The Recruiter
I have a hunch that this is a role or job that fundamentally resides in everyone. “Hey, lets go eat at this new restaurant!” would be a fundamental recruiter function. Getting others into what you’re into. Those closest to me know that I’m a master at this. I’m not saying its all a good thing. I have my own business, so by necessity, I’ve had to recruit other human beings into my company to work for me. My company drives rock bands around in nice tour buses, so it’s a cool thing to be a recruiter for. “Hey, come drive rockstars around” Of course, when you’re recruiting, you’re fundamentally recruiting someone into an idea. “Work for me and it’ll be great” This puts you in a weird category of being some kind of leader. But thats another chapter. As I look over my long life as a recruiter, I realized a fundamental skill I have and Im not sure where it comes from. But its the ability to get someone else excited about something. My fake wife (we call each other fake wife and fake husband because we recruited each other into a full time marriage without actually getting married) she comments on this every time I’ve got some new crazy idea. ” “Here we go again” But it reminded me of a story of probably the first time I fully used my recruiter power. I think I was around 8-10 years old. Every summer my dad would take my brother and I up to Midland Ontario, a beach cabin type community where my grandparents lived. My Aunt Nancy and Uncle Blake lived maybe 1/2 a mile from my grandparents house. My Uncle Blake would build boats. He was a school teacher by day, but parked in their driveway was the hull of a massive sailboat that he built from the ground up. They lived basically right on the beach. The house was a few hundred yards from the water, inside the forest. Just beyond the backyard forest was the beach. Scattered in the backyard were a bunch of old boats. A couple of canoes sat there that we would drag out to the water and paddle around in. But the best was this 2 seated wooden boat that we called, The Pumpkin Seed. It looked like a race boat without a huge engine on the back. In my mind it did anyways. It had a big hole in the bottom, where it had hit a rock long ago and was out of commission. Around this same time I had found my uncles stash of Popular Mechanics magazines. These...