have you studied 8-12 times over a 4 year period? congrats! you’ve been awarded a college diploma. this may be redeemable for an entry level job with entry level compensation.
if you’re willing to swallow some pride, those first job(s) after college answer questions about organizations and work itself. stuff like: what happens if you arrive late? don’t finish an assignment? say the wrong thing behind the wrong person’s back?
with some luck and elbow grease, your entry level job will eventually be replaced with a better job, better pay. and this cycle repeats until you no longer care, no longer adapt, or you shoot up your workplace.
first you eat sh*t, then you eat steak.
life is long
on several occasions i’ve been told “Ryan, you’ve lived so many lives.”
what they really mean is i have different skills. each skill took 1-10 years to learn, based on my interests and intensity and inclinations at birth. some of these skills i learned in tandem. by the time i was 30 i accumulated enough of them to live the life i want.
while grateful, i’m a bit concerned about the current generation of twentysomethings who don’t understand this natural progression of things. they want it all, and they want it now. dish cleaning jobs and customer service gigs are below them.
they complain that old people (“boomers”) occupy most of the fun jobs. and they’re right! you cannot beat someone at a race they started running before you were born.
unless…
skills compound
there is one way to be successful without being old. it’s to learn skills, quickly and often, then mash them up.
a lot of dudes are better than me at guitar. but they don’t know how to sing, so nobody cares. or they can sing, but they don’t know how to write lyrics. or they can write lyrics, but their melodies are predictable and boring. that’s at least 5 different skills required to be a decent musician.
same goes for people who know how to code, but don’t understand product. or being charming at the bar, but helpless at developing relationships.
to get to the finish line without being an Old White Guy, you have to figure these things out as a young person. then people will say you’ve lived several lives by your 30th birthday.
knowing our place
it’s also a good idea to put yourself in humbling situations, lest you forget how to use that muscle called “beginner’s mindset.”
i’m always in between something impossible and something comfortable. for instance this week i began restoring an air hockey table while also doing something i’m good at – manual labor.
so go ahead – take that customer service job. you’ll probably learn a (profitable) thing or two.
In retrospect, one of the more valuable jobs I ever had was probably as a server in a Mexican restaurant in HS. There’s a LOT to learn being a server most people will never deign to understand. They include, but are not limited to:
• Dealing with customers, particularly rude ones
• A focus on completion, which is the main aspect of excellence: you need to get the customer’s order, deliver it, attend to intermittent needs like more water, get the check to them, process the bill, bus the table all in time for them to get to their movie and you to get a new table sat
• Selling and upselling
• Working under pressure
• “Court vision”– being aware of your surroundings and anticipating problems
• Being efficient with your movements (i.e. grouping tasks)
• Being able to effectively appeal to your coworkers for help and attention when you need it (i.e. those margaritas always came from the bar, so you needed to appeal to the bartender to make your tables’ drinks in addition to all the customers he’s serving at the bar, not to mention the other servers asking the same thing)
They never teach this shit in college and its valuable in all jobs. This is to say nothing of the office politics shit they don’t teach either– but should.
I was fired from that job after I gave someone the wrong change and refused to cover it. In retrospect it was a petulant thing to do and I deserved to be frog marched out of there. But the managers were assholes and it was probably just an act of defiance against them. Should have let me know I was unemployable long before I attempted a stint in the normie workforce before doing my own thing– but that’s another story. ;-)