When I was a Realtor back in Indiana, I used to ask every new client I met a frank question about whether or not they actually needed my services: "Is a real estate transaction the necessary and correct next step in your life?"
I had gotten the question off a marketing website and liked it, so I used it every time.
Often, after honestly expressing their fears, expectations and long term goals, they realized the answer was no.
The strategy lost me a lot of business, but it gained me self-respect. It made me feel less like a salesman and more like an ally.
When I arrived in San Francisco I fully intended to continue selling real estate for a living. Then something unexpected happened. During my interview with Pacific Union, the market leader in luxury San Francisco real estate, the Managing Broker asked me a question: "Do you passionately believe that selling real estate in San Francisco is the necessary and correct next step in your life?"
Immediately I realized the answer was a resounding no. In order to be an ally to myself I knew there were other things I had come 2000 miles to do.
For the past six weeks I have been on a vision quest, interviewing for several different occupations. Chocolate shop manager. Staff writer at a vineyard. Marketing assistant for an independent record label. Assistant GM for a Tapas restaurant group who is pioneering the way in ecologically sustainable business practices in their industry. And several others.
Now the time has come to make a choice. I have more than one offer. (Every Realtor's dream, right?)
My favorite subject in college was sociology, the study of individuals' behavior within a society. My favorite topic was the question of what specific behavioral qualities separated human beings from the rest of the animals.
I never did hear an irrefutable answer to this question, and I continued to wonder what the answer might be.
I have heard that animals don't lie. But deception is so key to the survival of chameleons that we borrow their name to describe humans who most effectively display the propensity to deceive.
Mark Twain pointed out that "humans are the only animals who blush, or need to." But monkeys blush, too, it turns out. And possibly need to.
The only answer I myself ever came up with is that humans are the only animals that go out of their way to improve on what other members of their species have done in the past and are currently doing.
I've never seen a squirrel attempt to push squirrel culture forward into new realms of accomplishment. Possibly this is due to the lack of adequate documentation of squirrel culture, or the lack of availability of such documentation in squirrel language.
If my very humanity is based on my ability to innovate and alter the future of my species' culture, I suppose I should seek an occupation that affords me that chance.
Out of all the employers I have interviewed with, only one has broached the subject of what new, and uniquely mine, I feel I can bring to the organization. Sadly, the offer that employer made me has the lowest salary of all my options.
Out of a desire to pay bills, I initially rejected that offer. But last night I saw a t-shirt on my way home portraying a grainy photograph of four Cherokee men posing next to a campfire, holding rifles in their hands. Underneath the picture it said, "Homeland Security."
Humans reinvent old behaviors and call them new behaviors.
America was the Cherokee's terrorist. Now bloodshed, manifest destiny and injustice threaten to end America's reign exactly how it began.
We should just admit the record is skipping and play another tune instead of listening to it over and over, grumbling about how awful it sounds.
I already know how it feels to not innovate. What I don't know is how it feels to be asked for new ideas every day by people with sincere interest in putting those ideas to the test.
Yes, there's good money to be made repeating the old behaviors that have never brought me peace. There may be less money today in innovation. But the potential exists there for a different kind of tomorrow.
What would a squirrel do?
