Unexpected Life Lessons I Learned from My First Job

For as long as I can remember, I have firmly held the belief that I didn’t need anyone’s help to achieve my goals. I wanted to be a completely independent entrepreneur and take pride in saying that I’ve never worked for another company in my life. No bosses, no college; I wanted to be someone that did it all on their own. As you’ll soon read, I have learned and changed quite a bit since my previous way of thinking.

First, some background: I graduated from high-school about a year ago. Since my naive business ventures were not providing enough income, my parents presented me with an ultimatum that became the latest reason why I laid awake every night: “go to college or get a job”. Both options went completely against what I believed in; I was devastated but knew that I was at the point where I had to choose. After begrudgingly weighing the two of these seemingly horrifying options, I eventually decided to find a job.

A close family friend of mine was gracious enough to offer me a job in Tampa, working full-time in an office for a plumbing company. My official title was “Inventory Specialist”, and if that sounds boring to you, just keep reading. The majority of my 8-hour shifts were spent copying data from a spreadsheet and pasting it into our accounting and inventory tracking programs. Nothing about my personality meshed well with the tasks I was given. My job was repetitive, stale, and involved absolutely zero creativity. I was grateful that I wasn’t working at a fast food place, yet miserable at the same time. My dream of becoming an independent businesses man straight out of high-school had completed fallen apart. Throughout my time working in what was essentially a data entry job, I eventually began to realize that the adversity I faced at work helped make me a better person. Here are the three most important things I learned!

1. Some dreams must be crushed in order for you to grow as a person. This is one of the most important things I learned from my first job. Just because you have a dream doesn’t mean it’s a good one worth following. Looking back, I was young and stupid; I still am! It’s hard to believe how petty and arrogant I was…How could I possibly have believed that there was nothing to be learned from the people around me? I wanted to run my own business, yet didn’t want to work at any businesses to see how they were run! My previous goal of never working for someone was holding me back, but I was too naive and ignorant to realize it. If my dream was never crushed, I would never have had the opportunity to learn the things I did.
2. Building relationships are crucial and difficult. This was perhaps the most obvious and sudden realization I experienced when joining the workforce. Before I got a job, I considered myself to be relatively outgoing for a home school kid. I never had any trouble making friends or approaching people. After starting at work, I learned that I was (for the most part) raised in a bubble surrounded by like-minded people that were of my age group. At work, I had nothing in common with the people around me. Even the co-workers stationed directly next to me weren’t interested in being my friend. For the first time (maybe ever), I felt like an outcast, and in my office environment, the outcasts didn’t last long. Since I needed to keep my job, I was essentially forced to socialize with people that were nothing like me. To my surprise, I enjoyed it! It was different than what I was used to, but that’s partly what made it so interesting to me. I believe that building genuine relationships didn’t just help me keep my job, but made me a more trusted, valuable employee, and a better person overall.
3. Meaning is more important than money. I used to be a firm believer in the fact that money could indeed make you happy. While I still believe this to some extent, I have at least learned that a few extra dollars per hour are not worth it if your job makes you feel miserable. Take it from someone who literally repeated the exact same tasks over and over, every work-day, for almost a year: it is not worth it. Gary Vaynerchuk, one of my favorite role models, beautifully summarizes this point: “How you make your money is more important than how much you make.” Although I’m not sure if he’s the first person to say this, what he said has certainly stuck with me and has helped me learn an important truth. If I could go back, perhaps I would have chosen a lower-paying job with meaning rather than the higher-paying job that was meaningless (to me).

My personal development journey has been (and still is) a bumpy road. I urge any readers not to make the same mistakes that I did, and to learn from the little knowledge I have to give. Am I still young and naive? Very! Am I qualified to be giving this advice? Probably not! To me, this is simply about the opportunity to share some of the life lessons I learned. Maybe in the future, I’ll regret writing this, or even change my mind. But, if only one person reads this and is affected by it in a positive way, I would be more than thrilled.