If I Were 22: Embrace Serendipity So When Change Comes Knocking, You Open the Door

This post is part of a series in which Influencers share lessons from their youth. Read all the stories here.

Looking back from the relative comfort of middle age to my early 20s, I realize now that they were the toughest times of my life.

To start with, I was an English major in college, meaning that I knew the importance of a college education but had no clue what I wanted to do with it.

Like Dustin Hoffman’s character in the movie “The Graduate” (“I’m going into plastics”), I tried to make a joke every time I was asked what my plans were after college. My responses ranged from “I’m going to be an Englishman” to “opening an English store” just to get people to stop annoying me.

Things got worse when, after graduating from Cornell, I was rejected from Columbia’s Journalism School. With few prospects, and feeling increasingly worried, I did what any red-blooded, 21-year-old American male would do in similar circumstances: I ran away.

To be fair, I didn’t really ‘run’ away, but I did move to Washington, D.C. to consider a career in politics. Politics had always been a personal interest of mine and I figured that taking time off would help me reflect on my next steps.

Once in D.C., things began to pick up for me. Since I was becoming more interested in government, I decided to apply to law school, which answered the question of "What am I going to do now?" And I met and started dating a girl who would eventually become my wife. These things helped to ease my troubled mind and started me on a journey that would ultimately move me forward on a path that proved successful for me. So while my sojourn there was brief, I always look back fondly at my time there.

After my post-college hiatus, I returned to my hometown of New York City for law school. Law school was everything you’ve probably heard about (without the fun parts that were referenced in the movie “The Paper Chase”): three years of misery followed by another couple of years practicing as a litigator with a firm in New York.

As a young lawyer, particularly in the litigation field, I found myself fighting with everyone. From clients, adversaries and court employees to the guy who delivered my sandwich, my budding law career was shaping, and not necessarily in a good way, my otherwise non-adversarial personality. My natural inclination was to hope for everyone to make up and be friends. While this might seem like a nice quality to have, it doesn’t bode well for a successful career as a litigator. As I missed another Thanksgiving with my family due to work, and mulled over the possibility that maybe I wasn’t cut out for a law career after all, an opportunity presented itself.

The small travel agency that my dad had used his life savings to purchase was struggling mightily. Now, if my dad had been a dog catcher or a sewer cleaner à la Jackie Gleason’s friend Norton, I probably would still have left my law practice to help him out. But travel was interesting, and I was so desperate for a chance that I decided to leave the legal world and help my dad with his business.

My family initially counseled me against leaving a profession that I was heavily invested in with both time and money, but eventually they supported my decision. The year was 1984, I had just married the girl I had met a few years ago in D.C., and at the age of 27 I had been handed the keys to a travel agency.

We had a handful of employees, few prospects for success, and many giant competitors like American Express and Carlson Wagonlit looming over our tiny travel business. Because of my relative youth, I had naiveté, persistence and fear going for me.

While other, more seasoned professionals might not have taken the leap that I did, I had very little to lose and looked at the change as an opportunity. Interestingly enough, my legal background proved extremely helpful as we competed with our much larger competitors. First off, it helped me to conceive of Lawyers Travel – a corporate travel agency dedicated to servicing lawyers. This niche travel agency would, I hoped, fly under the radar of the bigger travel companies. Secondly, my law firm background helped me to create the Lawyers Travel Service business model that would ultimately make us a success.

The thing about Lawyers at that time was this: they all flew first class, because the client paid the bill! They also shared one other characteristic which made most travel agencies not want them as clients: they changed plans constantly, and booked all their travel at the last-minute.

Many travel agents HATED servicing law firms due to the lawyers’ needs to ticket and reticket and issue and reissue before upcoming trips. But this didn’t deter my fledgling company. We came up with some novel ideas that enabled us to compete for their business: we put travel agents in their offices, rebranded our company as The Lawyers’ Travel Service and also hired and trained travel agents who were smart, unflappable, and able to put up with the fluid demands of law firm travel. We also negotiated special airfare and hotel discounts for lawyers, and slowly our client base of law firms started to grow.

