan modification process.

Ben said to us, “You need to get their social.”

One of us asked, “Why?”

Jack piped up, “Because if they don’t give it to you in that first conversation, it’s going to back up the whole process. We can’t put the app through if we don’t have their social, and we don’t want to do all the work to get them a loan mod only to have them get cold feet later because they need to give us their social.”

I’m pretty sure they were telling the truth. They seemed like straight shooters.

And they were also making a fuckload of money. In the month that I worked there, I never saw Jack wear the same suit twice. And they were nice suits.

They had split the class up into two groups. Ben would help one group, and Jack would help the other. In exchange, once we got the app in we’d schedule a call for them to talk to the “senior broker,” which would either be Ben or Jack.

We were charging 2% of the loan amount and it was rare that we’d talk to anyone with a house worth less than $400k. We’d get half of that, and the closers would get the other half.

I was in Jack’s group, so every time I got an app in I would set up a call for him for the next day.

Like I said, my first week I absolutely crushed it and got 8 apps in. Even though we wouldn’t get paid for three months (and that’s even assuming a sale was even made), in my mind I was already spending the money.

Unfortunately, Jack didn’t manage to make progress with any of those first 8. Some of them flaked on the appointment and some he just wasn’t able to make a good connection with him.

After the first week, I was still hopeful. My second week I didn’t do quite as well, but not for lack of trying. I got something like 6 apps in my second week.

The rest of the class was not doing so well. Afshin was so nervous and awkward on the phone that he couldn’t get past the first 2 minutes of conversation.

Brandon was good, but I think he was lazy. He barely made any calls.

And Maria was too nervous to even call people. I don’t think she called more than a few people a day.

Maybe they were all a little self-conscious around me as well, because I dove in head-first. I took Ben’s training to heart and went to work.

After my second week though, I started to get a little disillusioned. Even with Tony Robbins’ sweet, sweet voice filling my ears during my lunch break, my motivation started to wane.

I blamed Jack for not being able to close any of my deals and make me rich.

Brief tangent: I didn’t have an MP3 player at the time, so I would bring my laptop with me in the car and listen to Tony Robbins’ various programs from there. Get The Edge.

Coincidentally, I had a friend in a similar situation during this time. I met Adam on my first day of boot camp. We were in the same Batallion, but he was a few months deeper into the army than I was.

I remember asking him, “Hey man, how’s the army?”

Completely serious, he says, “It’s fucking terrible. You’re going to hate it.”

I can’t say he was wrong, either.

Back then the lone soldier (a foreign soldier in the IDF with no immediate family in Israel) community was much smaller. Despite the fact that we weren’t in the same exact unit, I’d see Adam periodically over the years.

Even though he was from Canada, he had spent enough time living in LA during his teens that he considered it home.

Both of us had made the same decision to come back to LA and try to make it big after the army. Both of us were working shitty sales jobs.

I would call him on the phone during my lunch break and we’d swap stories about work, just like how we used to call each other in between Uber rides.

We don’t talk anymore. Yesterday was his birthday, maybe I’ll give him a call…

/tangent

Anyway, there were a lot of good Pho (a type of delicious Vietnamese soup) restaurants in that area, and every day I’d go eat at the same one. That and Tony Robbins were the light at the end of the tunnel for me while I worked there.

By my third week, Jack still hadn’t close any of my deals and you could tell I was starting to lose interest.

Looking back on it now, I know that it’s hard to take over the sales process from someone who has created an emotional bond with the client. You spend all this time getting to know the person, cracking jokes, bonding with them. And then some “closer” comes along and doesn’t invest the time or energy to do the same. They just want to talk business. People don’t like it.

But at the time I was still green and didn’t know the intricacies of selling. I was the opener and I was doing my job. Jack was supposed to be my closer and he wasn’t doing his job. It was all very black and white for me.

Two days into the third week and I uncharacteristically hadn’t written any apps. The guys called a meeting on Wednesday with the owner.

The owner was another Armenian guy, very nice like Jack and Ben. He’d show up from time to time and stick around for an hour or so.

I don’t remember the details of the meeting, but at one point the owner asks Jack,

“Tell them what your average monthly salary is like. Not like,” he paused to wave his hands around for emphasis, “the MOST you’ve ever made but like, average.”

Jack shrugs nonchalantly and goes, “Fifteen thousand.”

Had they had that conversation a week before, I might have been impressed. Shit, I was impressed. I just didn’t like how Jack wasn’t closing any of my deals. I wanted to make $15k a month too god damn it!

At the end of the meeting, Ben goes, “Okay, from now on, anyone who writes an app gets a $10 bonus.”

I guess they felt like they needed to incentivize us for getting more work done.

Maria had disappeared. Afshin was still around, despite not having written any apps. Brandon was coming like 3–4 days a week because he had to go to school or something. He was still lazy.

