CAREER STORY: How I Passed the NY Real Estate Exam While Missing a Shoe

real estate - my first humiliation ritual 🩴

Hello and welcome back to my shit show.

The British Accent is back, although I fear it’s lost a bit of its whimsy.

With the exception of Miami, things have felt so slow this month. I’ve been reading (more than writing — at least publicly—and not feeling any guilt around owing you a newsletter), pilate-ing, cooking at home, and catching up on my shows.

With that, since Owning Manhattan was trending, I was reminded to share a career story with you that I’ve been holding out on although I’ve promised it for a while.

Why was I holding back on this humiliation ritual of a story when it adds such great context to my career journey and personal development?!

Few of you know this about me, but in one of my many former lives, I ingloriously did real estate. I say that as I do not consider this, nor the nature of that industry a bright spot in my career. Nonetheless, I’m very proud of what I did to become licensed as I did so with one shoe on my foot.

I’m sure there is a future lesson to takeaway from this, but I’ll leave it up to you to extract what that is.

Picture:

The year is 2015 and I am desperate. I’m living in New York, I’m a recent-ish college grad and nothing is really working out (obviously). I am, after all a 2008 millennial IYKYK—you know how it was. Robbed from a promised career path even after doing everything right. I got my degree, was a rockstar intern at several record labels, and even still ended up working at Bloomingdale’s Flagship on 59th Street in Contemporary, thinking to myself — what the HELL am I doing here!?!?!!!

Even with my retail background, Bloomingdale's ran far too tight a ship for me.

Commissioned sales meant showing up to work in my one good blazer and running around that massive store so much that my Toms started to unseam at the sole. The managers watched us like they had nothing better to do, because they didn’t—clocking in on our progress through the register every few hours to make sure we were hitting our individual numbers.

Naturally, as someone with an innate aversion to hard pay-rolled work, I was over it within weeks.

After a few months of this I had reached a breaking point.

I wasn’t going to get comfortable financially from this! I was already in commissioned sales — why didn’t I just transfer that experience over to getting my real estate license for bigger money? Then let that be my final straw.

I had 3 years worth of proof that the resume thing wasn’t working, I had been nearly job scammed resulting in a permanent block from Venmo for accepting a payment in Bitcoin, and I didn’t know what else I was going do to remain in New York at any cost.

As my interest in Bloomie’s rapidly waned, my manager pulled me to the side and said to me in her bone-chilling Australian accent that I could become great enough at this to buy a home one day, but it appeared too much as though I didn’t care. I looked down at the black and white checkered floors, took a long inhale through gritted teeth, and told her as though it were a revelation, that it was because I didn’t.