22/40 - Unlock The Future

One of the more pivotal moments in college wasn't clear to me until much later. I was interviewing for a student leadership position my freshman year. It was the one that I really wanted to get into and seemed like the best fit for me from all the groups I'd talked to.

But, having been homeschooled and run my own company through high school, I'd never actually interviewed for really anything before. My parents raised me with an overdeveloped sense of self-esteem, so I wasn't nervous, but I also, in hindsight, wasn't prepared.

I got into the room with the three upper-classmen and we began to talk about the organization and what all would be involved if I were to be accepted. Then they started asking me some questions about myself. I answered them pretty directly but was not overly forthcoming. I could sense that the conversation was stalling.

Spoiler alert: I got into the organization.

But, later on, one of the interviewers s would tell me that there was a tipping point in that conversation. She had sensed that this was a new process for me, something I was doing for the first time. When she asked me a question about something I was learning or a new hobby, I told her that I'd taught myself to play guitar my junior year in high school. I told her about writing a song and recording it with my best friend and then selling CDs of our song to friends at church. I told her about hearing our song on the radio for the first time. She later told me that she saw a spark in the way I lit up about learning guitar and decided to ask a follow-up question about it. She told me that it was the moment that she and the other interviewers first saw the real Andy show up to the interview and the potential of why I'd make a good member of the that year's freshman class.

That organization, Aggie Leaders of Tomorrow (ALOT) would be my launchpad for the rest of my time at Texas A&M University. I learned how the University was run, how to work with alumni, how to raise money, recruit speakers, and lead teams. I would go on to be an upper-classman in the organization and run the marketing committee. My best friends and future roommates were in my freshman class.

And I would have missed it all if Karen hadn't seen a spark when I talked about playing guitar and got me to open up so they could evaluate a better representation of me than what I was apparently showing in the first half of my interview.

Stories like this remind me how much it matters to see people not just as they are but as they could become. To view every interaction with a new person as an interaction with a person on their way to becoming better than they are right now and to take that interaction seriously and with some level of responsibility because it might be a brief moment that becomes something they look back on as a moment that unlocked an important piece of their future.