A few months back we interviewed D’Wayne Edwards for a second time at Nike. At the end of the interview, Zach commented on his wristwatch. Looking down at the bright, round timepiece, D’Wayne noticed it was upside down. Laughing off his honest mistake, D’Wayne admitted that he doesn’t glance that direction too often. It was 1:00pm.

Tis the life of one who works passionately. Time has little meaning, if any.

As I headed out for the day this morning, I picked up my watch on my bedside stand. Feeling mischievous, I slipped the watch on my left wrist, upside down.

Working away in the coffee shop wasn’t the same without the nasty habit of glancing down every ten minutes. Things flowed. Things drug. It was all the same, except that my inner clock watching self was not present.

To work without constraint is free in so many ways.

This post has nothing to do with passion, careers, or the tour we’ve just completed. Rather, its about basketball in China.

Tonight, Yao Ming takes the floor against Yi Jianlian. The game is expected to draw 200 million viewers in China. For a comparison, last weeks Patriots vs. Colts game drew 34 million. The 2006 Super Bowl drew 93 million viewers. That’s just crazy.

P.S.- The game is not televised here in the United States.

by Noah Pollock

Although our journey across the nation comes to an end, in Tucson in 5 days, our most difficult journey has only just begun. In collecting the information we have collected, in experiencing what we have experienced, we learned to take things for what they are. In examining the trees throughout the forest, and minding not the forest itself, we learned to leave over-analysis behind.

It was not always so. Pursue the Passion set out to find what makes people passionate. Perhaps youthful arrogance led us to believe ourselves capable of distilling conversations to their passionate roots. The first leg of the trip, through mid-August, we faithfully executed our original plan. As we continued, our insecurity in the project’s simplicity grew. In retrospect, to believe that we could meet someone for an hour, cut their passion into a two-minute video, then progress to our next meeting, was a serious overestimation of our own abilities.

Dreaming big is always an overestimation. As feelings of doubt in the project mounted, we surveyed more honestly both the task before us, and our own abilities. It was difficult to come to grips with, watching our initial ideal exposed as somewhat frivolous, but we found comfort in several things. We found camaraderie, on the trip, with each other and those we met along the way. We received emails from readers who found genuine inspiration in what we offered. We found an incredible life experience being lived everyday.

What we have found is broken monotony. We departed as overly serious, business minded adventurers, and return humbled by our experiences. As a group, we have grown to support and nurture each other in a way none of us have ever known. What we have to offer is an honest interpretation of our travels, without presumptions of conclusions, which can help to avoid, or break, the mundane working existence. There is no singular, universal passion. Rather, there is an open-mindedness, fortitude and confidence shared among all we have found that is passionate.

If you frequently bypass the homepage to go directly to the journey blog, I suggest you take minute to peak at our home page. It looks snazzy.

If you use Safari and the page is not displaying correctly, please hold down “shift” the use your mouse to click on the “refresh” button at the top of your screen. If it is still not displaying, let me know.

In tour news, we are in Houston, just minutes away from leaving for Dallas. We went to the Toyota Center yesterday to attend the Rockets “read to achieve” day, where NBA players read books to grade schoolers. The day arguably featured the best and worst readers in the league, if there were such awards to be issued.

Shane Battier, a four year Duke graduate, articulately read an advanced picture book to some awestruck fifth graders. Meanwhile, Yao Ming led an “Old McDonald had a farm chant.” Dikembe Mutombo read to the kids. The experience was great.

Afterwards, we got to sit in on interview with point guard Mike James, who recommended a few “shake-booty-shake” spots to hit up on a Monday.

It was a fairly tame, but entertaining day in H-town.

Showering. Something you probably take for granted on a daily basis. But after spending close to four months on the road, we consider the act of showering somewhere between an enjoyable experience and something you would sell your soul for.

We started off this journey comfortably. We showered at my mom’s house. We showered at the house Jay grew up in during our stay in Los Angeles. Things got a little more out of the ordinary in the northwest when we showered and stayed at my stepdad’s great aunt Pinky’s house. But we definitely weren’t roughing it when we were being hit with the naked, dual headed shower sensation in Cape Cod, or in a cleanly kept condo located thirty-eight floors up in Chicago.

We have roughed it, showering at a dirty truck stop in Hastings, NY while paying eight dollars a shower to do so. We’ve had showering situations some would consider humorous, like when we showered in Jay’s cousin Tony’s artsy house in Portland. His shower was located in a room that was like a melting pot. The shower was next to the kitchen stove which was under a bedroom loft, where Tony and his girlfriend Stephanie slept. That time when we stayed with five girls in Delaware was pretty good too. The PTP crew upped the total shower hungry twenty somethings to nine that Wednesday morning, with only one ill-pressured shower available for use.

And oh, we’ve gone showerless. But let me tell you something. Showerless in Spokane is nothing compared to showerless in Mobile. It is humid and sticky in the south. If you don’t shower, you don’t survive.

Our most recent escapade to find a shower involved meeting girls at a bar on Beale Street in Memphis and latching on to them like they were the fountain of youth. Yesterday, Zach managed to finagle four showers from the attractive blonde working the counter of Hard Rock casino’s health and spa in Biloxi, MS. Today in New Orleans, we shower in a tub surrounded by rubber ducky curtains belonging to Ben, a friend of Brian Conley, who we briefly interviewed in Philly.

