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.

It would have been nice to have been writing this blog post from the picturesque Thousand Islands in Central New York, camping next to Jay’s uncle with full hookups and showers.

Instead, we are sleeping in the parking lot of an auto repair shop in between the cities of Hastings and Cicero, waiting for the shop to open so we can get the A/C compressor fixed.

You see, the A/C compressor snapped the serpentine belt, which then caused us to lose our power steering and severely affected our brakes. We essentially became a moving, six ton, 30 foot danger to all motorists and pedestrians around us.

So that’s why we are in this parking lot, waiting for this shop to open so we might have an outside chance at still having a campus day at Syracuse University.

Wish us luck.

Yesterday we officially had our first campus day at the University of Buffalo, where we parked in a reserved, highly visible spot with a ton of student traffic. Upon arrival, we promptly set up a table adorned with Kronik Energy drinks, a newsletter sign up sheet, a fistful of business cards, a laptop with our website, and of course, speakers blaring music that would attract the young college minds our way.

Our liaison Leslie gave us the introduction to the Buffalo campus to Noah while Zach and I answered questions from a couple reporters. I had placed a couple calls to the local newspaper and the student newspaper about what we were doing, and both of them showed up for interviews. The day couldn’t have started out better.

From noon to two o’clock Zach attracted about ten to fifteen people over for a brief interview to ask questions like:

“What are the obstacles students face when trying to land a job they can be passionate about after school?”

“If you were cruising around in this RV, what would be the one question you would ask?”

“How would you go about using that geography major to find a job?”

The majority of the responses were unanimous…the students had no clue about how to go about finding the job that they really wanted after graduation. Some didn’t know why they had chosen the major they had decided upon. Others just wanted free energy drinks.

It was exactly the kind of response I was looking for. Hundreds of students gawked at the RV. It got our team rejuvenated with a new experience. And we got some great footage.

Next on the list is Syracuse, Duke, Virginia Tech, and hopefully a couple others. I look forward to using these days for new documentary footage, to learn more about the college market, and to connect the students who talk with us to career opportunities and possibilities.

Stephen Hopson is one inspiring guy. We stayed with Stephen when we came to Akron on Sunday, and talked well past midnight about all he has accomplished since being born completely deaf. I’ve posted his story that appeared in the best selling book, Heartwarmers, for you to read because I believe it shows what a tiny dose of confidence can do to one person’s life. And if any of you would like to contact Stephen, he blogs at http://adversityuniversity.blogspot.com/

When I was three years old, my parents discovered I was totally deaf, a situation that forced them to make crucial decisions about my education. They decided to “mainstream” me, which meant that all of my peers and teachers would have normal hearing.

From that day forward, my grades and speech improved dramatically. My popularity among my peers increased, and my outlook on life did a complete turnabout.

Stephen would eventually graduate from Marist college in New York and go on to work on Wall Street as a banker, and then a broker. Despite being deaf, he wound up winning numerous awards and vacations for his extraordinary performance on Wall Street. He would eventually leave the investment industry, citing a lack of fulfillment and an epiphany moment on an annual vacation to Florida. On that beach in Florida he decided he wanted to be a public speaker and author. Since that decision, Stephen has spoken in front of hundreds of audiences, and has even become the first deaf pilot in the world to earn an instrument rating - a license to fly as pilot in command through inclement weather.

All because a tiny fifth grader heard three words…”That’s right Stephen!”

Have you ever seen a dad on a family vacation? It looks like punishment. The dad has his head down, frown on his face, objectively leading his family off to the next destination. The two kids with slumped shoulders drag their feet as they’re forced to go along to some attraction they have no interest in. The wife’s eyes deter to the windows of the shops she wishes to go in. But no one wants to detract the purpose driven dad from the path so they continue on.

Nobody is having fun, even though that is the whole objective of the vacation.

It takes a lot of planning to be disappointed. I had been planning our Notre Dame visit for weeks before our Friday night arrival. I had managed to finagle four press passes from the Notre Dame athletic department. I had marked the places on campus I wanted to see before the game. I was determined to park our RV first thing Saturday morning, at 7am, at a lot I had researched. I wanted to go experience the Notre Dame tailgate, see the football game from the press box, and of course, have fun.

