“The difference between average people and achieving people is their perception of and response to failure." --John C. Maxwell.
Opportunity
Before we made our decision to go to California and sell solar panels door to door, my brother and I both felt tied down in our factory jobs that we had been working at ever since they lightened the quarantine restrictions in Salt Lake county. Only making around 13 dollars an hour definitely wasn’t worth the emotional toll that working as an Amazon factory slave entailed.However, what really sold us on going to Los Angeles for the summer was our cousin who came to visit for memorial day. Adam Hill is his name, standing about 5 foot 9 inches tall, weighs 200 pounds of almost sheer muscle, sun-kissed skin, and one heck of a sales pitch. He had made a substantial living for himself doing door-to-door solar sales, and at this time in my life, I didn’t really know what I wanted my career to be.
Hearing what my cousin had to say about door-to-door sales, or sales in general for that matter, excited me. Thoughts of making good money without having to worry about paying for school or how long it takes to get a college degree excited me. Because of this excitement, I decided to venture to California in the middle of a pandemic in order to do something that I truly didn’t understand, and my brother decided to tag along for the ride.
Wake Up Call
Setting up shop in my cousin's home was quite interesting, to say the least. I hadn’t spent a significant amount of time with my brother for almost three years, because we both decided to serve missions for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, but that truly wasn’t a problem. In fact, catching up with my brother was one of the few bright spots of this whole experience.The true variable in the whole equation of success was our living dynamic in general. My cousin and his wife also were helping out some friends of theirs, Ramses and Emma, while they searched for a place of their own. So the living dynamic in my cousin Adams house goes something like this: six young adults, two newly wedded couples, two brothers, all living there for ulterior motives.
After living there for just a mere two weeks, I knew that this whole trip to the foreign land of Los Angeles was a fatal mistake. California was on a much more severe lockdown than Utah ever was, and as for me being a door-to-door salesman, this didn’t help. It gave everyone that I spoke to an easy way to send me away, without even listening to what I had to say. Because of this, and because I just wasn’t very good at selling door to door, I had very little success.
So I began to contemplate leaving and cutting my losses before it gets worse. My brother on the other hand was having a good amount of success but could clearly see that I was shaken by my lack thereof.
Because I wasn’t having success, and because Thomas was concerned for me, we decided to pray for guidance on what our next move should be. We felt strongly that we should cut our losses and head back home for the remainder of the summer.
However, our cousin Adam and his boss Rob offered us twelve thousand dollars each to hack it out for the remainder of the summer. Problem Solved! Rob and his multi-million dollar salary came to save the day! Rob is the spitting image of what I would describe a salesman as being. Confidence almost to the point where he is full of himself, determined and personifies himself as a demigod amongst men. Because of his offer of twelve thousand dollars to two hopeless, lost, and emotionally beaten sales reps, my brother and I decided to ignore our gut and stay.
A Breaking Point
Over the next three weeks, Thomas and I got slightly better at our job and began to have more financial success, but it wasn’t much. We began to feel like the promised twelve thousand dollars that Rob offered us wasn’t actually going to come to fruition if we didn’t improve. However, that wasn't the cause of our ultimate demise.The situation in my cousin's house took a sharp turn for the worse and ultimately was our downfall. Tannehill, my cousin's wife, never really wanted us to be there in the first place. Although she would deny this statement till she was blue in the face, actions speak louder than words, much louder.
Tannehill would verbally offend us at every opportunity she had. There was a palpable tension whenever I was in the same stratosphere as she was, and an obnoxious amount of immaturity only distracted my brother and I. She knew that my brother and I were in a vulnerable place. Trying to find our way in this world without leeching off of our parents is difficult for two young adults with no sense of direction in their lives. Not to mention that our job options were limited because of your inexperience and a worldwide pandemic.
The tipping point for me, and ultimately what served as a catalyst for my departure from this haphazard experiment gone wrong was the dreaded frying pan.
Around 12pm, I decided to prepare the routine lunch that I had been eating for the last couple of months. The lunch consisted of a chickpea pasta that tastes like wet socks, with grilled chicken, mozzarella cheese, and some sort of hot sauce to gag it all down. The reason for eating such monstrosity was the diet that I and my brother were on in order to lose that stubborn belly fat.
Over the course of my preparations for lunch, there was one fatal casualty. It was a Gotham steel 4.5-inch aluminum non-stick single egg frying pan. The handle was a little too close to one of the burners that I was using to prepare my lunch, subsequently burning the plastic that covers the metal handle.
So, after a hard day of knocking on doors, I came home to the personification of what I still see Tahnill as to this day, spoiled. As soon as I had returned from using the bathroom after work, I was alone in the living room with Tahnill, and I knew I was in for a doozy.
Tannehill was rather upset about something, so she asked, "Do you notice anything about the stove, Rowland?” As I glanced over to the stove I had noticed that I had forgotten to clean a bowl that I used to eat my lunch. Because of this, I responded, "I am so sorry for not cleaning my dish" and ran over to clean my bowl.
Something that my brother and I did in order to lighten the tension in the house was clean up all the dirty dishes whether we had used them or not.
This dirty dish wasn't what Tannehill was actually upset about. So the game of reading her mind continued as she asked, “What ELSE do you see?”. I responded, "What's wrong with the stove?" in an attempt to allow her to act her own age.
Instead of telling me what was wrong, she simply pointed to the frying pan. I noticed that the plastic covering to the handle had melted, but the handle itself was completely fine. So, I said, "I am so sorry that this happened to your mini frying pan, I can buy you a new one if you'd like."
The way that Tannehill responded to me next helped me realize that staying there in California was not worth 12 thousand dollars. With a spoiled, almost shouting tone she responded, "PLEASE DO!"
Ultimately, three weeks after we felt like we should have left in the first place, we bit the bullet and left California in our rearview mirror because we were sick of walking on eggshells.
Aftermath
The date is now January 13th, 2021. It has been a little over six months since my brother and I decided to depart from California on what we would consider a necessary failure.After finishing my online classes for the day, my brother asks me, "How was your first day back to school?" I reply, "I'm just grateful that I got back on track after all that happened this past summer, when will you start attending school?". My brother to this point has still not been able to attend a single semester of college due to a lack of funds. With a remarkable hope in his voice, he replied "Next fall, when I am able to afford it."
At this moment I realized that the aftermath of our failed experiment in California had a bigger impact on my brother than it even had on me. With a smirky look on my face and a sigh in my voice, I replied "we really could use that extra 12 thousand dollars right now."
While losing out on that money is one of my greatest failures as a person, what my brother said next has helped me put everything into its proper perspective. He said, "yes we could, but now we know what we want to do with our lives and why school is so important for us, something that I think is worth a whole lot more than 12 thousand dollars."
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