Despite the uncertainty of where and when we will shower next, there are two things you can count on.

There is no such thing as a group shower for the sake of conservation. And we will always use your shower products.

Listening to NPR, on the drive from Boston to New York, we were introduced to the ‘Jena Six.’ The year-old story had not yet been brought to its current level of media frenzy, and hearing it told as it was, I saw something seriously wrong going on. With a flexible southern schedule, Pursue the Passion, under my suggestion, scheduled a stop in Jena, to interview activists, and see what’s really going on.

It has been a month since we arrived in New York City. National media coverage has been revelatory, and none more than a September 26th OP-ED in the New York Times, by Reed Walters, the district attorney of LaSalle Parish. In the story as I knew it, Mr. Walters played the villain, the government thug. Yet as the initial outrage subsided, replaced by a more informed outrage, I came to believe that legally, Mr. Walters faithfully executed his post. In a hasty rush to oversimplified judgment, I placed the world’s racial woes squarely on the shoulders of Mr. Walters.

It was both ignorant and wrong of me.

Although Jena appears to enjoy a rich history of racial inequality, it neither exists within a vacuum, nor without tacit American approval. My family taught me that prejudice, in all its forms, is repulsive. But this case reminded me that bigotry continues to be my problem, as it was of my mother’s generation, and the one before that. Although I applaud those working in Jena, for bringing the issue to international attention, I do not see how we can help there. We will, therefore, not be going to Jena, instead visiting Mobile, AL and Biloxi, MS.

This is not to say that what is happening in Jena is unimportant, but with Pursue the Passion in mind, I see not how our visit there would help the situation. I’ve always wanted to visit Mobile, home of the Arnold family from Red Sky at Morning, one of my favorite books. From there we are afforded the opportunity to drive the southern coast of the United States, something we are all excited about, stopping in Biloxi, and then on to New Orleans.

Much of this trip is about personal growth. I see our visiting Alabama and Mississippi as greater opportunities for growth than visiting the already overwhelmed Jena. In Mobile and Biloxi, we will continue to do what we do: meet people, hear their stories and see how they live. Education through experience is incredibly powerful, and I am proud of our seeing the country. In seeing the states for all their uniqueness, we see how similar they are; we see people, regardless of color or locale, and learn that kindness is a universal trait. With each stop we make, our ignorance, no matter how benign, subsides.

I have been wrestling with this decision for some time. I invite, and would greatly appreciate, commentary, whether positive or negative. Feel free to comment on this BLOG, or contact me at: noah@pursuethepassion.com

There are days when it all just makes sense. Today was one of those days.

We started off the day by heading to a rural part of Tennessee to interview a goat farmer, who, after fifteen years of accounting, just wanted to find something where she could be outside. Zach and I toured the farm, seeing as many as sixty goats, but none caught our eye more the fainting goat. The fainting goat actually faints, although the babies do not. The adults freeze up because of a sudden boost of adrenaline caused by fear. So when the Puppy (aka Zach) wildly chased a goat, it was no surprise that the goat helplessly fell to the dirt with legs stretched skyward.

Back in the city after our country experience, our next interview was with an articulate, environmentally conscious entrepreneur, who at twenty-seven year, just moved to Nashville from L.A. with his banjo playing fiancé. With eyes as green as his cause, this first time entrepreneur and former male model explained how he planned to put “sexy” into the worldwide green movement through the means of bamboo underwear. In stage one and a quarter of his business plan, his company will be called “Bambooty.”

Over beers that night we interviewed Chris Pandolfi, a banjo player with the Infamous Stringdusters bluegrass band. The Stringdusters have recently received worldwide recognition, taking home three IBMA awards this week in Nashville. Now 28, Chris has been playing the banjo since he enrolled in Dartmouth for environmental studies several years ago.

The thing that interested me the most about the interview with Chris was that when asked “what would be the one thing he would tell his twenty-three year old self,” he thoughtfully replied that he would like to hear what the younger Chris would have to tell him today. The reason for the answer was that the younger Chris played the banjo for fun. Today’s Chris plays professionally. With the territory has come pressure. Pressure to perform. To live up to expectations. To deliver. It’s a completely different feeling Chris derives from playing now compared to ten years ago, so much so that he has begun to play the drums on the side to regain the innocent sensation he once had when he first picked the strings of the banjo.

The number one answer interviewees respond with when asked the question we posed to Chris is to “take risks.” Or “believe in yourself.” As interviewers, we’ve made the connection that although the question asks what an interviewee would tell their twenty-three year old self, the answer we receive applies to their current situation. So the question subconsciously reads, “what would you tell yourself?” And more often than not, their answer revolves around fear, and going back to the optimism of their twenty-three year old self.

Today we were exposed to experience and inexperience. We saw how fear, drawn from experience, can literally paralyze, like the fainting goat on its back with its legs stuck in the sky. Or how a lack of knowledge, like a first time entrepreneur, a baby fainting goat, or picking up drumsticks can afford that innocent sensation that the world is a clean slated canvas.

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.

We have a question to conclude every interview. It goes a little something like this…

“If you could go back to when you were 22 years old, and give yourself just ONE piece of advice, what would you tell your 22 year old self?”

I’m interested to hear what you would say. Comment below.

If I could give myself one piece of advice it would be “to enjoy it.”

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?