On the night of our arrival we decided to go out to Corby’s bar and be a part of the Notre Dame alumni tradition by having a few drinks. As the night went on, the chances of executing my original plan seemed to get slimmer and less likely. Our host Dave and his roommate Lisa discouraged us from parking at the RV lot I had picked out, citing that we should party at their tailgate the next morning and hitch a ride with them.

This last minute idea went against the grain of my perfectly planned day, so when Zach woke me up at 3am to see if I really wanted to leave at 7am to park the RV instead of going with Dave, I said that I still wanted to stick to my plan.

Flash forward four hours and we are parked at the Notre Dame tailgate in between two RV’s adorned in Georgia Tech crap. Jay, Noah, and Zach are asleep, but wake up three hours later with a high priority to shower. Instead, three stinky guys began to cruise around the Notre Dame tailgate, being somewhere in the middle of looking like beggars and being mooches, until I was convinced by the other two that my plan sucked.

Needless to say, the plan that I had perfected in my mind had backfired.

That was until we actually got into the swing of things. Our South Bend host Dave Matthews showed up and invited us to a tailgate with a twenty foot inflatable Frankenstein. We picked up our media passes and picked grass blades off of the fifty yard line. We watched the first quarter of the game eating chicken and hot dogs from the press box. I watched the second half from the south end zone area on the field. We attended a post game press conference that featured Charlie Weis explaining the 33-3 ass whooping his Fighting Irish had just received.

Last night Zach, Jay, and I drove from the city of Chicago to the Sheridan Correctional Facility to attend an AA meeting. Phoenix Rowel, a Chicagoan interview last year, had convinced us that this would be a very special opportunity to hear a very special person address a very special crowd. So there we were, three out of their element college grads seated on a chapel pew with about a hundred inmates adorned in their prison blues.

Nervous upon entry, inspired by exit, we had an experience that could never be replicated or replaced. The guest speaker, who we humbly interview afterwards, is a former maximum security inmate who turned into a warden after his parole, and is also a former drunk who has turned into a figure head for AA.

The respect that he received from the crowd was astonishing. This seventy-four year old man, with a slight country twang and an immense amount of character, was literally having inmates in the group pour their hearts out to him during the question and answer session. Many confessed their fears. Others asked specific questions relating to the 12 step program. Then one guy stood up and wholeheartedly thanked him for coming, which started a domino effect of sincere thank you’s.

By the time a highly energetic Lord’s prayer concluded the meeting, the atmosphere was that of baseball stadium who had just seen the home town team win. Inmates filed from the room with smiles on their faces and fire in their eyes.

It was a good thing we were a part of last night.

As I pounded away at my keyboard yesterday, constructing the blog of the day in a McDonalds in Chicago, I was overcome with a funny feeling that I had not felt throughout the course of this tour.

Guilt.

I have heard in my interviews and read in books about people that have worked hard to reach a point they’ve always wanted to be at, and once they get there, they feel guilty about what they’ve got (also see: Owen Wilson). But that has never happened to me.

I overheard a conversation between a couple about how hard it was to find “a” job. I watched the grumpy Monday morning faces march off to work from the window seat. And I realized just how lucky we are to be doing what we are doing.

After posting the post about Madison, I trudged back to the 38-story high rise condo (that we are SO fortunate to be staying at) to get the guys for the next interview. Still feeling guilty, we went to our interview with Daren Friesen, the director and founder of Moksha Yoga Center in Chicago.

In this interview the conversation ironically steered towards the different factors of personal happiness. Daren, who has learned from the best master teachers in the world (he takes a 3-month sabbatical every year to India to learn more about yoga), had a lot to say on happiness.

He talked about eating the right foods. He said your poop should float in the bowl and not stink if you are on the right track.

He talked about being true to yourself. His point was to distinguish what is true and not true, and that you need to separate yourself from all the things that are not true so your head isn’t clouded with crap. Clarity is an essential part to happiness.

Throughout the interview, which was conducted cross legged on some yoga pads, he consistently turned to yoga as the art which provided him with a peace of mind and personal happiness.

So guess what?

Zach, who turns 25 today (wish him a happy birthday below), and I will be cruising back to Moksha today to take a Forrest 2 yoga class. I hope to learn something new and learn more about the art that has been said to directly contribute to happiness.

You know when you receive an out of the blue birthday gift from that aunt you haven’t talked to in a few years? That’s what Madison, Wisconsin was to us.

