Eight weeks in, and Sioux Falls has stopped feeling like a place we’re just passing through. The turf is starting to feel like ours — or at least, like a stage we know how to work.
Week 8 had its own rhythm: wake up, review, hit the doors, and keep showing up no matter what the last door taught you. Some days that rhythm felt easy. Other days it felt like dragging yourself uphill in July heat with a demo book under your arm. But that’s the thing about this summer — the rhythm doesn’t ask if you’re tired. It just asks if you’re going to show up anyway. And every single time, we did.
Getting braver, one door at a time
Nobody warns you, before a summer like this, how much a single street can teach you about yourself. Every knock is a tiny referendum on your own nerve. Will you smile through the “not interested”? Will you stay curious when the conversation goes somewhere you didn’t expect? Week 8 asked those questions over and over, and one by one, we’re getting better at answering “yes.”
We’re braver than we were in June. We’re more comfortable improvising, more forgiving of our own bad days, and — maybe most importantly — we’ve gotten a lot better at leaning on each other when the doors aren’t going our way. That’s not something you can fake by Week 8. You either build it or you don’t, and this team is building it.
The stories only this job gives you
If you want proof that no two days on turf are ever the same, just ask Matthias. This week, a man who had served in the Army gave him a medal — the kind of moment you don’t see coming and don’t forget. Later, a family invited him in to show him the travel books they’d made of their own trips, page after page of a life lived on the road. And in a twist that still makes us laugh, one woman asked him — not once, not twice, but five separate times — where exactly he was staying this summer. Some questions just deserve to be asked on repeat, apparently.
Matthias also had one of those full-circle moments this job is famous for: he ran into a man whose parents he’d knocked on the door of earlier this summer, all the way back in Rapid City. Small world, smaller state.
Michael had his own run of fascinating doors — a conversation with someone who works with both NASA and Oracle, a chat with a retired airline pilot who flew for Delta for 33 years, and, almost unbelievably, a man who spent six years of his youth flying F-16s. You knock enough doors in South Dakota and you start to realize everyone has a chapter of their life you’d never guess just from looking at them.
Luise met a man named Yafat this week — one of those names and conversations that just becomes part of the season’s tapestry.
And then there’s Gabriel, who spent his week out in village territory, driving through what felt like an endless sea of corn and soybean fields, and came home with a genuine cowboy hat to show for it. Somewhere in one of those fields, he also found himself trying to convince a horse to get out of his way — a negotiation that, we’re told, took a little longer than expected. We like to imagine the horse won that round.
Team 7UP Spotlight
Two shoutouts this week that we’re genuinely proud of. Gabriel took home the win for Dad’s Week — congratulations! And Luise hit the milestone of a 200-unit shirt, a number that represents a whole lot of doors, a whole lot of “no’s” turned into “yes’s,” and a whole lot of grit. We’re so proud of both of you.
A Sunday to breathe
This Sunday looked different than most. Instead of the usual jam-packed, activity-filled gathering, we sat down together for a relaxed movie night. No agenda, no rush, just friends on a couch after a demanding week, laughing at whatever needed laughing at and simply being present with each other. Sometimes the most important thing a team can do is nothing at all, together.
Looking ahead
Week 9 is coming, and if this summer has taught us anything, it’s that we have no idea what stories it will bring — and that’s exactly the point. Because in the end, this summer was never only about knocking on doors. It’s about becoming braver than we were yesterday, building friendships that will outlast the season, and collecting stories we’ll be telling each other for years to come.
Here’s to whatever’s behind the next door.
Team 7UP
SW Eesti 