A common response we often receive when we tell strangers about our project is that it sounds like we are a band on tour. And you know what? Sometimes we do feel like some badass rock stars. But we are more like HBO’s show Entourage.

Yesterday was one of those episode like days.

We started off the day by conducting an interview with Dr. Helene Gayle, the first woman and the first African American to oversee the world’s leading humanitarian organization. Not so rock star like, but cool nonetheless.

Our original plan was to shoot some skeet in the south at eleven, but we found out they didn’t open until one. So it was time to improvise.

Now if you watch the Entourage show, picture E. E is the guy that makes stuff happen. He is the details guy. I am E.

I picked up the phone and starting dialing cool spots in Atlanta to fill up our open 11-1 time slot. The victor of the flurry of cold calls went to the Georgia Aquarium, the largest aquarium in the world. Within a half hour we were interviewing the director of communications in front of four whale sharks.

After cruising around the aquarium for a hour, where I even got to pet a shark, we headed to Fatt Matt’s for a lunch with our Atlanta liaison. The waitress, who had much more southern hospitality than teeth, served up a great pulled pork sandwich and lemonade.

Then it was off to shoot guns. And there’s something to be said about shooting skeet in the south. When we pulled the RV into Fulton County’s Skeet and Trap Shooting Range, it was a scene unlike any other. The scene resembled that of a golf range. At least to a city boy from California.

The collection of shooters appeared to have just gotten off of work, and had gone to the range to practice their favorite hobby. They unveiled guns from its cases like a golfer would a driver. They chatted amongst themselves about the latest skeet news while Zach, Noah, and I received an ongoing tutorial about how to shoot a rifle.

At the end of the day, Zach had hit 16 targets in a round of trap. Noah hit 16 targets in skeet. And I hit 3. “You were a lil’ stiff,” my girlfriend, who flew out from Phoenix to join us in ATL, explained to me of my meager performance.

The sun was slowly setting as we transitioned from backroads to highway, country to city. We stopped at 950 Peachtree, a bar of which I don’t remember the name of, and had an interview with Nika, a chef who quickly turned into one of the favorites on the trip.
Noah has always teased me about the rigorous corporate scheduling I’ve inadvertently adopted, scheduling interviews as early as 8:30am and no later than 6pm. But over beers at 9:30pm, we found out we could conduct interviews in bars.

The night ended by grabbing fast food and unexpectedly crashing the couch, again, at the house belonging to a girl we met upon arrival in Atlanta.

The hospitality of hosts hasn’t been limited to south. The welcoming warmth we’ve been greeted with across the country is the number one surprise I’ve had with this whole project.

I remember when Jay and I were planning the tour in June. Posted on our wall we had a typed list of cities where we needed a couch to crash. Each city represented the illustrious mystery of where we would stay. Jay spent hours on couchsurfing.com looking to make web friends, while I furiously sent emails to friends and family to let them know we were looking to find a house to shower at in Atlanta. Or Portland. Maybe Toledo, but more than likely, Buffalo.

Since that month of June, we have had an adventurous journey of finding generous souls that have opened up their homes. We stayed with my stepdad’s great aunt in Seattle. As I write this, I’m sitting on my girlfriend’s brother’s couch in Dawsonville, Georgia. An interviewee in Akron took us in for a night. I think we’ve met every member of Jay’s family. Even Mark’s Auto Service Center in Central Square, New York served us lunch and gave us a hefty discount on our RV repairs after we slept in their parking lot the previous night.

The title of this blog is called the journey. We have one more month of not knowing where we are going to stay. Wednesday we’ll be in Nashville. We have no definite place to stay as of now, a couple things in the works, like Zach’s friend’s ex-girlfriend’s friend, but no solid place to stay. No idea where we are staying in St. Louis, or Memphis, or New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Houston, Austin, or El Paso.

But you know what? I’m not worried.

Cheers to the journey, and if you know anyone in the cities we have remaining, tell them four scruffy journeyman are pursuing their passion and need a shower.

We were on the west coast for a month, going through places like California and Yellowstone National Park. We spent a long month in the Midwest, visiting Mount Rushmore and Chicago. Another month on the east coast was spent taking in New York City and Washington D.C.

It wasn’t right that we were going to only spend two weeks in the south, so we added two more weeks to make it even. One month in every region of the United States.

