Wouldn't You Do This?

Here’s the burning question for this blog post. What do you do when a family friend says that their kid is having issues and they feel like they are struggling to help them? The answer: Throw a party!

So here is the set up to all of that. I used to be a teacher, and my wife is still a teacher. We taught at the same school for a while. I am no longer in teaching, but she is and she’s still at that same school. One of our former students just graduated from college with a degree related to TV/movie production. He was down and out because he had a great, one-in-a-million internships with a late night television show, but the writers’ strike caused that to end abruptly. Needless to say, he was bummed about it. My wife, through the years, had become family friends with his family, being that she also taught his younger sister.

The mom reached out to my wife asking for advice on how to help him. We talked about it. Our brother-in-law is in the TV/Movie production industry. We agreed that we needed to hook those two up so that our brother-in-law could give some pointers to this lost young man. How do you do it, invite everyone over for a cookout.

We invited their whole family, and my wife’s sister and her husband, our brother-in-law.

The day we had the event, it rained, but dang it, I still cooked on the grill.

Those of us in the living room were focused on job stuff while those in the kitchen had casual conversation. I gave advice on resume and LinkedIn building. My brother-in-law gave advice on how to build his reels and specific job search sites for that specific industry. We also tried to convince him that, yes it sucked that the strike suddenly ended his internship, but he got to work on one of the top late night talk shows. He should be grateful for that opportunity.

The day ended with my kids initially using their Mario Kart live cars as spy cameras, and it ended with everyone cheering on those who decided to play video games.

The big point is that we have been given gifts and those gifts are to be shared with the world. This young man now had hope and direction all because his former teacher had the right connection and was willing to put in the effort to make a meeting happen.