Looking back now to my life at age 22, I never could have imagined where I am today. We are now one of the largest travel management companies in our field, and I continue to marvel at how far we and I have come in getting here.

Luckily, as I made some large changes in my life in my twenties, I could count on support from friends and family. I was the ultimate decision maker, but I was guided to some extent. I know that without some “adult supervision,” things could have turned out differently. So for all of you twentysomethings, like my daughters, who have just entered (or are about to enter) the thrilling, terrifying, and enervating process of trying to figure out what to do with the rest of your life (a.k.a. getting a J-O-B), let me be your guide. Below, I’ve put together a few pieces of advice that might be of help:

Planning Is Overrated. I could never have planned to go from majoring in English to attending law school and finally to running a travel business. Sometimes, you just need to throw lots of different balls in the air, and, although it is super clichéd, just see what hits you. Maybe you have a knack for baking and can come up with the next “cronut”? Maybe you should be working with your hands as a master gardener? Maybe you have the best new idea for a phone app? You never know until you try.

Take a Risk. As Bob Dylan sagely observed, “When you got nothin’, you got nothing to lose.” Now — before you have kids, a spouse, a mortgage, and all the other scary “adult” obligations that cause people to back away from taking appropriate risks — is the time to TRY SOMETHING.

While entrepreneurship is certainly not for everyone, you may want to get a day job that enables you to pursue your personal passions at night (i.e. work at a bank 9-5 so that you can act, paint or sing at night). While it might be difficult financially, if you have an itch to scratch, you should do so before you get another person involved long-term or have children to worry about.

Give Back. It may seem like you need everything (a job, a place to live, direction) right now, but you actually have a lot to give, too. While your professional plans may be fluid, giving back to your community will help you to realize that the world is bigger than just you and your career goals (or lack thereof). And while whether to accept an unpaid internship might seem pressing, seeing that others struggle to fulfill basic needs on a daily basis might give you perspective and help you to loosen up. When you’re opened up to gratitude, possibilities have a funny way of entering your world.

Relax. Getting yourself all worked up, like I made the mistake of doing in my early 20s, can be self-destructive, stultifying and pointless. Most of the time stressing out doesn’t help you cross anything off of the proverbial "to-do" list and in fact makes you feel worse. You think to yourself “Not only do I still not have a job that I like, but now I’m a stressed-out nightmare of a person!” Just relax. Take a walk around your neighborhood. Call up a friend and meet for a drink. You have plenty of time to worry later on in life so try to just enjoy right now. Of course, you should still go after your passion as hard as you can, but you should also allow yourself to take a break at the end of a day and even get a good night’s sleep.

Remember – A for Effort. Sometimes, it’s important to accept that effort in pursuit of a goal is as important as the achievement of that goal. Of course, if you want to get a promotion and don’t end up getting the promotion, you’ll be upset. But think about the qualities you had that caused you to be considered for the promotion in the first place. And remember the presentation you spent a week putting together and the successful three rounds of interviews you had throughout the process? Interviewing well and being able to put together a coherent presentation are skills that shouldn’t be overlooked. Hopefully, with some hard work and a little bit of luck and timing, you’ll achieve all of your professional goals, but in the meantime, working hard on something for the sake of working hard on it shouldn’t be overlooked.

Most importantly, keep in mind you are going to have good days and bad days, many failures and many successes. It is all part of the process of growing up, maturing, and learning. Think about yourself a year ago. Were you in the exact same job, living in the exact same apartment, in the exact same group of friends, dating or not dating the exact same person? Chances are you’ve answered "no" to at least one of these questions.

And if one of these important life variables has changed for you, you probably didn’t see it coming. You looked up one day from your cup of Starbucks coffee, locked eyes with a stranger, went on a great date with them and then started to date them seriously. Or at a birthday party you met someone who, after talking to you for a few hours and Facebooking you, ultimately connected you to a new job.

What’s fun about life is the element of serendipity that’s attached to it. The good and bad things are all surprising in some way so all you can really do is be open to the unknown that’s ahead and position yourself so that when change comes, you’re ready for it.

Photo: Author's Own