About 25 years ago, I was an intern at a Finnish-owned company in Canada, and got to tag along my (Finnish) boss on a trip to the cottage country in northern Ontario. I got to tag along because I was a fellow Finn and almost a part of his family having spent the entire summer under his roof.
He thought it was just a casual gathering, a meet-up with some friends and acquaintances, but then again, he had only been doing business in Canada for less than a year.
I remember two things from that trip. One, I was shocked to see that the host had a satellite dish and a dish washer (no pun intended) at his cottage. No Finnish cottage I had ever seen had such appliances, and Finns used to take pride in that, too. “We don’t need no stinking washing machine, we have great-grandmother’s perfectly good washboard,” was the attitude.
And second, at one point, the talk at the dinner table turned to business, and my boss explained that he owned a company that made hockey pants and sweaters.
“Interesting,” said one of the guests, a lawyer of a famous Canadian junior team. “Do you have a card?”
My boss, being a Finn going to a cottage had probably been considering mostly whether to take his shirt off as soon as he got out of the car or whether to wait until after dinner and no, he did not have a business card with him.
“Oh, I’m sorry, I don’t have any cards with me,” he told the lawyer.
“What? Aren’t you proud of your business?”
My boss told the lawyer he sure was proud of the company, but from that day on, he never left home without his business cards.
There’s a lot to be said about America but you can’t take away their entrepreneurial spirit. Every time I get back to the US (and Canada), I get inspired by it.
I see a skinny man walking around the streets of New York yelling, “ice cold water, one dollar, ice cold water”, and I tip my hat to him and start wondering how I could get that awesome gig. Of course, I also realize that I don’t really want that gig because chances are he’s still in New York selling ice cold water to tourists, just like he was three years ago, while I’m in an air conditioned Starbucks in Oklahoma City, blogging. (Let’s not get into the debate on whose work is more useful to the society).
A lot of it is in my head of course, how else would two middle aged men having lunch in a Greenwich Village coffee shop inspire me to also want to have lunch and talk shop in the Village?
It’s the talk shop part that’s in my head.
America is pushing me forward everywhere I look. The caves in Missouri aren’t just caves, they’re “fantastic caverns,” the gift shop by the side of the road is “the world’s largest gift store” that’s “famous for clean restrooms”. Starbucks’s smallest coffee is “tall”. The Springfield burgers are “world champion burgers”, and the Illinois lawyer promises to get tough: “You call, I hammer”. A sign outside a community college says, “Be happy. Be bright. Be you”, and a note on a Brooklyn construction site simply tells people to “be mighty”.
Everything is bigger and better – huger – than anything you’ve ever seen.
In this Oklahoma City Starbucks, there are at least two business meetings taking place around me. In Brooklyn’s Black Star coffee shop, the people at the next table were about to launch the greatest music teachers’ website in the history of the mankind.
“They asked me who my competition was, and I showed them this,” she told him, and they both laughed. Somebody was in trouble.
Everybody’s selling something, everybody’s on the move, everybody’s working on an important project, and everybody’s got a niche. I like that, because it doesn’t come naturally to me.
I’ll try to take this inspiration with me back home. Instead of calling myself a “self-made writer”, I’ll take it one step further. I’ll call myself “a one-time almost award-winning writer” – and I’ll start to carry business cards with me.
Baby steps, you know.