Christopher Walken Thinks You Should Go
I do not watch many commercials anymore. I stream most of what I watch, so I miss a lot of them. But every now and then I catch one of these Christopher Walken Miller Lite commercials, and for whatever reason, I stop and watch. Partly because it is Christopher Walken, who has made me laugh for years, but mostly because I like what he is saying. Yes, he is selling beer, but the message is pretty simple. Don't go straight home. Go meet your friends. Accept the invitation. Put down the phone and actually see somebody. Do something.
The problem is that just getting out there sounds a lot easier than it actually is. I recently had an event I really did not want to go to, and for some reason I thought about the commercial. "Christopher Walken thinks you should go," I told myself. Ridiculous, but it worked. I went. I sure can create an impressive number of barriers between thinking something sounds like a good idea and actually getting in the car, driving there and walking through the door.
My brother Paul and I have been talking about this a lot lately with the Greenland Sharks. Why is it so damn hard for guys to do something they actually WANT to do? We see women's Meetup groups with 2,500 members, six people running them and 20 events on the calendar. They barely have a web presence, but people show up. Meanwhile, we spend an absurd amount of time thinking about what we are doing, where we are going and how to make it interesting, and getting a guy to take that first step can still be incredibly difficult.
So this week I tried something different on Facebook. Instead of a picture of Cozy Corner restaurant we go to every Friday or some graphic about breakfast, I used a picture of a few of us sitting around a table.
I wrote:
A bunch of us have breakfast at Cozy Corner on Pulaski every Friday at 7:15. Nothing organized about it. Some guys are there every week, others show up whenever they can.
If you're around, pull up a chair.
I hit Post all the time. I should not have thought twice about it. But this time my finger hovered over the button. My face was in the picture, and I was about to send it into a bunch of Facebook groups in the neighborhoods around where I live. These were not people who knew me. And if you have spent five minutes in a neighborhood Facebook group, you know people are not always known for their restraint. Eventually I thought, what the hell, and hit it.
Then something happened. Five hundred people went to our website that evening. Another 250 or so each of the next two days. Guys called me asking who the Greenland Sharks were and what happened at breakfast. People signed up for the newsletter. The post started collecting likes and comments. A few guys said they were coming Friday.
And, of course, Facebook remained Facebook. One guy wanted to know why the picture wasn't actually taken at Cozy Corner. It wasn't. I just liked the picture of us, which had been taken at another restaurant before an event. Someone else noticed the Coke cans on the table and warned us about diabetes. Women asked why they couldn't come. And somewhere in there we were called a "sausage fest crew." Ouch. I did not see that one coming.
But none of it really bothered me. I know what the Greenland Sharks are. I know what we are about, and I am proud of it. This whole thing started because I wanted to have Friday breakfast with some friends. That was it. Then other guys started coming, we started doing things together, and somehow a Friday breakfast became all of this.
Now I wanted to see if more guys who didn't know any of us would actually walk through the door.
Friday morning came, and Mary was more excited about it than I was. She thought five or ten new guys might show up. My daughter Grace told me to text her and tell her how many came. I told both of them I would be thrilled with one. I really meant that. One guy walking through that door would have made the whole Facebook post worthwhile.
Nobody came.
Oddly, I wasn't really disappointed. The word was out, which was what I wanted. But sitting there that morning, I realized something I had not expected. I had been nervous too. Every time the door opened, I wondered if this was somebody from Facebook. Who was going to walk in? What was he expecting? Was he going to fit in? What did he think the Greenland Sharks were? I was already sitting at the table with guys I knew, in a restaurant I knew, doing something I do every Friday morning, and even I had some anxiety about a stranger walking through the door.
That made me think differently about the guy on the other side of it. Maybe he woke up Friday morning and thought about coming. Maybe he looked at the clock at 6:45. Maybe he got dressed. Maybe he even got as far as his car before deciding, eh, maybe next week. I don't know. And I don't blame him. I know I have done versions of exactly that.
Except I also know somebody who didn't.
There is a guy in the Sharks named Chris who found us online a few years ago and emailed me. He didn't know me. He didn't know Paul. He didn't know anybody sitting at that table. And then one Friday morning he just walked in. I probably didn't think much about it at the time. Looking at it now, I realize what a leap of faith that was. He had absolutely no idea what he was walking into. Today he comes fairly often and has become someone whose thoughts and perspective I really value. I have enormous gratitude that he walked through that door.
And thinking about Chris reminded me of another door.
A while back Mary and I were in Washington, D.C. We had gone to see Charlotte Adigéry in concert, and afterward we were walking south on 14th Street when we passed Le Diplomate. I remember looking through the window. The place was beautiful. There was this great-looking bar inside, warm and crowded, and I immediately said, "Let's go in."
Mary hesitated. It looked like they might be getting close to closing, and it wasn't that she didn't want to go. It was that little moment when you're standing outside someplace unfamiliar looking through the window. We don't know anybody in there. We weren't planning on going there. We had already done what we came out to do that night. We could just keep walking. But we went in.
I can still picture that bar. Beautiful. The staff looked like they had come straight out of Paris. We finagled two seats at the bar, our favorite place to be, and ordered absinthe from one of those fountains sitting on the bar. And we had THE BEST TIME.
Nothing monumental happened. We didn't meet someone who changed our lives. There wasn't some grand revelation. We just sat at a beautiful bar in Washington, D.C., drank absinthe and had one of those completely unexpected nights that was better because we walked into a place we had never planned on walking into.
Had we kept walking, nothing bad would have happened. We would have gone back to where we were staying and probably had a perfectly good night. We wouldn't even have known what we missed.
Maybe that is what I mean when I talk about jumping into a different sandbox once in a while. You don't know what's in there. There could be a fun kid.
Which brings me back to Christopher Walken.
"Get out there."
I still think that is incredibly simple advice and sometimes incredibly difficult advice to follow. I know because apparently I now need Christopher Walken to get me out of the house.
But he has a point. Sometimes you just have to walk through the damn door.
About Greenland Sharks
Greenland Sharks is a Chicago men's group who value friendship, experiences, and the long swim. Just a crew that shows up. No speeches. No name tags. No nonsense.
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