The Investment
How to moderate ambition. A call for May check-ins!
After we began to raise money to help grow The Small Bow as a company, I had this wave of worry that, even though the intent was noble, I still wondered if there was something deeply un-sober about that goal. I would run this imaginary seminar in my head each time – "Can You Be Sober and Still Scale, You Shithead?"
I'm sure it's entirely possible, but I have had this twitchiness about my own personal ambitions since I became sober, convinced that if I am not constantly right-sizing myself into something tiny – about the size of a fire ant is what I imagine – I'm only a few steps away from self-destructing. I wondered when I began defining ambition as wholly corrupt and unethical. Could I be ambitious about The Small Bow as a bigger business and not turn into some ravenous power-hungry asshole? I had doubts, but in the past couple of weeks, I've discovered that most of those beliefs stem from one bad experience.
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I've talked about this a handful of times here, but in 2014, I founded a news site called Ratter, which was an unequivocal failure. Initially, it was a solid idea: localized tabloids focused on the smaller towns in dozens of major cities across America.
I spent my early 20s as a reporter for these nowhere-places in North Jersey and Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, and there was never any shortage of drama, especially amongst the local elected government officials. When I began to raise money for it, I pitched it in some meetings as "Patch Meets Gawker." In some, I talked about how it was a nationwide search for America's version of Rob Ford. I promised and oversold it like a true rise-and-grind huckster. "BIG stories. All homeruns!" Sex! Corruption! Sleaze! Murder!
"We're gonna make small towns INfamous!"
Thanks to my time at Gawker Media, I possessed a somewhat desirable track record of generating attention-getting stories when that was a coveted building block of any media company, especially in the early 2010s when media properties were a much more tantalizing investment thanks to all the money being chucked at Buzzfeed and Vice.
The money-raising experience for Ratter was the usual trial-and-error of embarrassment and frustration, but I was determined to separate myself from my former employers and prove to everyone that I could build my own thing. Isn't that so silly – like, who is the "everyone" that I was determined to prove wrong? I'm sure it was many of my colleagues, old friends, or ex-girlfriends – people who'd doubted my ability to be a responsible adult at one time or another. But obviously, the only person who mattered was my father.
My father, notoriously risk-averse, especially regarding employment and financial stability, hated that I chose to do Ratter instead of something more respectable. “Why don't you try to work for The Philadelphia Inquirer?"
He also thought I was too old (40-ish) and had the wrong temperament. To prove him wrong, I told him I was reading plenty of dry business books about management and leadership and was seeing my therapist more frequently. That really set him off since he equated therapy with loserdom. "You can't handle this right now—you're not ready."
However, during my early fundraising drive for Ratter, I was asked to come interview for a high-level editor position at Maxim. When I told my father about it, he was relieved. He hoped that an opportunity like that would awaken me from the silly delusion that I could go into my business for myself, but I wouldn't budge, and I told him I wouldn’t take the interview. He was flabbergasted.
To prove how unprepared I was to take on this new venture, he confidently stated all the requirements I did not have – a lawyer, a Master's degree, a business license. And then this: "Do you even have a business card?"
When I told him I did not, he forwarded me a 15% off coupon from Office Depot and insisted I order 10 business cards if I wanted to be taken seriously.
After about six months, I finally raised a halfway decent chunk of money – almost $1.3 million in a seed round. Honestly, that seemed like an enormous amount to me at the time – like billions. And when it was finally fully deposited in my official business checking account, I would spend time staring at it, trying to convince myself that I was the type of person who would have access to a bank account with seven figures in it. Sometimes, when I was drunk, I'd pull it up on my phone to show to my friends if I felt that they did not fully appreciate that I did, in fact, "own my own business." One time, I did this to a highly skeptical high school friend I hadn't seen for a couple of years, and he seemed a little concerned that I wasn't lying.
Once the money was in the bank, I hired writers and editors for my two launch cities (SF and LA), but it was clear that nothing was gaining traction. Within a few months, I had to let those people go to preserve some of the funding, which had shrunk to about $350k at an astonishing speed.
I decided the best way for Ratter to succeed moving forward was to have only one full-time reporter: ME.
I was now in charge of the BIG stories (home runs only!), and I'd completely abandoned the local news angle. And I had just the story teed up to rescue Ratter.
