For hundreds of years, coffee has given mankind the energy to carry on with its petty existence. Coffee-selling chains like Starbucks have benefited from our socially acceptable addiction, appearing on street corners and on the part of the street that’s not the corner. Does that part of the street have a name? Ask U2. And if you don’t ask them they’re going to download the answer onto your iPod anyway. Moving back to the topic of caffeine, many cool teens (short for teenager) have started drinking energy drinks instead of coffee. Research shows that youngsters prefer energy drinks over coffee due to the fact that the sweetness is reminiscent of a mother’s milk, and teenagers are basically babies. One energy drink in particular has been taking college campuses by storm: Verve. Produced by Vemma, this drink not only gives energy to the students who drink it, but it also gives life lessons to the students who sell it. Here are a few things I learned from selling Verve.

I truly believe that the only way to learn how to do something is to learn how not to do it first. For example, Thomas Edison often said that he found a thousand ways how not to construct a light bulb before finding the one design that worked. When I entered college, I wanted to know how to make friends. Selling Verve, I learned how to lose friends, which helped me make them in the long run.

Another lesson I learned from selling Verve is that Egyptology is quite fascinating! Most scholars believe that it only took twenty years to create the Great Pyramid of Giza, which is an amazing feat considering that it was built without the benefit of modern machinery. Were the ancient Egyptians aided by aliens? I don’t know, but Verve is great! How do pyramids relate to Verve? I don’t know, but why do I keep asking questions to myself?

Sometimes the hardest lessons to learn are the lessons that shake up your worldview. The final lesson I learned from selling Verve is that a college degree is useless. Some of my friends are wasting ten years of their life learning how to become a doctor when they could’ve just sold Verve for ten years and made enough money to run for president. It’s worked before. In high school, our 44^th president was known as Barack “Verve” Obama. If he hadn’t been so productive as a high schooler, he may have participated in illegal activities, and then he never would’ve been elected. The butterfly effect!

I learned so much more from selling Verve but if I wrote down every single lesson I learned it would take up the entire nutritional information section on a tiny can! Come to think of it, I don’t think I ever actually sold Verve. I did attend a Verve Pipe concert a few years back, though. They were opening up for Cheap Trick, who surprisingly had an immense amount of energy for their age. It just goes to show that you shouldn’t stereotype someone by their age. This article is really about ageism.