As if dragging a three-wheeled carry-on across the mileage of an international airport isn’t enough, the government wants you panting before your flight. This week, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had a pull-up competition in the middle of Reagan National Airport’s Terminal 2 (not a metaphor) to announce the $1 billion in grants the administration plans to allocate toward healthy airport upgrades.

“I’ll leave no town unturned in Minnesota,” Lindell told The Associated Press in an interview ahead of a news conference set for Thursday.

He said he has a record of solving problems and personal experiences that will help businesses and fight addiction and homelessness as well as fraud in government programs. The fraud issue has particularly dogged Walz, who announced in September that he’s seeking a third term in the 2026 election.

A TV pitchman and election denier

Lindell, 64, founded his pillow company in Minnesota in 2009 and became its public face through infomercials that became ubiquitous on late-night television. But he and his company faced a string of legal and financial setbacks after he became a leading amplifier of Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen. He said he has overcome them.

“Not only have I built businesses, you look at problem solution,” Lindell said in his trademark rapid-fire style. “I was able to make it through the biggest attack on a company, and a person, probably other than Donald Trump, in the history of our media … lawfare and everything.”

While no Republican has won statewide office in Minnesota since 2006, the state’s voters have a history of making unconventional choices. They shocked the world by electing former professional wrestler Jesse Ventura as governor in 1998. And they picked a veteran TV pitchman in 1978 when they elected home improvement company owner Rudy Boschwitz as a U.S. senator.

Lindell has frequently talked about how he overcame a crack cocaine addiction with a religious conversion in 2009 as MyPillow was getting going. His life took another turn in 2016 when he met the future president during Trump’s first campaign. He served as a warm-up speaker at dozens of Trump rallies and co-chaired Trump’s campaign in Minnesota.

Trump’s endorsement could be the key to which of several candidates wins the GOP nomination to challenge Walz. But Lindell said he doesn’t know what Trump will do, even though they’re friends, and said his campaign isn’t contingent on the president’s support.

His Lindell TV streaming platform was in the news in November when it became one of several conservative news outlets that became credentialed to cover the Pentagon after agreeing to a restrictive new press policy rejected by virtually all legacy media organizations.

Lindell has weathered a series of storms

Lindell’s outspoken support for Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen triggered a backlash as major retailers discontinued MyPillow products. By his own admission, revenue slumped and lines of credit dried up, costing him millions. Several vendors sued MyPillow over billing disputes. Fox News stopped running his commercials. Lawyers quit on him.

Lindell has been sued twice for defamation over his claims that voting machines were manipulated to deprive Trump of a victory.

A federal judge in Minnesota ruled in September that Lindell defamed Smartmatic with 51 false statements. But the judge deferred the question of whether Lindell acted with the “actual malice” that Smartmatic must prove to collect. Smartmatic says it’s seeking “nine-figure damages.”

A Colorado jury in June found that Lindell defamed a former Dominion Voting Systems executive by calling him a traitor, and awarded $2.3 million in damages.

But Lindell won a victory in July when a federal appeals court overturned a judge’s decision that affirmed a $5 million arbitration award to a software engineer who disputed data that Lindell claimed proved Chinese interference in the 2020 election. The engineer had accepted Lindell’s “Prove Mike Wrong Challenge,” which he launched as part of his 2021 “Cyber Symposium” in South Dakota, where he promised to expose election fraud.

The campaign ahead

Lindell said his crusade against electronic voting machines will just be part of his platform. While Minnesota uses paper ballots, it also uses electronic tabulators to count them. Lindell wants them hand-counted, even though many election officials say machine counting is more accurate.

Some Republicans in the race include Minnesota House Speaker Lisa Demuth, of Cold Spring; Dr. Scott Jensen, a former state senator from Chaska who was the party’s 2022 candidate; state Rep. Kristin Robbins, of Maple Grove; defense lawyer and former federal prosecutor Chris Madel; and former executive Kendall Qualls.

“These guys haven’t lived what I live,” Lindell said.

Lindell wouldn’t commit to abiding by the Minnesota GOP endorsement and forgoing the primary if he loses it, expressing confidence that he’ll win. He also said he’ll rely on his supporters to finance his campaign because his own finances are drained. “I don’t have the money,” he acknowledged.

But he added that ever since word got out last week that he had filed the paperwork to run, “I’ve had thousands upon thousands of people text and call, saying from all around the country … ‘Hey, I’ll donate.’”

“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do,” Jobs said during his 2005 Stanford Commencement speech. 

“If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking—and don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.”

Many Gen Zers are apprehensive about what career to choose. Some are taking whatever gig they can get in today’s labor market, as roles are quickly being disrupted by AI, and once-lucrative jobs have fallen out of favor. But Jobs’ story is a reminder to young professionals that chasing a long, passionate career in what they love is the recipe for sustainable success. After all, they have a nearly 50-year career ahead of them.

The many jobs that Steve Jobs had and loved

Jobs’ has a diverse lineup of successful ventures under his belt—including Pixar Animation Studios, and software company NeXT—but Apple was his ultimate brainchild. Leading the company through its many iterations, Jobs helmed the creation of generation-defining products for decades. Baby boomers waited in line to snag the Apple II computer back in 1977; by 2001, millennials were flooding their music collections onto the iPod classic; and all throughout the 2010s, Gen Zers were gifted their first iPhones.

Apple may seem like an unmovable force today, sitting at number four on the Fortune 500 and having sold more than three billion iPhones. But its come-up was anything but sunshines and rainbows; despite cofounding the titan of industry, Jobs was forced out by then-CEO John Sculley in 1985, throwing his career into flux. 

The entrepreneur recalled making the most of the bad situation, entering one of the “most creative periods” of his life by launching NeXT and revamping Pixar Studios. But even he couldn’t resist the gravitational pull back to the “best thing that ever happened to [him],” Apple. He returned to the fledgling company as CEO in 1997, and remained in the role until just two months before his passing in October 2011. 

“Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith,” Jobs said. “I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love.”

Jobs’ love for his work turned him into a billionaire

Despite leaving behind a fortune estimated to be worth $10.2 billion at the time of his passing, Jobs made it clear that his ambitions weren’t tied to his bank account. A part of why Apple became a trillion-dollar innovator may be thanks to his devotion for the products—a life-long love for technology he first discovered as an eager tween, hungry for opportunity. 

“I was worth about over $1 million when I was 23, and over $10 million when I was 24, and over $100 million when I was 25,” Jobs told PBS in 1996. “And it wasn’t that important, because I never did it for the money.”

The iPhones sitting in millions of back pockets and MacBooks scattered across swaths of desks may not even exist if it weren’t for Jobs’ devotion to the craft. At just 12 years old, he took a leap of faith to put his passion into action; Jobs hunted down the phone number of the founder of Hewlett Packard (HP) cofounder Bill Hewlett’s in the yellow pages, and called him up for a favor. The tween needed spare parts needed to build a frequency counter, but he got far more than some nuts and bolts. 

Hewlett offered Jobs a gig at the iconic tech company—a launchpad for his future successes dominating the same industry. Jobs set himself on the path for greatness, all because he mustered the courage to try. 

“I never found anybody that didn’t want to help me if I asked them for help. I always call them up,” Jobs said in a 1994 interview, archived by the Silicon Valley Historical Association. “I’ve never found anyone who says ‘no,’ or hung up the phone when I called. I just asked.”

“Most people never pick up the phone and call. Most people never ask…You’ve got to be willing to crash and burn with people on the phone, with starting a company, with whatever. If you’re afraid of failing, you won’t get very far.”