We will be spending a little extra time in Atlanta (which we are going to today), Nashville, and Texas while visiting cities not included on the original tour schedule, like Jena, Louisville, and St. Louis. This will put us back in Tucson, Arizona on Halloween, which is symbolically, Homecoming weekend at the University of Arizona campus.

For a complete listing of the new tour schedule, please click here.

Check out this example of how one blind email has helped us find people to interview for the Pursue the Passion tour.

In January of 2006 I sent a Chicagoan entrepreneur by the name of Barry Moltz an email to see if he’d be interested in being interviewed on our 2006 tour. He wrote me back saying he could do a little more.

Besides building our original website and flying us out to Chicago in 2006, Barry sent an email out to his network of 10,000 people to find additional people to interview. From that email, we ended up interviewing Troy Henikoff, Mary Jane Grinstead, Anna Belyaev, Lynn Hazan, Rachel Begelman, Deb Morrin, Irv Segal, Mardi and Denny Moore, Cindy Banks, Mark Conway, Adrian Russell-Falla, Oksana Kolesnikova, Misha Segal, Jason Pettus, Jan Buckner Walker, Jake Sasseville, Lisa Canning, Jesus Delgado Jenkins, Tim Stevens, and a few others.

Then there are other people Barry referred us to that provided us with additional connections and opportunities.

Monica Rohleder, a 2006 PTP interview, referred us to Rayne Martin and Jen Hankee to interview. She also provided us with a connection at Helio, who sponsored our tour with three cell phones and service for the 2007 tour.

Melissa Giovagnoli, a 2006 PTP interview, introduced me to literary agent Jon Malysiak, who lit a fire under my ass to get going on a book.

Ann Meyer quoted me in the Chicago Tribune and referred us to Daniel & Jim, co-founders of Urban Initiatives for a 2007 interview.

Michelle True ended up writing us a poem about passion, which I’m thinking about using as an intro for my book.

Laura Allen referred us to Noah Kagan, who referred us to a few other stellar entrepreneurs around America.

Phoenix Rowel, a 2006 interview, invited us to hear Tom speak to the Sheridan Correctional Facility this year, which was one of most memorable, meaningful experiences this summer. Tom turned out to be one of our interesting interviews after we saw him speak to a hundred inmates. He also referred us to a couple documentarians to help with our documentary.

JoAnne Pavin took us out for golf last year, gave every PTP member a massage this year, and wants to eventually host a golf outing for PTP next year. She’s kinda amazing.

I didn’t write this to boast about how many connections I have made through PTP, or to brag about some of the experiences we’ve been fortunate enough to be a part of. I wrote this because I wanted to show how one blind email opened up a world of opportunity. I wanted to show that loose ties are the ones that can really count. And I wanted to encourage you to start creating a network of people that you can call upon to make things happen, and so you can make things happen for them.

As I write this, I am sitting on a couch with four girls at the University of Delaware. The RV is parked outside in their driveway, sticking out ever so slightly in the street and edging up against the gutter of Klondike Kate’s, the restaurant in which we just devoured three orders of nachos with five other female students.

Life is good.

We spoke to an entrepreneurship class of fifty-five students tonight. Considering that we wrote most of the presentation at 2am in a bar last night in Philadelphia with two professional hula hoopers, it could not have gone better.

Walking towards Alfred Lerner Hall with Jay and Zach, about to deliver our unrehearsed, soon to be improvised “speech,” I asked the guys what moment they were more scared of. Was it this moment, just minutes before facing a room full of our peers to see what the response was to a project we’d devoted the last three months to? Or was it when we were about to enter the Sheridan Correctional Facility to sit amongst a hundred prisoners and listen to an AA motivational speaker.

The unanimous answer was this moment.

Inside the classroom we had some technical difficulties that delayed our presentation ten minutes, nearly forcing us to deliver our message without the aid of pretty pictures on powerpoint. We finally prevailed and opened by showing our introductory video, which can be seen below.

As we got into the core of our story, we all became more confident in what we said. It was the first time we had shared it in a public setting. And it felt good. Jay shared stories about Class Project, living on my couch for two months, and group dynamics. Noah talked about how funny it was that a Spanish linguistics and creative writing major was standing in front of a business class, sharing entrepreneurial lessons gleaned from the road. Zach’s naturally beautiful voice put the class at ease as he talked about how the students sitting before us should take advantage of every opportunity in school. I just tried to speak from the heart.

