How did you end up in Nashville?

“So Nic, how do you know Charlie?”

What he means is, “how did you end up sitting in front of me?”, which is fair, considering he doesn’t know me, but, has agreed to waste an hour of his morning meeting with me. I’d already explained this to him during our phone call the week before, but, I imagine he’d forgotten within a minute of hanging up the receiver. I re-introduce some quick small talk about our mutual connection which leads to me giving my quick little spiel about being new to the area, but, having experience in his industry. This prompts him to him throw out the next obvious question:

“So, how did you end up in Nashville?”

What he means this time is, “Why? Why did I end up in Nashville?”. For the most part he probably doesn’t care, as this meeting is simply a favor he is doing for the man who referred me to him. However, now that I’m here and I’ve given him a piece of background, he is at least a little curious as to why I ended up in a new town, with no job and few contacts and am now sitting in front of him on this Tuesday morning. But, what is interesting to me is his asking “how?”, not “why?”, this happened.

If you ever cared enough to notice, people will generally ask how something happened, when 9 out of 10 times they are really curious about why something happened. “How” is simply stating the facts, whereas “why” is explaining the reasoning and cause of each of those facts. I guess that, for the most part, “how” is much more simple and cleaner and doesn’t beg for any details. The same way one may ask a co-worker, “how he is doing?” when in fact all he means is “I’m acknowledging you”.

After months of practice, I’ve perfected my “how” story. I can rattle it off with the right hint of ambition and youthful humility so that it sounds plausible, at least to me. The story explains “how I truly love the Commercial Real Estate Industry, how I have always wanted to make Nashville my home and am extremely excited about the growth opportunities the city has to offer”. Whether he believes me or not, whomever I’m speaking with typically tries to nod approvingly as though I’ve followed the obvious course of action. Though in most cases their body language tells me they are actually trying to decide whether they believe me or pity me as some young fool fleeing responsibility. In all fairness, I can’t really blame them for thinking this. That curiosity is logical, considering the back story I’ve provided them. While I haven’t lied, I haven’t told the entire true either. Like I said, I’ve only told them how this happened.

Each time I read this reaction on someone’s face, I get the urge to break the professional conversation code and go off on a tangent about why I’m here. I want to drop the act, lay my cards down and explain my position in ruthless detail. I think the truth, the “why”, makes a lot more sense and believe that a reasonable person would be more likely to understand it than the bullshit riddled story of “how” I got here. Yet, each time I’m on the verge of breaking character, I cower and revert back to my scripted explanation. Divulging why would be a bit much to get into during an interview. However, as I dance through my surface-level overview, I actually have the true story running through my head…

In terms of a career path, I’ve never known what I wanted to do. So as a result, I’ve tended to move along with the herd. At age 23, I was a year out of college and had spent that time in a western ski-town, busing tables and snowboarding while doing my best impression of a carefree ski-bum. I could never fully get into character though, because I knew that lifestyle was temporary; just a quick lay-over before I began the life that 18 years of adolescence and 4 years of college had brainwashed me into thinking was the only normal way to live. I moved to Atlanta for the simple reason that the majority of my friends lived there and they seemed to be having a pretty good time. I had hair down to my mouth and no resume, and was oblivious as to how the “real world” functioned or how one went about finding a job in such a place. At that time, jobs that I would literally dream about seemed unattainable or imaginary, or simply not for me. It appeared that every responsible person’s path led through a cubicle between 9-5, Monday through Friday and so with little thought put into it, I joined the rank and file of the real world.

For several years I lived like a lot of people in the their mid-20s, binge drinking my way through the weekends while tolerating the job I was required to show up at during the week. As it turned out, the “real world” felt a lot like college life. Work was basically a long class with a strict attendance policy. Nearly everything in my life still took a backseat to my social agenda. Going out on Thursday nights felt mandatory and I squeezed every drop out of the weekends, culminating in the late afternoon of Sunday-Funday. This schedule all but assured nothing productive was achieved on Friday or Monday and in a sense, shortened the actual work week to three days.

Life continued like that for as long as it naturally could until, after a couple of years, certain responsibilities became unavoidable. All around me, friends began to slowly morph into real adults and, naturally, adult type things started happening. People began to take pride in their work, or rather, they found something they cared to take pride in. Careers began to develop, and with those careers came responsibilities that took precedent over happy hour and required a level head more than three days a week.

After spending a few years slinging mortgages while also witnessing the prelude to the sub-prime crisis from the inside out, I’d begun working in commercial real estate and had a little over a year under my belt. I found the industry had a lot of positive qualities. It was very entrepreneurial, very social and it involved a lot of running around. Whether you were going to look at property or meeting someone for lunch, there was always something to do and someone to bullshit with or even better, you could always pretend you were doing one of those things. This lack of structure was one of the main things that appealed to me in the first place. I had started as an intern at a large firm while I was getting my MBA in the evenings. The very nature of the business provided a very flexible schedule and made it much easier to keep a few extra balls in the air. I could literally go two weeks and not see the guy who sat across me. No one kept a normal schedule and thus no one ever questioned yours. For an intern with a limited amount of actual “deliverables” it was perfect.

