Life can sometimes be counterintuitive. The thing you want is not what you need, and the thing you need is the opposite of what you think you want.
When I got out of college with my journalism degree, I thought all the local TV stations would roll out the red carpet and welcome me. My heart was soon broken when every one of them turned me down flat, telling me I lacked experience and maturity.
I was living at home and I remember sitting at my parents’ kitchen table feeling like a complete failure because no one wanted to hire me.
Well, not exactly no one. A radio station that has long since gone bankrupt offered me a chance to read the news on the radio once a week. It was a 12-hour shift from midnight until noon on Sundays.
The deal was, I would read five minutes of the latest headlines and weather at the top of the hour, and the other 55 minutes would be a talk show that was beamed in over a satellite. I desperately needed experience, so I took the job for a few months.
It went fine until one night, the satellite wasn’t working, so we had what is known in radio land as “dead air.” That means if you turned on the radio station between midnight and noon during my shift, on that particular night, you would’ve heard nothing. Static.
When this happened, I tried to call my bosses and co-workers, but not one of them answered the phone. I didn’t know what to do, so believe it or not, I called my mom, who I knew was up late listening for me to read the news at midnight.
I explained that the equipment wasn’t working and I was there all by myself. My mom did what any mom would do when she heard her child upset: She told me it was going to be OK.
She then said, “If none of the equipment works and no one is answering the phone to help you, why don’t you just lock up and come home?”
I told her I couldn’t abandon the ship like that and decided to do something that was way out of my comfort zone and completely unexpected.
I turned the microphone on and explained to the listening audience that the regularly scheduled program was not available because of an equipment malfunction, but I was there and I would talk to them all night on the radio.
For the next few hours, I discussed the news of the day and opened the phone lines to take some calls. Perfect strangers—voices over an invisible phone line—kept me company all night. Together, we got through the crisis.
When my bosses heard about what happened, they were so impressed that they gave me my own talk show once a week.
That show led me to get a full-time job doing the news on the radio, which in turn led to writing for newspapers, getting a gig on television and, eventually, a 41-year career in journalism.
Had I gotten what I wanted right out of college—a job on TV—I would’ve failed. I wasn’t ready.
Turns out, what I thought was the worst thing for me turned out to be the best.
Moral of the story?
When opportunity knocks, it’s often disguised as failure. Answer the door.
