Last night I went to the Golden State Warriors vs. Phoenix Suns basketball game. This post is not about basketball and the millions players make, nor how it was very nice of Mary Gilbaugh to provide me with complementary tickets, but rather about the initiation college graduates have when entering the “real,” working world.

Brandon Wright around this time last year was the most recognized figure on the North Carolina campus. His lanky six foot nine frame and fifteen points per game scoring average was the subject of many basketball commentators praises as NBA scouts drooled at the opportunity of drafting him. Buying into the hype, Brandon decided to forgo his final three years of college and go to the NBA.

With the third overall selection in the draft, Brandon went to the Golden State Warriors.

Being a huge Golden State Warriors fan and Bay Area native, I have had the privilege of enjoying the best year the team has had since the ’91-’92 season. I have also seen very little of Brandon (the Mr. Wright is completely unnecessary considering he is three years younger than I). He has averaged about four points a game while appearing in half the games this season, with the other half being spent on the bench.

Last night Brandon did make an appearance in the game, albeit for about six seconds. As he joyously responded to the call to put him in the game, he was briefly corralled by the head coach before reporting to the scorers table. Brandon’s first impact on the game was immediately fouling Shaquille O’Neal, which the big man did not take a liking to. For a minute I thought Shaq was going to break Brandon’s braces with one swift jab. With that, Brandon was quickly taken back out of the game and took a seat on the bench, where he would not move from for the remainder of the contest.

What Brandon did for the Warriors is what an entry-level college grad would do for his first employer. Fouling Shaq was like getting a cup of coffee, or washing the boss’s car. Both are meager tasks only assigned to rookies, for no other good reason other than to give the message of “welcome to the real world. If you think you’re going to own this business in six months you’re wrong. Now take a seat back on the bench/cubicle.”

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.

This is a recap of our week-long trip to New York City, which began on September 11th. This video post is in response to the votes counted from our “Vote for Video” post from Monday. We hope you enjoy it as much as we did New York!

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.

Michael Vick messed up big time. Now he’s going to jail, has lost all his multi-million dollar endorsements along with his football career in Atlanta, and probably only has a future with the Oakland Raiders.

Yep. He messed up. But his first mistake was getting involved with people that had an interest in dog fighting. The people Michael Vick hung out with brought him down.

Lots of people say that we are crazy to live in a RV. They say four people in that close of quarters would drive them nuts. But we are four friends that have been bound together to take on an opportunity of a life time. And we’re good people, otherwise complete strangers, like Christian in Minneapolis, wouldn’t welcome us with open arms into his new apartment.

Much like the people Michael Vick hung out with brought him down, the team I have around me, Noah, Jay, and the Puppy (aka Zach)…they bring me up.

That my friend, is priceless. Cheers to the journey.

For the second year in a row, a Pursue the Passion team member has been diagnosed with an infection not typically found in young adults.

You may remember Case 1. Kristy Sather came along for a week on the 2006 Pursue the Passion Tour, riding from Tucson, Arizona to Santa Rosa, California. Upon arrival in her hometown, she checked into a hospital after feeling something was wrong. She would spend a week in the ICU after finding she had Septicemia, a rare, serious life-threatening infection in her kidney. Needless to say, it was a very scary week.

Case 2 is Noah Pollock, who has been our journalist for the last month. A few days ago Noah found out that he has Shingles, which typically targets adults 50 years and older. Shingles is an infection caused by the varicella zoster virus, the same infection that causes chicken pox. Causes of Shingles include a stressful environment, depression of the immune system from sunburn, and multiple changes in climate…all things we’ve experienced in our life on the road.

So we have two rare cases, both coming on back to back years of living in a RV for extended periods of time. Is this just some coincidence, or do working in cramped quarters and living in dorm-like conditions have something to do with it?

Weird.

Yesterday I came across Whitney Johnson’s “Dare to Dream” blog. She had an interesting point on one of her posts that said, “for all your readers know, you may be daring them to dream, without having dreamt yourself.”

This quote frightened me. I’m scared that you, the reader, think that I, the author, am just some 22 year old kid telling you to follow your dreams. I am going to share with you how, and why, I am pursuing the passion so you do not get the wrong impression of this site.

My Story:

I chose accounting when I was deciding what my major should be in college. My step dad told me that accountants made the most money and had the most opportunity out of school, and since I was insecure and money driven at that point, I chose accounting.

I never planned on being accountant, but that was the path I was led down by default. All of my classmates either were continuing their accounting education by obtaining their masters degree, or were accepting offers at Big 4 firms for fifty thousand dollar salaries in the fall semester of 2005. I was stuck in the middle. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life.

I had twenty interviews with potential employers that fall semester, and one thing became apparent. Not everyone had it figured out.

But that damn question of “what should I do with my life” lingered over the heads of everyone I talked to in the interview waiting rooms. Even after I accepted an offer with an accounting firm that fall, that question still remained on my mind.

In my very last interview, I got this funny feeling. I was overcome with fear that this would be my last interview. As I watched my interviewer ramble on and on about how much she loved her job, I realized that I liked interviews. I discovered that I liked interviews because I liked people. And what I enjoyed most about people was talking with them about their passion.

I went home that night and thought about what I would do during the summer between graduation day and my official start date in Corporate America. I got out a pen and paper and jotted down the things I wanted to do. I wanted to travel. I wanted to be close to sports. I wanted to better myself. Most of all, I wanted to continue having the feeling I had when I talked with people about their passion.

