Escape from the Mailroom

Every time you put a piece of mail on someone’s desk, a little piece of you dies.

There is a silent stigma attached to being the mailroom guy. Many in the company see you as the hired help. Maybe they’d rather not see you at all.

When you sort mail for a living, it’s the universe telling you that this is all you’re good for. It’s the company telling you that this is all you’re good for. Sadly, it’s you telling yourself that this is all you’re good for.

I was once helping someone set up for a meeting in a conference room. My job was to move chairs from point A to point B.

She couldn’t decide if she wanted this set up, or that. I offered her my opinion, because my back hurt and I was tired of lugging the same ten chairs from one side of the room to the other.

“Yeah, I’m gonna listen to the mailroom guy.” She said with a hint of twisted pleasure.

I was the help and the help does not speak.¹

At that moment, I felt more worthless than ever. I was distraught. And it was one of the greatest things that ever happened to me, it was the spark that set my plan in motion.

It was time to escape from the mailroom.

The Plan

I would stay late, after everyone left. I knew the security guard’s patrol route, because I was once the security guard.

With the HR area cleared out, and the guard away, I would pick the lock on their employee records room, find my file, and change my role in the company.

Then I would come in the following Monday, and assume my new identity.

Maybe not.

Truth is, I was too lost to have a plan. I just knew that I needed to be identified with something – anything – other than my job. It was a matter of survival at this point.

I wasn’t fulfilled at work, but was my life outside of it any better? Was there anything about me that had value? It’s sad how low you can go when you attach your self worth to your job.

I am Vlad and I am not my job. I am Vlad and I am not my title. I am a body floating through the universe, stumbling around on a giant rock, trying to make sense out of things.

Right there was my answer: stumbling around until things made sense. Stumbling towards the things that were interesting to the kid in me, who grew up on magic cards and books and computer games.

Hobbies

Back then, the thing that gave me the most anxiety was meeting new people.

When a mutual friend would introduce me, it would go something like this:

“Hey Jack, this is Vlad. He works in…uh…office services.”

I think they would be ashamed for me.

But in my mind – in my own world – I was Vlad the reader, the writer, the magician, the sketch artist, the budding body builder, the future entrepreneur.

I had my hobbies. I never stopped tinkering or learning. I was a collector of random thoughts and experiments. I leaned into being a nerd, and it was my solace from the hours of sorting mail.

And in those hobbies I found my string of hope. There was a life left to live, and it had nothing to do with my day job.

Realigning with my interests gave me a chance to look towards a bright future instead of leaning on the crutches of a nostalgic past. The Mailroom freed me to be myself.

Getting Fit

I was so down, that it spread to all parts of my life. My diet consisted of junk food and alcohol. My morning workout was hitting the snooze button for reps. I didn’t have much to live for, because I wasn’t living much.

Then a bet between friends.

The bet was, who in my group of friends could get in the best shape in 30 days? It was the first time that I saw the inside of a gym. Overnight my life changed. I could do things other than mope and work. I could lift heavy things for fun. It was meditative, it was flow state, it was designated me time. It was also a completely new outlet to geek out on – the manic nature that brought so much grief could now be channeled to learning everything about amino acid profiles and muscle fiber types.

I went from king of the snooze to 5 AM gym rat, and I learned when you invest in yourself – anything about yourself – you get a lot of unexpected secondary benefits. I didn’t know about the studies linking exercise to lower rates of depression². I didn’t think about the longevity or energy benefits of working out. I didn’t think about the message I was sending to my brain, body and the world by taking positive steps forward.

I just liked how it felt, and I liked how I looked. All the other stuff was icing on the cake.

I was still stumbling, but the bigger quads were helping to cover a lot more ground.

