All Good Things Happen For a Reason

I had something happen to me a couple weeks ago that made me really believe – more than ever – that everything happens for a reason. But this story really begins nearly 20 years ago when I was a teenage kid working a summer job for the Boston Red Sox grounds crew.

On July 31, 2005, Jonathan Papelbon made his major league debut for the Boston Red Sox. One of the perks of my summer job was that I could go to any game I wanted just by flashing my employee ID, and I could bring a guest with me, too. I brought my older cousin Robbie to the game and we sat in the right field roof deck in standing room only seats to watch Papelbon play. He was a highly heralded rookie pitcher and the Red Sox would go on to win that game behind a great performance by the pitcher who dealt seven strikeouts along the way.

The next morning, reality crept back in when I was at Fenway Park at 7am with a rake, shovel, and wheelbarrow performing my daily routine of cleaning the debris from the track (exterior area) of the entire stadium. This was a thankless job that involves raking peanut shells, beer cups, and other trash into a pile and shoveling it into a wheelbarrow, occasionally making stops to dump the wheelbarrow into a trash bin so I could resume my thankless, minimum wage job.

Most people on the Red Sox grounds crew were college students from midwest universities majoring in turf science who wanted professional careers looking after baseball fields or golf courses. A handful were adults with full-time jobs who did the grounds crew work as a side hustle, often coming for the more glorious chores associated with gametime. And then there were peons like me who did the real grunt work when no one was watching, kids who were just diehard baseball fans and loved being around the stadium, cleaning up trash, clipping grass, and wiping down toilet seats in the dugout bathrooms on hot summer days simply for love of the game.

I had grown up a diehard baseball fan, and by extension, a diehard Red Sox fan. It was customary every season that I would watch or at least listen to every game on the radio, and when I was not doing that, I was listening to sports radio or daydreaming hitting a baseball while my mom took me on an errand. Simply put, baseball players were superheroes to me.

It turned out that on that hot summer morning, Jonathan Papelbon himself was jogging around the field at 7am while I performed my daily assignments. In the entirety of Fenway Park at such an early hour, I have to imagine it was only the two of us there. And could there be a more stark dichotomy than a multi-million dollar pitcher who would eventually win a World Series and make his way onto the Hall of Fame ballot, and me, a minimum wage working teenager performing manual labor in the summer sun?

Every time Papelbon made his way toward me, I vowed that I would say something to him. Perhaps I would say “congrats” or “nice game” or “I was here to watch you yesterday” or even just “hello.” Every lap he made around the field, I tried to build up the nerve to say something to him, but every time I came up with an excuse not to. Perhaps I would lose my job for talking to players, which was forbidden. Or, even more frighteningly, maybe he would reject me or embarrass me.

Several laps ensued and eventually Papelbon finished his workout and headed into the clubhouse. I remember watching this and starting to have a self-deprecating kind of feeling, scolding myself for being such a wimp and missing my opportunity to meet one of my idols.

As the summer continued, I found myself having the rare opportunity to work a game, which was usually made available to me when there was a high chance of rain and they needed more people on staff to roll the tarp out onto the field. I was talking with one of the older grounds crew members who was a college student and I told him my little Papelbon story. He looked at me incredulously and said, “You know he puts his pants on the same way as you, right?”

As silly as it may sound, it was the first time this possibility had ever really occurred to me. I actually stopped to think about the fact that me and all of my idols put on their pants one leg at a time. From that point forward, I vowed to be a little more confident, and I have many other stories to tell about player interactions I had in the years that followed, but that is not core to the story here.

Later on in life, I started telling this story to aspiring sales reps. I found myself at a relatively young age selling “enterprise,” which basically just means selling to executives in big companies, typically Fortune 500’s. I had to learn very quickly that all the people I sold to have problems. Their problems might be different than my problems, but they have problems nonetheless. In fact, I often found that the more successful someone was, the more likely it was that they suffered problems far greater than the problems of someone who had very little, because perspective is everything. In other words – and simply put – I learned to not put people on a pedestal. And this lesson has served me very well, because there have been dozens of times that I have been the youngest person in a boardroom and dozens of times that I have turned those people into happy, paying customers.