But as time wore on, I began to realize that one drawback of real estate is that it ties you to a particular city like few other industries can. Once you have fought through the harsh, low-paying, cold-calling years in order to somewhat establish yourself, the last thing you’d want to do is move somewhere else and start over. And despite my slacking, I was, by default, slowly establishing myself with each passing month. Gaining a decent foothold in the local market creates a great deal of inertia against ever leaving a city. That force would continue to grow stronger each day until I reached a point where leaving was not only foolish, but completely out of the question. I certainly wasn’t there yet, but I began to realize I was closer than I thought and it scared me. It scared me because reaching that point with that career meant leaving wasn’t a viable option, and that meant staying in Atlanta, which in turn meant settling down and making it my home. I never intended to call Atlanta my permanent home, but to be fair, I wasn’t ready to think of anywhere as my permanent home and that’s what made the situation surprising complex. Deciding to continue with my current job meant choosing my path for the foreseeable future. The problem was that I still thought of myself as young, and when you are young there is a feeling of freedom that comes with the knowledge that you can move anywhere and do anything. Most of all, when you are young, that edge of adulthood is still out on the very distant horizon. That edge is the point that everyone eventually falls off when they become real adults and move on to the next stages of life. All around me I saw friends dropping off due to marriage, kids, a great job, or all three. That was what they wanted and I was happy for them. However, at that time in my life, that edge scared the shit out of me.

My girlfriend was the one who suggested a move in the first place. For her, Atlanta had run its course and she was ready to move back to her home town and suggested we make the move together. I knew that meant finding a new job in a new town in which I had very few contacts. I also knew it would be starting over and possibly facing a new edge, only set on a different backdrop, but I didn’t care. I knew that if I didn’t leave now, I probably never would. Staying felt like a form of surrender. Surrendering a portion of my youth prematurely in favor of a predictable life that was laid out in front of me. I wanted to believe that I still had gas left in the tank and new adventures ahead of me. In my mind, staying meant that this simply wasn’t true.

Despite how much sense this all made in my head, it was still a difficult concept to put into action. It was a huge decision and fortunately I was able to appreciate just how big it was. All of our lives are determined by thousands upon thousands of incremental decisions. And while most are not too consequential, each decision is essentially another link in the chain all the same. It’s easy to get caught up in our daily, weekly and monthly routine and lose sight of how all these decisions are slowly directing our lives one step at a time. And still, there are rare occasions when a major decision comes along whose outcome forever changes the direction your life is heading.

When I was 18, I chose not to play baseball in college. That was probably the biggest decision I have ever made in my life, yet, at the time I had little understanding as to its consequences and how my path would fork from that point forward. Had I chosen to play, my options would have been limited to a small college relatively close to my home town. I loved baseball more than anything else I knew at that point in my life, however, I also envisioned going off and experiencing college on a large-scale. At the time, I weighed the decision between scratching out four more years of playing or heading off to a big unknown school. I say I weighed the decision, but, not in the manner that it deserved. Not to sound too dramatic, but, my road split at that point and the path I chose eventually shaped 95% of the rest of my life.

Of course, I didn’t understand all that at the time. I couldn’t, I was 18. At that age you don’t understand the world enough to comprehend that concept. Even if someone had laid a blue print out in front of me and explained the consequences of my decision, it still would not have resonated. I saw it as just picking a school. I’d go off, have fun, meet new people, but would still have all my friends from back home and would still exist and in that world. Little did I know that leaving for a school far away at 18 would essentially be the beginning of the end of that life back home. It wouldn’t happen over night, but slowly the old connections would grow weaker while new bonds grew stronger and the pull to return home would lessen year by year. To this day, it is still the decision I find myself thinking about the most. Never regretting, but, wondering what would have happened and where I would be had I chosen the other path. I was too ignorant at the time to understand how foolish it was to give up baseball, something I was good at and loved to do, which I would go on to learn is an extreme rarity in life. However, had I not walked away from it, I wouldn’t know the majority of people I consider close to me. It’s a decision I’ve never forgiven myself for, but, at the same time owe everything in my life to.

Now, ten years later, I was facing another decision similar in magnitude to the one I’d made a decade earlier. I’d had time to think about it and what I couldn’t understand ten years ago was obvious to me now: the direction of the rest of my life was going to be determined by this decision. If I left, I knew there was a chance I would regret leaving. However, if I stayed in Atlanta, I was certain that I would always regret not leaving. I tried to convince myself that there was a middle ground, that I could go and if it didn’t work out, we could always come back, but, while that was true, I knew that it wasn’t completely accurate. That would mean that the attempted adventure had failed and that seemed like the worst outcome of all. When I was being truly honest with myself, I knew that I had to remove the safety nets. I was either staying or going, period. Staying would mean being with my friends for many years to come, but, it also meant heading down a fairly predictable path. Like I said, staying felt like surrendering. It meant that the adventures were over and that’s the thought I could never get out of my head. I had to see what might still be out there.

Those are all the things I want to say, but of course, I don’t. All of that would be a bit much to lay on a stranger on a Tuesday morning. Instead, I do my best to seem responsible and hope that he bought into the half-truths I’ve just told him.

“Well, Nic, I applaud the decision you’ve made to come to Nashville. I think you will find everything you are looking for. I don’t believe that I can help you out right now, but, why don’t we stay in touch over the next few months and I’ll keep my eye our for something”, he says with a grin.

Now its my turn to be lied to, or at least wonder whether I’m being lied to. I can’t really blame him. What else is he supposed to say?

“Sounds good to me. Thank you very much for taking the time to meet with me this morning. I really appreciate it”, I say as if this was the most exciting fucking thing I’d ever had to say.

He walks me to the door and we shake hands yet again, reaffirming our agreement to stay in touch. I walk out to my car well aware that I still don’t have a job. It is a little bit scary and little bit depressing, although it is new. It’s not mountain climbing or white water rafting, but in a way, it is a new adventure. And for better or worse, it’s what I asked for.