#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 (#89) 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 told him about the first annual Impact conference, being held that weekend at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. But for two guys whose entrepreneurial experience amounted to hawking costume jewelry at a flea market, this thing was far more legitimate than it had any right to be.
We had to submit an official application for it the week before, with our transcripts, our resumes, and, as I recall, two or three essays. (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 or networking—I’m not sure I even understood what those meant. But that fall I was at the peak of being blindly ambitious about everything (#89), so when an opportunity appeared that sounded vaguely impressive, what choice did I have but to take it?
The logistics were also mildly insane. Daniel and I took a five-hour Greyhound bus to Toronto on Saturday morning. To the best of my memory, we did not have a hotel booked. Somehow we ended up at a Holiday Inn Express near the convention centre, and despite both of us being well under the required check-in age (#32), they let us stay after getting phone confirmation from our parents.1
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 and an equal number of college students. There are teenagers who have already started telecommunications businesses, and are looking to hire people, while others are trying to launch ventures of their own and asking them for advice. I am way out of my depth here: I had never done anything remotely professional in my life. I wasn’t even sure the old suit I borrowed from my dad met the dress standard. (Note this is eight months before my own experience with Servitec at Shad Valley, #62.)
But somehow I manage to engage in normal-seeming conversations with several people. In the middle of this, I naturally take a break from the professionalism overload, sitting on the couches with three guys I’d hit it off with and talking about Reach for the Top (#11, #10, #1).
The banquet dinner is more of the same: I’m seated with several delegates and two older business owners who dispense sage advice I no longer remember. There are several speakers, including national news anchor Robin Gill, before the heavily advertised keynote: Kendra Todd, the recent winner of the third season of The Apprentice.
Sitting there at sixteen, at a conference I had applied to, been accepted to, and travelled five hours by bus to attend, listening in person to one of the best-known reality-TV contestants of the moment give us business advice should have felt like a much bigger deal than it did. 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 noted that all of us high school students attending were extremely impressive and then told us to stand up.
It took nearly twenty years—and plenty of later conferences and professional settings—for me to appreciate how unusual that moment actually was. At sixteen, I was sitting in the main convention centre of the country’s financial capital, being singled out simply for having found my way into the room.
For the first time, I had seen what serious ambition actually looked like. I just didn’t know it yet.