A few months before I launched, some shady people I knew had offered to sell me some extremely wobbly Justin Bieber gossip. I don't remember the exact origins of the story – and forgive me for not rooting around Google for too long to find it – but I believe it was a series of damning texts between Bieber and an ex-girlfriend. I passed, but The National Enquirer had published the texts, and Bieber's management had already denied them as fake. But – and I say this entirely removed from any whiff of journalistic gravitas – "my sources" claimed that the reason Bieber's management denied it was because they also included an unflattering pic of Justin Bieber showing his penis. Even though that was my beat for a long time at Gawker and Deadspin – celebrity penises, that is – I still wanted Ratter to be focused on more local-government gossip. (Had it been the penis of, say, the mayor of Alameda, maybe I would have been more eager to strike a deal.)
But now I was desperate for an audience boost and I went back to see if Justin Bieber's penis was still available to purchase. I decided it was a good investment for Ratter, that the rewards far outweighed the risks. I told them how much I was willing to spend on it, but by then, no one wanted any money, and they just handed it over to me on a tiny flash drive.
A day or two later, I did some half-assed fact-checking to "verify" the authenticity of Justin Bieber's penis, even though there was no way to do so considering other body parts of Justin Bieber – most importantly, his head – were not visible I had little choice but to "trust my sources" on this one. I decided that the company had no choice, so I ran the photo of the penis with a headline declaring it was Justin Bieber's with minimal context.
Within hours, I watched my site, which had been tanking, suddenly gain some momentum and new eyeballs as news of Justin Bieber's dick had zoomed across the internet and began to hijack most Twitter feeds throughout what was turning into a most auspicious day.
But, like most things in my life had done in 2015, it darkened quickly.
A few hours later, I received an email from Gawker's legal department – the company was one of Ratter's lead investors – forwarding along a voicemail message from their general tip line. It was from a man, anxiously looking to get in touch with me, who claimed that the dick that I was passing off as Justin Bieber's was actually his dick. He said he had shared that photo with a man he'd met on Grindr a few months prior. "Impossible!" I responded.
But once I spoke to him on the phone, he was pretty convincing about what had happened. We agreed that the most dignified way of getting to the bottom of this was if he snapped a real-time photo of his penis and sent it to a friend of mine to compare it to the one that we had posted on the site.
Once I got back the results, it was clear I had grievously messed up. It felt like all the bones had fallen out of my body. At home, alone with my thoughts and shame, I must have screamed "WHAT!" at least a dozen times throughout the night.
The next day, I issued an annoyed retraction and tried to move on quickly, but there was neither time nor money left to recover from that mistake.
That wasn't the official end of Ratter, but it was the day when I was certain it had zero chance of succeeding.
*****
I barely tell that story anymore, but I think about it often – how low I'd gone. Then I think, what if it turned out to be Justin Biebers's actual dick, and it helped Ratter survive? How much lower would I have gone after that?
I blamed most of Ratter's failure on outsized ambition more than drugs and alcohol.
After a not-so-great couple of weeks fundraising for The Small Bow, I decided to learn to be ambitious without all the poisonous, self-destructive striving I'd attached to it. Here's how I want to be ambitious now: Consistency. Generosity. Tactful communication and boundaries. Are those scalable? Only one way to find out.
Thanks for letting me spill.
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Quick heads-up: I’m gonna be taking some of May off to work on my book so look out for more contributions from other writers throughout the month. In the meantime, help us out with this month’s Check-Ins?
That’s right: May Check-Ins are due this week. We want to know how you’re living. Tell us what’s up with your recovery or anything else noteworthy. We want both the great and the gross.
The perfect length is 150-300 words. Here’s a great one from last month’s round-up to give you an idea of what we’re looking for:
I decided that when I cleaned up I would start going back to the doctor. It’s been 2 months and 2 days since I last used cocaine, and I’m seeing the doctor.
I never thought the hardest part of getting clean would be managing anxiety from doctor visits. When you’re waiting to learn how big the hole in your septum is (5mm btw) the gap between appointment check-in and being seen by the doctor is actual purgatory.
The nurse could tell I was nervous while she was taking vitals and drawing blood, and went out of her way to make small talk. “It’s Valentine’s Day and you didn’t bring me anything?” she asked. “If I had known it was you, I would’ve,” I said.
She told me I was doing the right thing by seeing the doctor again, and I think she was right.
