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 were amazing. Page after page of schematics on how to build pretty much anything. One page caught my eye and sent me into a frenzy of recruitment.

The schematic was for a boat. 3 55 gallon oil drums side by side with a square hole cut in each for you to sit in. A couple of 2×4’s on each end to attach all 3 together. 2 guys sit in the outside drums and paddle. The middle drum stores your supplies.

No exaggeration. I literally spent the next week and a half plotting to build one and take it down from Toronto Ontario, down the Saint Lawrence river to the Atlantic ocean. About 600 miles. 2 years. No problem. Its going to be great!

My recruit? my cousin Matthew.

The basic plan (as I saw it) was to spend the rest of that summer building the boat. And making it seaworthy. The plan in the book called for a welding torch to cut the holes in the drums. We plotted for hours of how we would get the drums down to a shop that had a torch to cut them. Literally rolling 55 gallon oil drums miles each way and then rolling them back.

We spent a full day discussing each detail of the plan of the boat build. I “invented” a modification to the plan in the magazine when I realized that the holes in the drums would probably cut our armpits as we rowed. I figured out that we could cut some garden hose down the middle and make a trim piece to put around the sharp edges.

After a week or so of that, we began plotting our route, which we would launch the following summer once the boat was built. We figured we could paddle 50 miles a day. Based on absolutely no physical evidence of any kind.

50 miles a day divided by 1200 would be 600 days. Which was like about 2 months for my 10 year old fantasy math.

I would lay out to Matt exactly how much food we could bring, where we’d stop to get supplies. We’d be sleeping in a tent when we got ashore at sundown. I had massive fantasies about riding out the rainstorms we’d probably encounter once a week.

I had totally convinced Matt that this completely insane and physically impossible fantasy was totally real.

I 100% believed it myself. It was absolutely going to happen.

I’m going to start a religion.

Yours truly,

The Recruiter

Author: Ian

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