Jimmy Fallon and me

How I quit a job after 1 day and wound up on The Tonight Show.

I’m Bill Murphy Jr. Welcome to Understandably, my new regularly published email about “the story behind other stories.” I hope you will consider subscribing!

I want to share a story today that I’ve been dying to tell — something that happened a few months ago, actually, but that I didn’t learn about until afterward.

Short version, it’s how I (sort of) wound up on The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon.

Low-grade viral

This is really a butterfly effect story. It starts a decade ago this month, when I worked for a single day at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

A few hours was all it took. It was 100 percent clear that this was the WRONG job for me. I quit the next morning. I told nobody for nearly a decade.

But then last year I decided: What the heck? Things turned out okay in the long run. What am I afraid of?

So, I wrote about the whole experience for Inc.com. The story went low-grade viral. Then earlier this year, I heard from CBS Sunday Morning.

They were doing a whole show about quit…