Every journey is made up of a million little moments, but there's usually one domino moment that makes the whole thing possible.
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Story performed by: Aaron Calafato
Audio Production: Ken Wendt
Original Art: Pete Whitehead
Additional Vocals: Cori Birce
Season 2 of 7MS is made possible by Fishbowl
Standup.mp3 - powered by Happy Scribe
Hey, it's Aaron. I wanted to give a shoutout to Fishbowl. They've been a great presenting sponsor for season two of 7 Minute Stories. If you didn't know, Fishbowl is a rapidly growing community platform of over 2 million professionals. I am one of them. They are most commonly described as Reddit meets LinkedIn.
And Fishbowl is really becoming the digital water cooler for professionals to talk and post on an assortment of workplace topics like remote work life, interviewing, dealing with bad managers, how to ask for promotions, company politics. The list goes on, stuff that we all deal with. So I'd love if you join me there to do that, go to joinfishbowl.com/7ms that's joinfishbowl.com the number 7ms.
You're listening to 7 Minute Stories with Aaron Califato. Visit our website. 7minutestories.com. That's the number 7minutestories.com. To see the awesome new merch available this season, choose from stickers, coozies, T-shirts, tote bags and more. I have to say the tote bag is my favorite. This episode Standup.
Have you ever had a calling like you felt like you were called to do something in your life? It's the thing that if you're not doing it actively or it's not a big part of your life or you're not making a living doing it, or it's not a hobby or something, if you're not allocating your time towards this thing that in your heart you know you should be doing or want to do so badly that it gnaws away at you at night, that it keeps you up at night, that you'll fight to do no matter what, just because again, it's not entitlement. It's not like I was born or I should be doing this. I'm entitled to do this. You don't even want it.
It's just something that, you know, fits with you. You ever have that? I do, and I have. And it's led me to this very moment right now where I'm talking to you and telling 7 minute stories every week. This is the manifestation of a calling. But I wouldn't have gotten here to this moment, talking to you, sharing with you, building a relationship with you every week.
If one, several things had to happen to ensure that this was possible. But I did recall and I just remembered there was a domino moment, there was a lynchpin moment, there was a moment where the road shifted or I got off on the exit and I realized that if that moment didn't occur, most likely I wouldn't be talking to you to this day.
So I thought it was important for me to share with you when that moment happened because it's context for what you're hearing every single week. So it all started the first couple of years of College, early 2000s at Bowling Green State University. And it was a bit of a disaster those first couple of years. I've told stories in season one of this podcast leading up to this moment.
I told a story called The Audition, where I tried to audition as a guitar major at this school, and it was another shit show. You should listen to it. And then another one you should listen to is called The Spotlight, which brings us to this moment, because then I become a theater major, but I'm not getting any of the roles as a traditional actor. And I thought I should.
I got to a point where I'm running the spotlight in plays because I'm part of the theater community. And when you didn't get cast in the roles, they'd have to put you in different pay book, like stage manager or running lights or whatever, all these very important things, by the way.
But to my brain, I was so upset that I wasn't being able to get these roles. I started sabotaging the actors during their dress rehearsals, moving the spotlight off of them. Listen, I was in a bad place. I own it, 100%. I was out of control and immature. But here's the thing. The source of that, though, really comes back to what I'm talking about, which is this sense of a calling.
I needed to be doing this thing. I needed to be connecting with an audience in some way. But I just hadn't found my medium. I hadn't found the thing. And the fact that I couldn't find that connection point, the fact that I couldn't manifest it, that I couldn't practice it, exercise it, do it was torturing me.
It was until there was a class that I took as part of my major theater major called Standup. And it wasn't about stand up comedy. I mean, it was a little bit, but it should have been called like solo performance. Or maybe it was stand up. The art of solar performance. I don't remember. The point is, it wasn't just about traditional Standup that you see.
It opened up a world to me that you could just tell a story in front of an audience. And that's a thing you can do. Or you can sit at a table and tell a story, or you can do performance art or you can do a solo play. There's a lot of ways to do it, but it just opened the world of storytelling for me, and it brought it outside the world of just the social role of storytelling. We're all storytellers. I tell stories all the time. Growing up, I was around great storytellers.
But I thought that was just a family, a community thing that we passed down generation to generation. I never thought that it could be taken out of that context and used them to present as a performance to an audience of strangers. It just didn't occur to me, even though it's the most natural and the oldest form of communication we have, which is the oral tradition.
But it just didn't click. I didn't have that awareness. And I had this teacher, Lisa Lockford, shout out to Lisa Lockford, Sorry I was such a prick in your class. Maybe I wasn't, but I had a feeling I was just an arrogant prick. But she's amazing because, well, she's just amazing. But she was amazing because she opened this world for me. She didn't know it. She's just doing her class.
But for me, all of a sudden she's showing VHS tapes and DVDs and whatever of all these different solo performers that are incredible that if you haven't heard about, you should really check out Anna Deavere Smith, Eric Bogosian, Spalding Gray, John Lake Ozamo. The list goes on.
And I remember watching them and going, Whoa. What I love about it is that you bring your own style to the stage, and then you could make it your own however you want to do it. You could write it, you could improvise it. And I found that I loved extemporaneously telling stories like I do every week for you. And it was like, oh, you could take full ownership. And all of a sudden, that moment, I knew what I wanted to do.
And then when we got our first assignment, it became crystal clear. It was, tell a two-minute monologue, you could write it, you could make it up. Whatever. I did it. I just told the monologue. I remember the reaction. I got some laughs, more so I got their attention.
But even greater than that, I had this moment. It's an indescribable moment of just knowing this is what I'm supposed to be doing as I'm telling the story. And I knew I was going to do it and repeat it over and over again. And now it's led me to talking to you every single week. And I've just been repeating that same moment over and over again.
And I'm Super grateful for it and the realization that happened, and maybe this is what you can glean from it, too, is that there's a myth of a self made person. I made a lot of stuff myself. I've done a lot of things myself, but without chance, without luck, without the gift of this class and Lisa Lockford and just being at Bowling Green State University and even making the choices I did beforehand to bring me to where I was.
Without that, without receiving that, I wouldn't have had that experience. And I don't know if I'd be talking to you right now if I didn't know that this was possible, if I didn't know there was that other side of the calling, which really is the answer to what it is that you want to do and express in this life we have. And I'm Super grateful for it, and I should give it more credit. I haven't given that moment enough credit. So this is my start.
7 Minute Stories is created and performed by Aaron Califato. Audio production by Ken Wendt you can connect with Ken or inquire about his audio production services @kenwendt.com that's KenW-E-N-D-T.com . Original artwork by Pete Whitehead find out more about Pete's work @pettwhitehead.com special thanks to our partners at Evergreen podcast and lastly I'm Cory Burst make sure to tune in next week for another story.
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