I was the only one working hard. During a particularly strong day for me, I dropped another app into this basket-thing.

I heard the owner ask Ben, “Tony signed another app?”

That kind of recognition made me feel good. But you can’t buy dank weed with recognition.

Oh yeah, I should probably mention that the sales name I gave myself was Tony King.

During this time in my life, I was also watching all episodes of The Sopranos. Between that and the Tony Robbins programs, I figured Tony would be a good name to go with.

The last few days I was there I managed to write three more apps. At the end of the day on Friday, I already knew I was going to quit.

I think everyone had that feeling, but nobody said anything. Sales jobs have such a high turnover, I don’t think managers put much effort into trying to keep new people who don’t have the stomach for the job.

At the end of the day, I asked Jack, “Hey, can I get the bonus for writing those apps? I need it.”

I’ll never forget the look he gave me. It was the look of, “You’re going to quit, aren’t you?”

He slowly pulled out a huge wad of cash from his pocket, peeled off $30 and gave it to me.

I never went back.

The next week I got literally about 50 calls from them but didn’t answer the phone once.

I felt guilty about leaving. I had bonded with Jack, and despite everything, I felt like I was losing a friend.

Still, I didn’t feel bad enough to answer the phone. I was worried they’d convince me to go back.

LOL, I remember after my first week there, my uncle asked me about the job.

I said excitedly, “Well, we have to get these people on the phone and have a long conversation with them. The call only counts if we get their social security number, and I did it 8 times last week!”

I probably could have figured out a better way to explain the job, because as soon as he heard “social security number,” I’m pretty sure he thought it was a scam.

“Stu, please go back to college,” he said.

I rolled my eyes. He just didn’t get it.

Actually, I was the one who didn’t get it. Girls, money, satisfaction — I didn’t get any of it.

On top of that, things were getting increasingly intense at my uncle’s house. I felt very uncomfortable there, which is understandable considering the circumstances.

Still, I knew I was on borrowed time. After my most recent failure in the world of commission-only sales, I started to get depressed.

I mean, there I was with my dick swinging in the wind, thinking that I could do anything after finishing two years of “character building” in the army. Yet for all my effort I only had thirty fucking dollars to show for it.

I tried to spend as little time at my uncle’s house as possible, which is tricky when you don’t have a job or very many friends.

I remember I would go to the Gold’s Gym in Woodland Hills, work out and then smoke a joint in my car in the parking lot.

Not wanting to go home, I would sit in my car, stoned out of my mind and listen to Tony Robbins drop knowledge bombs on my head.

Didn’t do much good, but it did help pass the time until I was supposed to go home.

I didn’t tell them I quit until a few weeks after I actually did. By then I was completely demoralized.

My mom knew my situation, and suggested that I go talk to a therapist at CSUN. I was technically still a student there, even if I wasn’t enrolled in any classes.

Somehow I managed to talk my way into a one hour session with a therapist. Good thing too, because that conversation would change my life for the foreseeable future.

As I walked into the appointment, I saw all these depressed people and hated that I had to put myself in the same category as them. I finished the army! I had potential!

The therapist was this Jewish guy, probably in his 50s. We started chatting and he asked me what was on my mind. I told him.

“You know, I got back from the army like six months ago. I thought I’d be making money, you know, living life. Doing all the things I dreamed about doing when I was in the army.”

“And?” He asked.

I shook my head sadly. “It’s just not working out. I’m working these sales jobs…”

I told him about the jobs. He nodded patiently.

“The truth is,” I said wistfully, “I kind of want to go back to Israel. I mean, I have so many friends there. I could live in Tel Aviv, go to the beach..”

He smiles and says, “I lived in Israel for a while after college. On a kibbutz. It was a blast. Why don’t you just go back?”

I go, “Really? You think so?”

Took me kind of by surprise. I thought therapists weren’t supposed to give you suggestions?

He goes, “Yeah, why not! You’re what, 25? Go do it while you’re still young. Go have fun.”

That sounded like pretty fucking good advice, I must admit.

After a few more minutes of conversation, I was already stoked to go back. I walked out of there feeling like I was on top of the world.

No more shitty sales jobs. No more disapproving family.

The next day I waited until everyone that lived in my uncle’s house was gone, packed up my shit and drove to La Quinta. I didn’t even tell my parents I was coming.

When I got there and told my mom, she was like, “You need to call Scotty and tell him you’re gone.”

I thought I had that covered.

“What? I left them a note. That’s not enough?”

“Stuey…” she admonished.

I sighed. Jewish guilt.

I spoke with my aunt Holly, a very sweet lady. She had read the note. After talking for a few minutes she goes,

“But you didn’t even tell us you were leaving!”

I don’t think it would have mattered. I think I have a problem ending relationships with people. I’m always scared they’re going to try to work things out.

Anyway, a month later I was on a flight to Tel Aviv.

But that’s a story for another time.