Do Cool Sh*t (9 page)

(C) What are the tangible skills I have that others don’t?

• Do you excel at special computer programs, computer languages, or other creative skills?
  
• Do you speak any languages fluently?
  
• Are you a great photographer?
  
• Are you exceptional creatively?
  
• What do you do best in the opinion of your peers?
  

When you are in an interview, always give the interviewer a vision of tomorrow, the notion that with
your
help, you can take the company to the next level. Giving someone a mental picture of growing the business together (with you in it) and that you will add tangible value to the business beyond just the daily duties, is where the excitement comes from for any employer.

If you don’t have any marketable skills, don’t panic. Start by taking classes! You can take free design and Photoshop classes at the Apple store, you can pretty much get any tutorial now on YouTube.com, and you can also find
so
much information on Google. My close friend Manick went from being an investment banker to learning how to code on his own at a very high level in
less than three months
because he dedicated himself to it day in, day out, for three straight months. Now he is launching one of the smartest companies for music that exists online, Rukkus
.com, a website for music lovers to discover new music and easily find out where the bands are playing. He built the entire back end of his website by himself. Three months of dedication, in the grand scheme of things, is nothing. Fully dedicating yourself to something for only a few months upfront can reap benefits for the rest of your life. By the way, for those of you excited about learning some code—a useful skill for pretty much any entrepreneur these days—you can also attend Codecademy (codecademy.com) to learn various computer programming languages quickly.

Once you figure out what you’re good at, it’s so much easier to ask yourself the next question:

What am I passionate about? What am I
really
good at?

By now you know that you can pick your passion project only within the realm of the things you are
actually
good at. You must pick a passion project utilizing your talents, the things that your most trusted people around you say you’re exceptional at! You can work in the music industry if you really like music, but you may not end up a singer.

Within “What am I passionate about?” answer the following:

(A) What do I like to do for fun?

• Do you like to build things for fun?
  
• Do you like to write for fun?
  
• Do you like to volunteer and work with kids?
  
• Do you like to cook?
  

(B) What’s the last thing I’ve done that I’m proud of?

• Have you helped someone else achieve something?
  
• Have you built something that is important for the community?
  
• Have you supported a group or community through a rough period?
  

(C) Are there any communities, people, places, or issues that I care about supporting?

• Are you passionate about helping your family and friends?
  
• Are you passionate about storytelling?
  
• Are you passionate about human rights?
  
• Are you passionate about women’s issues?
  

After you have identified what you are good at and then what you are passionate about, now it’s time to apply it.

6

WHAT SUCKS IN YOUR WORLD

How to Put Your Passion in Motion

Status quos are made to be broken.

—R
AY
D
AVIS

I
clutched my stomach in pain for what seemed like the third time that week. After a long day of working on set of a Victoria’s Secret commercial (yes, Adriana Lima is that hot), gastro pain was the last thing I wanted to deal with
again
when I got home. This time though, it was worse—a cross between serious bloating and sharp abdominal pain.

Why was this happening? I never had this kind of stomach pain before, but it now seemed to be a constant foe! I simply couldn’t live this way.

What had I been eating? I knew I had been eating crappy, unhealthy, processed food on set of the commercials and I had ordered some creamy dish that night (man, it was good). I recall wolfing it down before speaking to anyone at dinner. I’ve always been a fast eater, since I grew up with an identical twin sister with an identical starvation syndrome (
and
with an older sister who was less than one year older than us). The three of us would race to the kitchen table and play a game of “How much food can I stuff inside myself before I can grab seconds?” It was tough competition. My poor parents were left with scraps.

Now, I really had to do something. There had already been too many times I’d pulled the old “it wasn’t me” line when my stomach was upset. (You know that move, you’ve done it before, don’t pretend.)

As I sat on my couch with a hot water bottle leaning against my belly to soothe it, I opened up my laptop and did what any modern-day human would do: I googled it.

It didn’t take me long to figure out what was bothering my stomach. I self-diagnosed myself as lactose intolerant. In my research, I read that one in five Americans is lactose intolerant and that 80 percent of the world is lactose intolerant to varying degrees. Most humans lack the enzyme to break down lactose, which is present in all dairy products. The symptoms include bloating, stomach pain, and gas. Aha! I figured it out! That was easy.

I then decided I would conduct an experiment: I would not eat dairy for a month and see how I felt. Within a week, the bloating, stomach pain, and gas were gone. (See, Pops? Who needs medical school?) Very quickly though, I began to miss eating a lot of my favorite foods: ice cream, grilled cheese, and most important, pizza. It required every bit of self-restraint not to eat pizza, especially late at night. The scent of slices called to me from every corner of every block of New York City, and I had walk with my head down a lot.

A few weeks into my dairy experiment, I traveled to a small country town in the South of France. And when you’re in France, you
have
to eat cheese. It’s blasphemous if you don’t. So I caved and I ate it—a lot of it (I did bring a whole container of Tums with me just in case), and then braced myself for what was to come . . .