These desires that I wrote down is what you now see with Pursue the Passion. The RV came as a necessity because we had nowhere to stay, and I actually thought that when I bought Maggie Miracles (the first RV), that I was making a sound investment. Three hours into the first trip, broken down with green liquid spewing from the engine, I quickly realized that it had not been such a financial savvy decision.

That summer I interviewed 75 amazing people. I traveled 10,000 miles by RV, my mom’s 4Runner, plane, and train for 2 months. I went to places like Nike, Microsoft, Playboy, many sports stadiums, the homes of welcoming strangers, and cities I had only read about. It was the time of my life.

The summer also had an inadvertent effect on my Corporate America experience. It completely soured it before I even stepped in the door. I knew, that after being exposed to all different occupations and possibilities, that I had made the wrong choice to go into accounting. I was selling out by going into a secure, stable, well-paid position because it just wasn’t me. But because I was contractually obligated to show up on September 4th, I was going to show up on September 4th.

On August 23rd, two weeks before my anticipated start date, I reported to a “real job.” The corporate lifestyle benefits came throughout the week, ranging from extravagant lunches to all types of corporate goodies. I temporarily forgot about all that I had gained and gleaned during the summer.

But as the months passed, I began to revisit the advice that was given to me. I began to write a book about the pursuit of a passion, despite not working with a passion myself. This was troublesome to me, and even more so as I continued to receive emails from people around the world who were inspired by this site.

I felt not only like a corporate sellout, but also a hypocrite. I thought to myself, “how can I have a site that says to pursue your passion when I’m not pursuing it myself?”

I guess that was my “aha” moment where I said to hell with this. I started to get by on a PB & J diet, sacrificed Saturday nights, and saved up so I could go on a second PTP tour. I sent out over twenty carefully crafted sponsorship proposals to corporations, schools, and small businesses to see if they’d be interested in sponsoring the tour. No luck.

One day I received an email from the boss saying that she wanted to see me. I made the decision that it was now or never for me. It was time to quit the job I despised.

I walked into the office belonging to my boss at the scheduled time on the scheduled date with my heart pounding and my roommate’s co-worker’s resume. My boss was seated on the other side of the desk with two envelopes. Much like a classic western gunfight, I drew first. I quit. BAM!

I left the two envelopes on the table, one containing a raise, the other a bonus, and said goodbye to steady paychecks and corporate security.

With no paycheck, I scrambled to get by. I hired my friend Jay, who graduated in December with a college degree and is now on the tour, and paid him minimum wage to help me get things in line with the Pursue the Passion tour. He crashed on my couch, and we ate free Hot Pockets and Stouffer’s products, given to us by Nestle, until we couldn’t take the taste anymore.

Every day I would rise at 5am, wake Jay up at 8am, and we’d work until 9pm or 10pm. Then we’d bounce back the next day, looking for sponsors, passionate people to interview, and couches to crash on.

It wasn’t until I focused all my time on Pursue the Passion did I start to see results. After all those hours of writing sponsorship proposals, we found a sponsor in Jobing.com right in our own backyard. We went from having four people visit the site a day to an average of two hundred people per day. We made a pact not to eat Hot Pockets again.

Things started to click and hit full stride come July 1st, the official start of the second Pursue the Passion tour.

We’ve been on the road for over a month now, pursuing our passion, and the question that I frequently receive is “so, are you any closer to finding out what you want to do yet? What you going to do after this?”

People don’t realize that I am a passion pursuer and a crazy entrepreneur that will not stop until the bank account says zero. My goal is to turn this website into a resource that will help people who are in the same situations I found myself in as a student, and in the working world.

I am whole heartedly and no longer hypocritically pursuing my passion, and I invite you to join the journey as well.

Yesterday Jay and I were rapidly typing away at our computers to spread the message about our tour. We were emailing any and everyone to see if they knew of any extraordinarily passionate people we could interview and/or if they would link our site to theirs to increase our traffic a bit.

In the haste of a Monday, we decided to take a break. This break soon turned into an imaginative goal setting session, in which we set some outlandish, yet achievable goals. The goals that we came up with are as follows:

Read the full interview »

This past weekend the Pursue the Passion team embarked on a roadtrip to the high-spirited UC Santa Barbara campus so Class Project (Jay and Noah’s music group) could play at the Derpa-Sherpa-Palooza, a remarkable music festival featuring a variety of passionate artists. The music festival could not have gone any better, with Class Project being called back to the stage an astounding three times to entertain the half hippy, half hip-hop loving college crowd.

So what does this have to do with the journey?

Read the full interview »

In a classic “listen to your gut and follow your passion” type of moment, Jay Whiting’s infectious enthusiasm for the events this upcoming weekend convinced me to sporadically travel to Santa Barbara. Jay is one half of the hip-hop group Class Project, and is an integral part of the 2007 Pursue the Passion team. Jay’s partner in crime is Noah Pollock, who shares the same passion for music and completes our roster for the upcoming roadtrip.

This weekend they will be playing in the Sherpa-Derpa-Palloza music festival at the high spirited Santa Barbara campus. Over 500 people will attend, and it is one major break in Jay and Noah’s pursuit to break into the music industry.

I am joining these guys this weekend because this mini-roadtrip is the definition of how our team is there for each other. Just like these guys are going to be by my side for the Pursue the Passion project, I am going to be there for Class Project breakthroughs. This is what teamwork is all about.

More pictures, updates, and entries to come…concert is Saturday and I’ll be back Monday.