Jason Feifer

Instead of wishing that I was somewhere else, why don't I work towards that somewhere else by starting right now?

Bloom where you're planted.

There you go.

That's a nice cliche.

That's for a good reason.

And then number two is that I, after a year, thought to myself, all right, well, look, if I'm really serious about this and I'm not just grumbling, what does it take to go somewhere else?

What does it take to work at these large publications?

And I realized that, well, working at the Gardner News is not going to get me there because at no time in the history of the world will somebody at the New York Times pick up a copy of the Gardner News, read the story I did on the middle school play and call me up and say, we're bringing it up to the big time.

It's never going to happen ever, ever.

I needed to go to them.

I quit the newspaper and I sat in my bedroom for nine months and I cold pitched everybody.

I didn't have any connections.

I knew nobody.

And I'm writing editors of the Washington Post and the Boston Globe and the Associated Press.

Eventually, I start to land stories in these publications.

It takes a long time.

There's a lot of being ignored.

And even when I do land a story, as exciting as that sounds, I will tell you that the money that comes along with it is not that exciting.

So I would bust my butt to get $500 out of the Washington Post or something like that.

But after nine months of this, I had proven something.