EMAIL US HERE: tsbcheckins@thesmallbow.com SUBJECT: MAY CHECK-IN
It will be published on TUESDAY, May 6th.
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ALL ILLUSTRATIONS BY EDITH ZIMMERMAN
MORE CHECK-INS:
We Have No Choice But To Sit With It
"My mother died in December after a long bout with Alzheimer’s. I thought that by “pre-grieving” during the many years she was ill, I would insulate myself from the grief. But her death has hit me very hard and thrown me off-balance — a lot of unexpected weeping, for one."
I Can See the Edges of Everything
"I'm not in recovery yet, though I suspect I will need to be at some point. I've been cutting way back though, until last week when, "because it was a long week," I found myself pulling out one of my signature moves: getting absolutely shitfaced while the people I'm out with have a beer or two. When you do this after a few weeks of hardly drinking, though, the result is a migraine that lasts until Monday afternoon and forces you to cancel the fun plans you made with your friends."
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ZOOM MEETING SCHEDULE
Monday: 5:30 p.m. PT/8:30 ET
Tuesday: 10 a.m. PT/1 p.m. ET
Wednesday: 10 a.m. PT/1 p.m. ET
Thursday: 10 a.m. PT/1 p.m. ET (Women and non-binary meeting.)
Friday: 10 a.m. PT/1 p.m. ET and 4 p.m. PT/7 p.m. ET
Saturday: Mental Health Focus (Peer support for bipolar/anxiety/depression) 9:30 a.m. PT/12:30 p.m. ET
Sunday: (Mental Health and Sobriety Support Group.) 1:00 p.m PT/4 p.m. ET
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If you don’t feel comfortable calling yourself an “alcoholic,” that’s fine. If you have issues with sex, food, drugs, codependency, love, loneliness, and/or depression, come on in. Newcomers are especially welcome.
FORMAT: CROSSTALK, TOPIC MEETING
We’re there for an hour, sometimes more. We’d love to have you.
Meeting ID: 874 2568 6609
PASSWORD TO ZOOM: nickfoles
Need more info?: ajd@thesmallbow.com
This is The Small Bow newsletter. It is mainly written and edited by A.J. Daulerio. And Edith Zimmerman always illustrates it. We send it out every Tuesday and Friday.
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A POEM ON THE WAY OUT:
The Givens
by Kim Addonizio
*****
Someone will bump into you and not apologize, someone will wear
the wrong dress to the party, another lurch drunk into the table
of cheeses and pastries at the memorial service, someone will tell you
she's sorry it's out of her hands as though everything isn't already.
One day the toilet will mysteriously detach its little chain
from its rubber thingie and refuse to flush, in the throes
of whatever existential crisis toilets experience after so much human
waste, so many tampons it wasn't supposed to swallow, so many pills
washed down because someone in a fit of sobriety tossed them in, though later regretted it but too late, they're gone, someone kneeling to empty
a meal, a bottle of wine, too many mango-cucumber-vodka cocktails made
from a recipe by Martha Stewart. Someone will have seen Martha Stewart
in a restaurant, surrounded by admirers; criminals
will order quail, world leaders will stab their forks into small countries
to hold them still for their serrated knives. Ben Franklin said
nothing is certain in this world but death and taxes but he was wrong
about the taxes but then again, right about the impermanency
of the Constitution. No one will come to your door to give you a stack
of bills imprinted with Ben Franklin's face, but a Jehovah's Witness
will find you one day to tell you there is no Hell and that the souls
of the wicked will be annihilated. Someone will love you but not enough,
someone else send gift-wrapped pheromones to your vomeronasal organ,
which will promptly destroy them like bugs in a zapper. These are but a few
of the many givens, and it's tempting to boil them down to just two
like Franklin did but I prefer Duchamp's "Etants Donnes," —1. The Waterfall,
2. The Illuminating Gas, water and light, as it was when God began
to pronounce those words in his marble bathroom but given how it's all
gone since then he probably should have skipped the part where clay
sits up and rubs its eyes, looking for something to fuck or kill.
The rain, the lightning. The river town, the fireworks off the dock.
Someone will run through a lawn sprinkler, someone else open a hydrant.
Someone will pull you from the fire, someone else wrap you in flames.
— “From Mortal Trash” (via Poetry Society)
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