We had little expectations when we rolled into Madison on late Thursday night. We were going to stay with Noah’s nephew who he hadn’t seen in seven years. Noah didn’t even know his nephew lived in Madison until twenty-four hours prior, when Noah’s elder half brother submitted a story and recommended we stop by his son’s new college apartment.

On Friday we had our first official campus visit, where we were all set to stop by the University Research Park at four o’clock. At three fifty-five, with dark clouds in every direction you looked, it began to rain. It rained hard. As we pulled into our designated parking lot, we saw people scampering and sprinting to safety, hardly noticing our often conspicuous RV. Determined to make the most of the event, I braved the rains and bolted to the University building, where I checked in with our contact person.

We ended up talking with three women who were all incredibly intelligent scientists who recently turned bio-tech entrepreneur. One of their companies was in the fourth year of research on how to create skin for burn victims. With Madison’s reputation for being a bio-tech hotbed, it was a cool stop for us because we got an inside look at what was really going on besides cheese production.

Penelope Trunk, a brazen careerist, met us at a happening breakfast spot called Lazy Jane’s to talk with us about everything career related. I felt like the interview was something like Kahlil Gibran’s well known book The Prophet, where a prophet was asked by a group of ordinary community members of what his thoughts were on topics like love, time, and wealth. Instead of asking about ultimate life questions, I asked of topics like networking, the importance of the city you live in, fear in careers, uncertainty…and Penelope handled each question beautifully. It was a genuine interview, and it was great to get some candid answers to some honest questions.

We interviewed Kim & Jason, founders of the disease “adultitis,” which essentially affects all adults (ages 21-121) who take themselves too seriously. Over chocolate milk and cookies, we heard about how this energetic and ambitious couple has started a business based around the concept that as adults, we need to stop taking ourselves so seriously and get back in touch with the inner child in us. Kim, a former kindergarten teacher, and Jason a cartoonist had great things to say, and it translated very well to the camera.

Then there was State Street, the famous University of Wisconsin hangout that attracts everyone from beautiful college girls to local Madisonians. Ian’s Pizza put my favorite pizza spot to shame (No Anchovies in Tucson). Monday’s was a bar that was poppin’ on a Friday. The farmer’s market exposed us to Wisconsin’s main claim to fame, “the cheese” (after hearing about this so called “squeaky cheese,” we bought a bag from a guy with a beard that called himself Farmer John. The cheese squeaked in your mouth, hence the name). We went into the second largest state capital in the U.S. (next to D.C.’s capital). I bought a red shirt with the word “WISCONSIN” imprinted across the chest in bold white lettering for $10.99. And I rocked it hard when we went out on Saturday night.

Now we are in Chicago, two and a half hours away from the city that was a pleasant surprise. Thanks Madison for the memories.

After CBS big leagued us, and our lunch date cancelled, Pursue the Passion did what it does best. Improvised.

Right now, as I write this, I am in the Metrodome in Minneapolis, stealing wireless internet from the Minnesota Vikings while watching the Twins thump the Mariners. It is 12:55 CT, 10:55 PT on a Wednesday afternoon, and we have a couple hours to kill before our next interviews with a 83 year old boxing trainer and the only female to solely own and operate a boxing gym in America.

I’m not too interested in the ballgame. I’m more interested in who the hell has time for a baseball game on a Wednesday afternoon. It is, after all, the official hump in hump day.

So who is here? Lots of screaming camper kids adorned in the brightest t-shirts you’ve ever seen. Hot Orange, Lime Green, Bright Blue, you name it. They’re having fun. There is not too many business executives here; just the ones trying to close a sale with a client. And a handful of dedicated dads with company logo collared shirts.

The imbalance makes me wonder…if America can’t break away every once in awhile for an afternoon baseball game, what can they break away for?

We were talking last night with our host Christian, a passionate public defender, and discussed his recent vacation to Thailand. We talked about how he had to beg and plead for a two week vacation.

On his vacation he met people from all over the world that were on similar adventures.
But the difference was that the other Aussie and German travelers he met weren’t on a two week getaway, they were on a two-three month vacation.

Here in America, we call that a leave of absence.

These two thoughts came together to make me think, “Are we too caught up in the workplace? Are we so engulfed in our work that we can’t break away for an afternoon ballgame with peanuts and cracker jacks? (Hell, they have wi-fi at the game, you can even check your email while you’re there!) And are we so indispensable that two weeks vacation is an unreasonable request?”

This may sound like an infomercial America. But it’s not. This is reality.

What do you got for me in response?