In any event, this entire learning made its way into my book, Authentic Selling: How to Use the Principles of Sales in Everyday Life. There is a chapter about Cold Calling, and about half of that chapter is dedicated to the story I told above. I start out with the story because it is a central tenet of how I came to realize that you need to treat these conversations really like any other conversation you would have with any stranger you meet on the street. There is some level of self-awareness that you are interrupting someone’s day but also a level of casualness because, hey, we are all human beings.

Now, fast forward to a couple weeks ago. It’s a hot summer morning at Boston Logan Airport, much like it was eighteen years ago when I was just a 17 year old kid with a summer job. In this case, it was 6am and I was on my way to New Orleans for a work trip. I’m no longer making minimum wage, and I have come a long way since those days.

Entering security, I think I see Jonathan Papelbon. But it’s kind of hard to tell. He is wearing sunglasses and he is going to a different security line than me, so I kind of just write it off to early morning grogginess.

Eventually, I get to my gate, and the same gentleman is sitting about 15 seats away from me. I cannot help but to do a little bit of quick research, and lo and behold, I discover that Papelbon grew up in Louisiana, and that he has several arm tattoos – just like the man sitting nearby. I decide this is enough information to go ask if it’s him, as the worst case scenario is that maybe I will just mildly annoy a random stranger for interrupting them listening to music on their headphones.

So, I walked right up to Jonathan Papelbon and asked if it was him, to which he replied, “Yes.” I immediately explained that I had been at his major league debut, and then gave him an abbreviated story about how I saw him the next day and how he made it into a book I wrote. He went from seeming really tired waiting for an early morning flight to being really ecstatic, and really loved the story. At that point, the airline announced a gate change. Within an instant, we established that we were both on the this flight together. We agreed to walk to the new gate together, which, was all the way across the airport

For the ensuing fifteen minutes, I had what I would call a pleasantly surprisingly interesting conversation with him. What I thought was most fascinating is how much of an interest he took in me. He asked me about my book, and then he asked me about what I did for work. When I told him about how I help commercial lenders close deals faster with less administrative headache using Artificial Intelligence, he told me the story of how his mom was a commercial lender and tried to think about whether he could introduce me to someone. He also asked me about why I was going to New Orleans, and told me a bit about his farm in Mississippi that he was heading back home to.

But what was probably the most rewarding part of this exchange was something he told me that felt like he had been trying to get off his chest for a long time. He had been away from the game of baseball a bit, and he felt a little bit jaded about it. Baseball was a lot tougher than what it seems…much in the same way that my grounds crew job was not really as cool as all my friends thought it was. He lamented being in a different city every three days and being away from friends and family. And you will never believe it, but he told me that he wished I had come up to say hi to him as a teenager, because the one thing he ever wanted as a baseball player was to be treated just like any other person.

You cannot make up a better story. In the end, it turned out that the person who I had put on a pedestal so many years ago was someone who actually wanted me to do the exact opposite – and for his own sake more than mine. Being treated like a hero was actually unsatisfying for someone who just wanted to be like anyone else. This just goes to show that it is only in our own minds that we decide what others must want, instead of just asking them and finding out for ourselves.

There are billions of people on this planet, and I chose to write about one of them in my book, in a chapter about facing your fears and introducing yourself to strangers. What are the odds that I would run into this person? What are the odds that I would run into him and let it be a story about how I was wrong all those years ago? And to take it a step further, what are the odds that he would tell me he wished I said hello?

I told this story to a mentee of mine because she is gearing up to apply for jobs and I do not want her to think about the interviewers as any better than she is. She asked me a question: “Do you think everything happens for a reason?” I was never one of those people to think so because the expression just seems so cheesy. But after this experience, I am hard-pressed to come to any other conclusion.