"Joe Nevin, the inaugural good-Samaritan extraordinaire - helping kids in 27 countries around the world, including here in Australia become self sufficient and independent so they can stand on their own two feet - just like you and I!"*
Give me a picture; standing tall and proud on a plateau, clad in Victorian explorer attire in a dry arizonian environment with a plethora of young African children staring religiously toward me. Now add in the desert hues of orange, dirt red and the nihilistically clad children. Staring off into the distance; with a determined and hard-edged look, a look that screams "I'm going to find uncharted territory and assimilate these natives to my own culture".
I was going to continue and create an entire farce about the salesperson industry, and how salespeople will manipulate and distort facts just for quite a bit of cash. For those thinking it, I know, wordplay and dispensing entertaining half-truths are two traits I modestly possess. But then I thought against it. Despite the fact that I was like a mosquito on a hot summers day to the everyday civilians in transit boarding trains, I believe that some good might have actually come from it.
Before we even start this deconstruction of my most interesting month, I'd like to warm things up by reminding everyone what a hustler is from the most credible Urban Dictionary:
| | "People who are forced to use their Brains to make it in this world... Also they can be so sly that they can sell you stuff you don't need". | |
Now the lightbulbs start shining and many of you will recall an unfortunate day in transit to/from a regular train station where there was this well dressed, slightly over-confident, over-exhuberant person trying to catch your attention and berate you with facts about some society or charity. I was one of them.
Let's face it, I was the biggest hustler. I hustled harder than Jay-Z back in his dope business, harder than those guys with window wipers and buckets filled with soapy water that stop in front of your stationary car on a busy highway to meticulously clean your car window. You call out your futile attempts of refusal and yet they still continue, plowing away with the assumption that their efforts will earn them a gold coin or two. Course, I wasn't very good at it, despite my overconfidence, but take note of the part of the definition written in bold.
I guess that gratifies myself as a true hustler: persistence. It's such an important concept it's incorporated into my then-company's own logo: Pride, Persistance (sic), Passion (which is just like being persistent, but the only thing your passionate about is scoring that last sale to hit your goals).
But point in case, I managed to garner the interests of strangers by asking obnoxiously annoying questions and or acts of attention; like the time my co-worker and I decided to re-enact a scene out of Enter the Dragon in the middle of Edgecliff Station on Wednesday noon. It's safe to say that Peter Chi has no shame. I'm straying from my point again: point is, despite all our efforts to annoy, sell and harass people, there were still those kind souls to stopped, listened and considered our very limited proposals about children and the Red Cross. Even fewer were those who stopped, listened, laughed at out attempts to build rapport and decided to give a portion of their income for the next two years to help out disadvantaged kids across third world countries.
That's proof of God's own mysterious ways.