Other Hobbies that got me out of the funk

• Meditation – making meditation as simple and sustainable as possible. I didn’t care how long, or what meditation actually meant, as long as I set time aside every single day to slow down and watch my breath and observe my thoughts. This got me through some very dark battles with Mara.
• Bed Making – I don’t know if this qualifies as a hobby, but it was the very first step of my mailroom recovery. It was recognizing that I can get a win early in the morning, and it was a win that I could control. It taught me to lean into the things that I control the outcomes of.
• Listening to Podcasts – I had a long commute, and previously it would be reserved for music or napping. The idea of learning something as an adult seemed foreign – through most of our lives we treat learning as a chore, usually because school leaves a bad taste. But podcasts let me listen to things I found interesting, by people that were interesting, the learning was a side effect. The show I credit most with my success is The Tim Ferriss Show. If you want to give it a shot, listen to his interview with Derek Sivers or Naval Ravikant

There were many more, most of which I abandoned, some which I only come back to once in a while. My favorite failure was trying to start my own company called Swolesnacks. You can read about that here: Things I wish I knew before starting a subscription box business.

Merging the Hobbies with the job

Ultimately it was a curious experiment in Google Sheets that taught me one of the most important mailroom lessons of all: find a way to incorporate your hobbies into your job.

I was pissed at my boss because he didn’t think the mailroom team was doing a good job, and I had no way to prove otherwise. I got together with the rest of the team, and set up a designated phone number that they could text whenever they did an important part of their job – inspecting conference rooms. That text message fed into a real time scoreboard tracking team and individual performance to show the hard work we were all doing.

The bosses didn’t care, but what I thought was a clever use of nerd skills, wound up being the cornerstone of my professional development. A thing that built my reputation. Today, I integrate systems, streamline system flows and build dashboards all day long, but it all started with that accidental experiment.

The key isn’t to focus on breakthroughs at work, but to live a life of such depth that the things you do outside of work overflow into your job. Most people do the opposite, and they are miserable for it.

Meditation gave me inner peace and an eye for mindfulness. Making my bed gave me a quick daily win. Working out exercised both my aggression and my body. There was no master plan, I stumbled into things out of desperation.

Hobbies kept me sane. Before my day started, I already felt accomplished, and no matter how bad it was, I had something to come home to: a made bed and a fun project.

The Boss

Does your boss exhibit any of the following characteristics?

Megalomaniac, no regard for other people’s time? Has no idea what your workload is, yet has the gall to assign more of it? An overgrown, insecure child? Loves the sound of their own voice?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, then…Good.

Good.

This is your fuel. Let the lack of recognition, the lack of support and human decency drive you. A daily reminder that you are not where you belong, that you have so much more to offer the world.

You’re being given a great perspective: insight into what not to do as a manager. Take a minute and make a list of every single thing a bad manager has done to you. Now keep that list for the rest of your life, and never become that person.

It’s your chance to break the cycle of abuse.

This was the pain that fed my own growth. Not my professional growth, it ignited my personal journey. The career was a side effect.

Every bad bit of feedback fueled an extra rep at the gym, an extra application for a job, a few more moments of meditation.

Stop Networking

“I’m not here to make friends, I’m here to work.” – every miserable middle manager I’ve ever met.

Build relationships. Make friends. In the dark days of the mailroom the thing that helped me survive was being friends with my co-workers. They were there for me in ways that I could never repay.

Ultimately, it was friends in another department that dragged me out of the mailroom, in spite of the forces clawing me back into the abyss.

The friends I made at my first job are some of the dearest people in my life. I even met the love of my life there.

Whoever said work wasn’t for friends is stuck spending a lot of time with their enemies. No wonder they’re stressed. Make friends, make connections, help people, be kind, and no matter where your career goes, you’ll find great gratification.

Whatever success I have had in life can be traced to three principles: kindness, gratitude and curiosity.

What have you done this week?

Being in the mailroom was a blessing. It gave me something that most people don’t have any more – a mortal nemesis. It was a villain, an existential crisis. It gave me something to fight against.

Every week, I had to answer the question of, what have you done to get out of the mailroom this week?

“March 11

If you enjoyed this post, please consider sharing it with a friend. The highest compliment you can pay me is to share, to subscribe or to comment. Thank you for reading.

²https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC474733/

Also published on Medium.