The What If Effect

There is a woman somewhere on the East Coast who has no idea she changed my life. She came into the Apple Store I worked at on a slow afternoon, looking for a charging cable and maybe a case for her phone. The kind of customer you help in three minutes and never see again.

I was thirty-two. Eight or nine months into the job. A sales associate in a navy blue shirt working the product zone of a store on the east side of Cleveland that I had quietly figured out, by my third month, was the most lucrative Apple Store between there and New York. The customers who walked through those glass doors on a regular weekday were a different kind of person than the ones I had grown up around. Construction company owners. Dentists with their own practices. Business owners. Professionals whose lives were operating on a math I had not been issued the key to.

I was curious about them. So I had developed a habit. As often as I could without making it weird, I would ask the customers I helped what they did for a living.

I asked her.

She said she had gone back to school at forty-one and become a psychologist. Three minutes. That was the whole conversation. She paid for her cable. She walked out.

But something inside me had already started moving. I went home that night and I could not sit still. The question would not leave me alone. It kept circling, getting louder every time it came back around. Not the question I expected to ask myself, either. The version of me that had been losing for years would have asked something safer.

Instead the question that showed up was this.

What if I am closer than I think.

That question changed everything that came after.