Sliding Doors

Some careers are planned. Mine keeps finding me in rooms I wasn't supposed to be in.

I was working a management training session for a business in Houston when a woman walked in looking for art.

She was funny, direct, and completely certain about what she liked. We started talking about one of the artists we carried, one whose eyes I particularly loved. I told her that if you can paint good eyes, you draw people in.

She handed me her business card and said, "Wanna see some shitty eyes? Here's my work." Then she laughed.

That was Laura.

I followed up about the art she was interested in and figured I'd never see her again.

A month later she called. She'd landed her biggest commission yet with a collector in Fort Worth and needed someone to help hang the installation. One week earlier, completely by chance, I had attended an art show for the first time in nearly a decade and met a man who owned an art installation company.

I made the call. Set it up.

The night we installed the art, Laura and I spent hours curating her commissioned pieces into a gorgeous gallery inside the collector's home. When we sat down to dinner afterward, the collector looked at me across the table and asked:

"Now what do YOU do exactly?"

“Faking it until I make it,” I thought, as I struggled to sum up the sequence of events that led me there. 

But before I could answer, Laura chimed in. 

"She helps collectors find art."

I smiled and went with it.

Later, when I met with Monte, the installation company owner, he mentioned he used to be an art agent, helping artists sell their work and building relationships between creators and collectors.

It stuck with me.

Not because it was a revelation, but because it felt like a recognition. It sounded like the perfect thing for someone who loved people and making connections. It's what I do best.

So I called Laura and asked if she'd let me be her art agent.

She said yes.

I found a contract online, rewrote it until it said what I needed it to say, and she signed it. It was January 2020.

A few weeks later I signed a second artist. Then COVID hit.

Despite that,  I signed seventeen more before the end of the year.

But that's a story for next time.

Some of the best things in my life have started with a chance conversation I wasn't supposed to be part of. I wasn't supposed to be in that boutique that day. I wasn't supposed to be at that art show. I wasn't supposed to be at that dinner table.

And yet, I was—and I made good use of my moments of serendipity. 

If there's a thread running through my life it's this: It pays to show up, make the connection, and trust that the room you're standing in is exactly the room you're supposed to be in.

Even when you have absolutely no idea what you're doing there.