#148. Impact (Saturday, November 18, 2006)
What was your best day…of doing something substantial without knowing it at the time?
Somehow, our financially unsuccessful jewelry business from the summer (#18) did not dissuade our CEO Daniel Jing (#86) from pursuing other entrepreneurial ambitions. And once again, I was the one who’d gotten pulled along.
I’m not sure which member of Daniel’s (presumably vast) high school entrepreneur / Shad Valley network had provided him the intelligence about the first annual Impact conference—to be held over two days at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre this weekend—but for something so tangentially related to what we were doing (hawking costume jewelry at a flea market), it was way more legitimate than it had any right to be.
We had to submit a official application for it the week before, with all our transcripts, our resume, and two or three essays I recall. (Though, the organizer emailing me five minutes after my submission telling me I’d be attending does suggest that this was merely a formality.) I wasn’t that excited about entrepreneurship and networking and all that (I’m not sure I understood what those even meant): it’s more that in that first term of my junior high school year, I was at the peak stage of being blindly ambitious about everything—so when an opportunity came along to join my friend and business partner that sounded vaguely in that direction, what choice did I have but to take it?
A quick note on the logistics—which is the less important but still an unusually interesting/insane part. Daniel and I took a five-hour Greyhound bus to Toronto on Saturday morning. But, to the best of my memory, we did not have a hotel already booked (seemed to be a pattern with me, #32). The details escape me, but somehow we end up at a Holiday Inn Express near the convention center; and despite neither us being anywhere near the required twenty-one check-in age (#32), they allow us to check in after obtaining phone confirmation from our parents.1
And the room in the hotel only had one bed, so I volunteered to create my own makeshift bed by merging two couches and sleeping on that. I recall not even lying down properly on it; it was like I was lying in a pit, with my legs and neck raised on the two edges and my body slump in the space below them. Yet, for some reason, not only did I sleep fine that night, but I had probably the most beautiful dream ever in my life (to that point for sure, and probably even since). Obviously involving a girl I had a crush on at the time (given the implied content, I won’t name names).
Anyways back to the conference…
On the first day, we have an extended networking session in the giant foyer of the Convention Centre, with a mix of the forty or so other high school attendees (pretty much all from the Toronto area except for Daniel and I) and an equal number of college students. There are teenagers there who have started their own telecommunications businesses (and are looking to hire people) or have some other ambitious venture they’re planning to get off the ground (and are looking for advice from those telecom business owners). I am way out of my depth here: I’ve never done anything in the realm of professional in my life to that point, I don’t even know if my dad’s old suit I procured for this event met the acceptable standard. (Note this is eight months before my own experience with Servitec at Shad Valley, #52.)
But somehow I manage to engage in normal-seeming conversations (with non-existent actual business productivity) with several of the people there. Though, in the middle of this, I of course need to take an extended, necessary break from this professionalism overload to sit at the couches and talk casually with three guys I had hit it off with—whose names I do not remember and who I never connected with afterward—naturally on the topic of Reach for the Top and competitive high school trivia (which they also played).
The fancy banquet dinner is much the same way, as I’m placed at the table with several of these delegates and two older business owners who give us sage advice (whose contents I no longer recall). There there are several speakers at the front: the organizers of the event, the national news anchor Robin Gill, a few more people of moderate importance, and the keynote speaker of the event who was heavily advertised on all the web materials… Kendra Todd, the recent winner of the third season (and first female winner) of Donald Trump’s business-based Survivor-style show The Apprentice.
Sitting there as a fresh sixteen-year-old, at a conference I had applied and been accepted to and travelled five hours by bus to, listening to probably one of the most well-known contestants in reality television at the time (when reality TV was at its peak) in person dispensing inspirational business advice. Described objectively like that, it should have been a much bigger deal than it felt at the time or even in my natural hindsight after all of these years. Most of Kendra’s actual content, besides anecdotes about her Apprentice experience, has been lost to time. But what did stand out was near the end of her speech, when she told us she’s been informed that there were high school students at this event, and she told us that was extremely impressive and told all of us to stand up.
That moment was yet another thing that should’ve meant more to me than it actually did. It was only after nearly twenty years, and engaging in many other conferences and professional business settings—and feeling the genuine nervousness and anticipation and recognition of how special it was each time—that I’ve been able to only partly appreciate how ahead of my life trajectory I was in that moment in the main dining hall in the main convention center in the largest financial center of the country.
I had seen true ambition for the first time in its genuine physical form. I just hadn’t known it yet.
- Notably, my parents were uncharacteristically nonchalant for all this, seeing as I was sixteen and this was my first solo trip to another city. For the life of me, I can not fathom how they allowed me to take off to Toronto without a defined hotel plan. I genuinely believe something must have shifted in them—maybe triggered by my university incompetence—in later years, because micro-managing my trips (personal or work) became standard practice all into my adult years, only gradually lessened through the passage of time.