An hour and thirty minutes later we had students in the RV signing our ceiling and talking to us about how energizing it was to have four guys their age talking about issues on their mind. Questions that had not been shared in class came pouring out as we talked with students one on one. All the fears that we had going into the class, and even at the conclusion of the presentation, were relieved after seeing the jubilant reaction of the students.

The fifteen minute break the professor allotted the students to come chill with us came and went, students scurried back to their class, and we left with Noah’s long lost cousin and her two friends.

It was a good thing we were a part of last night, and I’m down to do it again.

As I write this, the PTP team is around the breakfast table at Zach’s great aunt Norma’s house in Cherry Hills, New Jersey, compiling a last minute powerpoint for our first speaking presentation tonight. We will be talking to an entrepreneurship class of 55 at the University of Delaware for an hour and fifteen minutes.

As the tattoo on Noah’s left bicep reads, it should be a “spectacular disaster.” More on how it went tomorrow.

In other news, we arrived in Philly yesterday and promptly ate cheesesteaks at Tony Luc’s after interviewing a couple bad ass young guys. That night we had drinks with a pair of professional hula-hoopers. After the most ridiculous hula hooping session, they gave us their hula hoop, much like a samari passes down a sword to his protege.

The hula hoop is currently rolling around the back of the RV, and we’re debating on whether or not to bring it out for the presentation tonight.

Hopefully the hula hooping skills have no reflection on how our spectular disaster of a presentation will go.

Wish us luck.

Ten thousand, five hundred and twenty-two miles after leaving Phoenix, Arizona on July 2nd, we arrived in New York City on 9/11. The surreal experience we had at Ground Zero, coupled with the journey from Chicago to the Big Apple have made the past two weeks among the most memorable on the tour.

The Highlights

On Thursday, August 30th, PTP went to jail…voluntarily. Driving from Chicago to a small town called Sheridan, three of us marched into the penitentiary chapel and joined a hundred inmates adorned in prison blues to be a part of an AA meeting. We interviewed the speaker afterwards over milkshakes. It was a humbling experience.

The first Saturday of September put PTP in the Notre Dame press box to watch the worst home opening loss in Fighting Irish football history. We picked grass blades from the field, took pictures with the Leprechaun, and attended the Charlie Weis post-game press conference.

In Akron we stayed with a guy named Stephen Hopson. Born deaf, Stephen has gone on to make motivational speaking his professional career after an illustrious career on Wall Street. His story shows what confidence can do.

The RV had it’s first major mechanical problem on the trek from Buffalo to Syracuse…we ended up sleeping at an auto service center parking lot in the middle of nowhere New York. We got the problem fixed the next day, and ended up turning a lemon into lemonade by interviewing the owner and barbequing with the mechanics.

After fixing the RV we escaped to Cape Cod for the weekend to stay at a beach house. It was beautiful. We ended up being treated to our first lobster dinner of our life. Hardly roughing it on the road.

We are now in my favorite city on earth, New York City. This morning we shook hands with Al Roker of the Today Show and even got some air time. We’ll be here until Tuesday morning, interviewing passionate New Yorkers and taking in the sights. Then it’s off to Philly, D.C., and Atlanta.

Cheers to the journey.

I was talking with Joe Cockrell, director of PR for Jobing.com, yesterday in New York City as we walked around Ground Zero looking for Big Al’s Pizza. Given the circumstances of the day, the mood of the city was as somber as the gray, overcast skies looming above.

As we detoured around the closed off streets of the financial district, Joe shared a thought he had conjured in a leadership class. It’s a simple, scary thought for all of us, but one that will come to define us all.

We will one day have a headstone that includes the year of birth, the year of death, and one big, fat dash. This dash says nothing and everything about us all at once.

I saw lots of dashes yesterday as our crew visited Ground Zero. Pictures of fallen firefighters were everywhere. Roses rested beneath names circled by families who had made the pilgrimage to pay last respect. 2,976 names and faces…2,976 dashes.

The dash is forgiving because it does not discriminate. A person barely living life will have the same dash as the person who has lived every moment to the fullest.

But look deeper, and you’ll see that the dash is there as a reminder to us. It is a reminder that although the dash will be unable to define us on the headstone, it defines us as we live on.

