Stage 6 – Testing
The next stage of grief is testing. A grieving person looks for a way out of his or her depression and starts testing ideas or activities that might help.
For me, the testing stage evoked my moment of creative inspiration. I got the idea to go out to Park Avenue, put on a sign board and hand out resumes. In fact, my entire summer was a testing stage for financial grief.
Consequent to my viral publicity, I was introduced to many interesting people and opportunities—and because I was naturally curious and did not know what would work out, I considered them all.
I corresponded and spoke with dozens of people who persistently tried to convince me to join their multilevel marketing programs, met with an accomplished engineer and businessman in the Hudson Valley who wanted me to sell lychee wine store-to-store, spent a week with the Ahab-like founder of a start-up company who was developing an automated stock trading system, met with several boutique investment banks with the idea of starting up and managing a hedge fund portfolio valuations group, met with a Cleaning Diva to see if we could join forces, met with an insurance representative who wanted me to sell supplemental work insurance, met with an ambitious real-estate entrepreneur on Wall Street who wanted to me to help purchase undervalued toxic assets from failing financial institutions and flew to Dallas to meet with a trio of entrepreneurs who were trying to develop an energy drink for the Latino market, promote a hyperbaric chamber for chronic wound care and find investors for a municipal bond hedge fund.
I tried anything and everything—and nothing worked—other than becoming more and more famous for being the "Face of the American Economy," "Sign of the Times" and the "Sandwich Board Guy."
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