EPTMillennia have carved each portion of this planet into something unique whether geographical or cultural. It is all seamless. We are all human. No matter how hard we try to justify our differences, it will never be feasible to distance ourselves completely from another. Many people make excuses to isolate their culture from others, but we all have something in common. I’ve been passionate about our common bonds as people and have found that “networking” shouldn’t be a learned skill but rather an essential component of living. I’ve been fortunate enough to have previously traveled a bit and lived in Seoul, South Korea. Part of that fortune was a changed mind about cultures and I’ve been compelled to share it since.
Back in February, I was working at a creative digital advertising agency in Irvine, California. At digital agencies you work on amazing projects for big clients and form ideas from scratch. You wear what you want. You are trusted with responsibility, matters of performance and you are credited for artistic ingenuity, business savvy, and aggression at the ping-pong table. It is all things slick with promise of long-term benefit and status. However, completely out of the blue, a high school friend of mine contacted me and proposed I leave the agency, on a whim, to travel Earth and tell people’s untold stories.
What?
It hit me like a ton of bricks. Yeah, with a month or even a couple weeks of deliberation, the decision might come more easily. Sunday, February 3rd, 2013 was the Super Bowl, but for me, it was an ultimatum. By midnight I had to decide whether or not to quit my great job with a single week’s notice, still work 40 hours, cancel utilities, forward my address, find a place to store my car, drop a bomb on my roommate, pack my whole apartment into storage and sign up for 150+ hours in planes …in 5 days. The results came in: that week removed my behind and dropkicked it repeatedly, Nonetheless, with the help of my family and friends, I was then on a 16-hour flight to Dubai with the next 3.5 months of my life on a plan to see 12 countries (10 of which were new to me) across 6 continents. I would meet people with inspiring stories who were changing the game in their cities. The daily journey and behind the scenes were up to me; I was now the social media manager for an international travel show sponsored by Google.
Yes, we have an app for everything, we can drag up to refresh, and most importantly: follow one another. Even so, there is much we’re missing out on. Social media has flooded our mental cache with fleeting tidbits but seldom does it spur us into action, emotion or personal experience. Instead of a reality where everyone talks at each other, who tells good stories anymore? Now that even my mom has a Samsung Galaxy S3 and posts pictures to Instagram, things have changed. There is value in followership and value in producing content from scratch. Who will go off the beaten path to not only have fun with their own life but make a legion of people die to come along on the journey? This was my new job description, and I ran with it. 10 countries later, 90 videos shot and edited myself, and 100,000+ aggregate followers gained across channels, I finally reached a place of feeling some solace about my value in this position.
Well, remember how I said things got even crazier? Along the way, I saw a post about “The Best Jobs in the World” for Tourism Australia. One of them was a social media management position they were calling the “Chief Funster”. $100,000 worth of salary + expenses, going to festivals and tourism events full-time and telling the stories was a vacant? I laughed out loud as I couldn’t believe something might be even cooler than what I was already doing. The application was to make a 30-second video, that’s it. I still have no idea what’s next after this TV show and decided, “why not,” and made a quick video. I threw my hat into the ring. I thought I’d have decent chances, but after the deadline, news stories began coming out that over 600,000 people applied for these 6 jobs. Immediately dropped my chances out of the window and made it a distant possibility in my mind.
To my disbelief, I got an email last week congratulating me for making the top 25 for Chief Funster. I couldn’t believe it. As excited as I was and as fun as I should feel, I began to feel very serious. What followed is where I’m currently at––and it’s hard… It’s really hard. It’s not about me anymore, but it’s about whether or not people believe in me. This part of the race for the job requires each of the candidates to find people that believe they’re the right person for this spot and get them to vocalize it. One part is finding high profile advocacy, the other is advocacy from the public.
We all have a certain amount of credit to spend with our relationships. Once it’s spent, it can become difficult to ask for help from those people ever again. I knew once I said yes, I would have to spend that credit, potentially not having any left if I lost this race. I’ve turned to family, friends, and the people I’ve known the longest and I can only ask for their help. This is a reason why I turn to TeamLiquid, who I’ve been with for a while. This dream will escape if I don’t try, and I think that would be harder to live with than failure, so I’m all in. I’m not old enough to be wise, but I think this is what life is all about.
If you’ve gotten this far in this blog, all I could ask is for you to consider letting Tourism Australia know someone believes I’m right for this job. Personally, I really do think I’m right and hopefully you can see that in my delivery. I’d love for this to be a victory for not only myself, but for everybody that’s invested in me. In every waking moment I have outside of making this travel show a success, I’m pushing to be New South Wales’ next social media man, even if that means making fun of myself, coming up with content in airports and editing for 10 hours on flights where everyone else is asleep. I don’t have the luxury of free-time like many other candidates do, but I’m sure as hell going to keep up (as I write from a moving bus in Argentina streaming data from my phone on roaming). Please consider me for the job. I won’t let anyone down if I get it.
Cheers.
EDIT: Just took this video yesterday