And nothing did. Nothing happened. No bloating, no stomachache, and no pain.

Huh?

Why couldn’t I eat dairy at home but could eat it in the French countryside? I asked the proprietors of the farm-style restaurants about the cheese I had eaten. They told me they made the milk right there in their backyard and made the cheese themselves. Interesting.

The reason my stomach was so happy in France was becoming clear to me. American dairy manufacturers were injecting tons of hormones into the cows so they can produce more milk, giving them antibiotics and feeding them pesticide-filled feed, all of which was affecting the dairy we ate and all of which gave us the stomachaches, bloating, and intolerance.

I started eating organic and humanely treated dairy to see if that would be OK for my stomach, and sure enough, it was! My stomach (also known as my petri dish) was able to stomach this
good
kind of dairy. I wondered if others knew this
before
they swore off their favorite foods, like pizza.

I started dreaming about pizza. I loved it! I loved what pizza stood for. It stood for inclusion of rich, poor, old, and young. It welcomed all ethnicities. It reminded me of my favorite childhood memories, so many random dates and late-night study sessions. Pizza was a true mash-up of cultures, we ate with our hands, and we laughed and cried with a great pizza pie. It was truly amore.

I then started researching to see if there were alternatives available. I didn’t really find anything good. I did find one small hole-in-the-wall place in the East Village, but it didn’t offer organic or local dairy. I discovered that pizza is a $32 billion industry, it accounts for 10 percent of American food service sales, and Americans, on average, eat one hundred
acres
of pizza every single day. Wow.

OK, if
I
gave up on pizza because it made my stomach hurt, and one in five Americans is intolerant to American dairy, so
they
gave up pizza too, it meant that 20 percent of Americans were in the same boat as me. If I missed pizza, then surely some of these 20 percent of the people missed pizza too!

There it was.

I needed to open up my own alternative pizzeria, using fresh, local, and organic ingredients, a place where everyone with any allergy can come and eat a wonderful slice of pizza. Gluten intolerant, dairy intolerant, wheat intolerant, whatever, it didn’t matter, anyone would get to eat delicious pizza!

I daydreamed about having a cozy place where friends could meet. I wanted to work with local farms and serve drinks made locally. I wanted my pizza boxes to be made locally. I wanted to be an advocate for local farmers and businesses. I wanted it to be like that gem of a place I saw in the South of France where they milked their own cows and made their own cheese in their backyard. Although, given the price of real estate in Manhattan, maybe I’d nix the cow part.

This kind of pizza safe haven didn’t exist anywhere in New York City at the time. I did my research. There were hundreds of pizza shops on every corner but nothing like the one that I was imagining.
But
I knew nothing about the restaurant business. I knew nothing about starting a business at all. Luckily, I had some extra time to learn more since I was still working as a freelance producer. In between shoots, I was able to further explore this new project.

There were three different routes I could take to get to my goal.

The first was the philanthropic route. I could become an advocate for local farms and local businesses and help them get off the ground and perhaps also see what they are up to and how they started their businesses.

The second was the intrapreneurial route. This meant that I could try and get a job with an existing pizza company or a restaurant group and try to show them why creating a healthy pizza side to their business would be an interesting opportunity. I could explain to them that Whole Foods was on the rise and that even Walmart was embracing organic produce (which was a clear sign that all of America was headed that way) and that their company needed to do the same. I could basically be an entrepreneur within an existing organization. I could come up with ideas and help the company put my ideas in motion.

The third approach was the entrepreneurial route. This meant that I would just go for it on my own. I would create the entire concept, come up with the systems, the recipes, find the location, hire people, do everything on my own. With no experience, no money, and still with student loan debt, this would be by far the hardest and least safe route to take.

I spent the next week thinking over my three options. I mulled and mulled.

Ultimately, I decided that the philanthropic route was far too safe. I thought about both of my parents, who sacrificed their stable lives in their home countries and took the chance to move to Montreal, Canada, from India and Japan in the 1970s with no family support and just each other. Their own mother tongues were different from each other’s and
still
they went for it. They took the chance
again
and moved to the United States from Montreal, when they were fifty years old so that we (their three girls) could get our green cards before turning twenty-one years old (just in case we wanted to stay in the States). For my parents to start over at fifty in a new country
again
was bold! And the sacrifice was beautiful. I made up my mind. My samurai blood was telling me not to go this safe route. I knew I would eventually be philanthropic but in different ways.

When I thought about the intrapreneurial approach, blood immediately began to rush to my head. I could hear a middle manager immediately saying something like, “No, that’s not going to work,” just so they don’t have to deal with something else to do that might put more work on their desk or require more of their precious time. It brought back memories from my banking days. The thought of working for a company again was simply not something I was prepared to do.

So that left me with entrepreneurship. I was going to go for it. Lone-wolf style.