I retired from clock making at age 18 after selling the only clock I ever built for $100,000.
It was January of my senior year of high school, and I was sitting in the bleachers at my brother’s basketball game when I received an email from the University of Notre Dame saying I had been nominated as a semi-finalist for a merit scholarship. I had already been accepted to the school a few weeks earlier, and while I wasn’t yet sold on the idea of bringing my lack of impulse control to a notoriously stuffy and unashamedly Catholic university, I could be sold for a price. So I of course decided to apply for final round consideration.
The application consisted of two parts. The first was some 25-minute online assessment that I truly could not tell you anything about at this point. I just know I did it.
The second part was a video I had to make answering the question, “How will I use my Notre Dame education to be a ‘force for good’ in the world?” It was the sort of vague yet reverent call-to-arms that universities eat up with Cookie Monster efficiency, which is to say quickly but without realizing how little they’re actually accomplishing in the process. In any event, it was a prompt I was confident I could answer well, and I knew making an engaging video wouldn’t be an issue for me.
The bigger issue was where I would film it. Winter in Chicago isn’t exactly a ~vibe~ for a backdrop, and nothing about my family’s squished home in suburbia screamed, “Take me seriously.” There were no impressive bookshelves or quaint fireplaces or copies of The Complete Works of Henry David Thoreau to place casually on my desk. Nor did I even have a desk.
So I somehow decided the best solution was to take my blue bedsheet, stretch it across my wardrobe, tape a few family photos and album covers to it as if it were my bedroom wall, and use that as the backdrop. Why I didn’t just use my bedroom wall I could not tell you. I’m sure the logic made sense at the time and probably had something to do with all the utterly random still-hanging dog photos my brother tore out of a calendar and taped onto our shared bedroom wall at age six.
But I still thought the backdrop was missing something. It still just looked like a bedsheet with a bunch of cheaply printed photos taped to it. It needed one more ingredient.
That’s when I got an incredibly stupid idea. I thought, “What if I get a few pieces of paper, draw a clock and some hands for it, cut all the pieces out and attach the hands so they can swivel around the clock face, and then move the hands every few cuts in the video so when you play it back it looks like the clock is actually working?” It was so stupid and so pointless and I truly didn’t think anyone would notice. But it made me laugh. So I did it.
Before, the backdrop looked like a bedsheet with a bunch of cheaply printed photos taped to it. Now, the backdrop looked like a bedsheet with a bunch of cheaply printed photos taped to it and a clock.
Fast forward two months. My quirky, fast-paced, C+ comedy video got me to the interview round, and my quirky, fast-paced- C+ comedy interview answers secured me a merit scholarship at Notre Dame, worth $25,000 each year of school. I committed to the university a few days later.
Arriving on campus in the fall and meeting all the scholars program administrators was a trippy experience because they all were reciting to me every minuscule detail of my life before I even had time to read their name tags, a side effect of reading applications for a living I'm sure. But the most memorable interaction came when I met the director of the scholars program. He was interested in having me do some broadcasting work for one of the department’s outreach programs, so he invited me into his office to talk about the opportunity. He introduced himself and gave me a bit of an overview of what he did for the university, and then when he started talking about why he wanted me to work for him, he said this:
“I loved your video. It was so off-the-wall and energetic and refreshing to watch. And my favorite part? It was that clock you put behind you with the moving hands. I just thought that was so clever.”
I was genuinely baffled. I had forgotten I even did that. That was an Easter egg I left for myself and now here was the director of merit scholarships at Notre Dame recalling it to me six months later. It was baffling.
Fast forward six more months and I got an email saying my scholarship’s sponsor, a well-off alumnus by the name of Edward W. Devine, was coming to campus and wanted to meet all of the students he was sponsoring. So one sunny Thursday morning I woke up early and trekked over to the ritzy dining room of the on-campus hotel to meet the man that made it possible for me to go to a school like Notre Dame.
When he arrived, he took a moment to introduce himself to the other two students who were attending the breakfast. And then after a few moments he turned to me, shook my hand, looked me in the eye, and said, “That was a cool clock you had there.”
By that point I was convinced that clock single-handedly got me a $100,000 check. That clock was what made me stand out from a crowd of hundreds of other applicants who had a copy of The Complete Works of Henry David Thoreau placed casually on their desk.
It was such an important lesson for me. It was the moment I realized I would get much further in everything I do by trying to make myself laugh than by going out of my way to impress anyone. That my own giggles would somehow make a yellow brick road to somewhere I’m supposed to be and to trust that I’d find all the people who want and appreciate that along the way. That in a sea of college kiss-ups and corporate schmoozers, I would make my way to the top by playing games rather than playing the game.
I threw the clock away as soon as I finished filming the video. It was just a laugh, after all.
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