Which leads me to the question…what are we doing between the dash?

by Noah Pollock
noah@pursuethepassion.com

A nickname can be a beautiful, or truly awful thing. Some are lucky enough to have a name conducive to an automatic nickname. Daniel Weber has been D-Web since the day he was born. Other appellations intend to offer a constant reminder of some joke among friends, then spreading to people completely uninvolved with the original joke. So was the case with my middle school/high school moniker Rat. In this, the long tradition of applied sobriquet, I offer for your approval Zach “Puppy” Hubbell.

What began as a cynic’s condescension of youthful exuberance, the Puppy has become so much more. The greatest nicknames spring from humble beginnings as the new owner grows into the name, like bougainvillea slowly occupying the seemingly uninhabitable face of a brick wall. Zach Hubbell, arguably the kindest, gentlest soul this world has ever known, has become the Puppy, for the reasons listed below and almost certainly more that we have yet to discover.

Youthful Exuberance: Constantly excitable, the Puppy has a seemingly endless reserve of earnest interest in everything. Furthermore, this excitement cannot be hidden behind a veneer of apathetic adulthood. At 25, the Puppy still giggles like a schoolgirl at the thought of a hike, fun night out, or a delicious meal.

Voracious Appetite: If not told to stop, the Puppy would eat the plate on which his meals are served. I once saw him eat an entire set of patio furniture with little regard for the impending stomachache caused by the consumption of large quantities of metal. The Puppy loves food, much like, well, a puppy, while constantly maintaining the svelte-ness of a 2-month old Golden Retriever.

Run, Puppy, Run: Upon arrival in every city, the Puppy rips off his shirt and starts running. To where he runs we have little idea, knowing only that he gets lost nearly every time. But this Puppy, with the aide of opposable thumbs, always calls home for directions. Dripping with sweat, he wanders back into whomever’s home we are currently occupying and rhetorically asks permission to use the shower.

Crate Training: As the fourth member of the group, the Puppy sleeps on a bench. He recently discovered the hallway of the RV as a more spacious sleeping area. He had neither blanket nor pillow for the first 2 months of the trip, having been finally bestowed both by Christian Eichenlaub of the Humane Society of Minneapolis. The following is a partial list of sleeping environments utilized by the Puppy: face down on top of the RV, face down on a 38th story Chicago balcony, carpets in nine states, off the edge of a California king-size bed, a basement in Buffalo, somewhere in Vegas, many couches and a hammock. The Puppy recently said that he naturally analyzes the depth of carpets in every home he now enters, judging whether or not they would be suitable to sleep on.

At this moment, we sit in a beautiful beach house in Cape Cod. Some of us work. The Puppy is out chasing the Frisbee.

Good nickname?

Going to the mechanic is like going to the dentist. Or paying taxes. It’s just something you don’t want to do, but have to.

So yesterday when our serpentine belt snapped and we had to make an emergency pit stop at Mark’s Service Center in a small town called Central Square, NY, I was dreading it. Especially when we had to sleep in the parking lot so we could be the first customer in the shop…with outside hopes of being the first one out.

At 8am the RV was moved from parking spot to parking garage. A mechanic looked at the engine, made a judgment, and called in for a part. The diagnosis was that we would be there for awhile. A long while.

I called to cancel the lunch I had planned with an entrepreneur named Sean, and then cancelled the campus event at Syracuse University. The day was blocked off to getting this problem resolved.

What transpired during the remainder of the day was a true bonding between mechanics and PTP. We hung out with these guys, remembered their names, even made their weekly college football picks. They barbequed and fed us delicious pork chops and mechanic salad. They opened up their break room allowed us to use it as our home office. Not once did we ask when the RV was going to be ready to hit the road.

Come 4:30pm it was time to write a check for the damage. We had quite a day. We made a radio appearance that a few customers had heard in the early morning, where we gave shots out to Mark’s Service Center and asked the radio audience where the nearest shower was. We interviewed the owner of Mark’s in front of a Post-Standard reporter, and had our pictures taken for tomorrow’s Syracuse newspaper. But the moment had come that I feared most.

It was time to get a tooth pulled. It was time to write the check to the IRS. It was time to pay.

But something happened during the day. We had a good time. We carried a positive attitude. And we had given Mark’s Service Center a feeling of importance with media appearances. It was a special experience.

The bill was astronomical. But it could have worse. Mark, the owner, who had taken us in like his own employees, had given us a discount. A significant discount. He had charged us $10 in labor, and fair value for the parts.

There is still good in this world, even at the auto repair shop.