This Gen Zer didn’t have business connections or an NBA pedigree—only a willingness to mop flooring and do laundry for his faculty basketball crew. That grit not solely landed Daniel Sung a coveted internship with one of many league’s most modern franchises—whereas hundreds of thousands in his technology are caught unemployed—it additionally put him face-to-face with LA Clippers C-suite.
“I really wanted to learn from her,” Sung informed Fortune. Each week, all the cohort of interns would have weekly meet-and-greets with LA Clippers’ senior management crew—and Sung made it his private mission to nook each single one for a private catch up earlier than his internship was up.
“I actually got in a little bit of trouble from HR,” he laughed. “But I knew I needed to talk to all of our C-suite before I left, because when else are you going to be just in that close of a proximity? It’s also hard to be more vulnerable and get really tailored advice otherwise.”
“I was very strategic, so that they could always see me passing them,” Sung stated.
Ultimately, his persistence labored. Zucker’s chief of workers noticed certainly one of Sung’s LinkedIn posts titled 5 Classes I Discovered in 5 Weeks on the LA Clippers—a publish that went viral on the platform and gained traction contained in the workplace too. “That gave me a lot of positive attention, and really sparked the ears of a lot of the C suite executives,” Sung added.
Quickly after, her workplace reached out to schedule the one-on-one assembly.
Gillian Zucker’s recommendation for the Gen Zer
The night time earlier than sitting down with Zucker, Sung stayed up till 2 a.m. researching after which rehearsing the right inquiries to ask. However when the assembly got here, nerves gave approach to honesty.
“I told her to be honest, I don’t think I really know what I want to do in life yet. I’m still 18. (I was 18 at the time) and I have so many interests,” he recalled. “I love sports, I love consulting, I love marketing, but I don’t know where all ties in. What do you think is something that I can do to really find out what I want to do?”
“And then, she asked me, ‘What would you do for free?”
He says the questions immediately introduced him again to the time he was mopping flooring for the Vanderbilt College basketball crew; doing 40-hour weeks of unpaid work to show his ardour for the business.
“You have to do work like that that really inspires you—you have to do work that you can do for free,” Zucker informed him. “It really was the best advice. She said you have to find out your why, what you want to do, the thing that really drives you, and the thing that just by being in that environment, you’ll be happy and you’ll be able to learn from it.”
Fortune has reached out to the NBA for remark.
A single electronic mail can change your profession
The CMO of $7.2 billion firm Squarespace even calls cold-calling employers the “life hack to avoiding long interview processes.” Years earlier than her success in tech, Kinjil Mathur spent her summers as a university pupil skimming phone books to search out the contacts of companies and professionals in her metropolis. She would go to the corporate listings part, and began cold-calling companies inquiring about internships—stating she was even keen to do with no paycheck.
“I was willing to work for free; I was willing to work any hours they needed, even on evenings and weekends. I was not focused on traveling,” Mathur informed Fortune.
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