Almost every time I cut a bell pepper I think of working at Subway because that’s where I learned to core and cut a bell pepper efficiently.
I started working part-time at the Forest City location when I was a junior in college. I needed rent and grocery money. Outside of being really crappy minimum wage to start—how did we survive on $7.25, and why isn’t my rent still $400—I actually grew to enjoy working there.
It was the first place I got to kind of “take charge” by accident and shift my role toward admin and management. Essentially I wanted to make sure that our location was the best Subway location. I wanted nothing to do with working at a janky store and having professors, friends and townspeople coming in and associating me with a sub-par experience.
So I did little things really well—like cleaning and organizing and overall just being excellent in a fast-paced service industry job. This eagerness to excel versus just exist is important to me.
I value my quality of work, and the way I go about work. It’s always been that way.
At some point, I became shift lead and then assistant manager. This is pretty cool for college work experience. Not only was I opening and closing, but I was writing the staffing schedules, placing orders and optimizing the workflow of our location while juggling a major focus on academics, and chasing a national title in wrestling.
If you’ve been in college athletics you know how demanding the schedule is on top of academics, so to swing working during the season I had to be locked in and ruthlessly cut all nonsense out of my schedule. I didn’t really have another option. This might be one of the first times I played out “the more you do the more you can do.”
It might sound silly, but when you give a young person the freedom to seek out and assume responsibility outside of their assigned work you end up creating that pattern for them in the future. Bonus, they actually met me with compensation that changed as my responsibilities did, so I was able to learn how that worked as well.
Don’t underestimate the power of your stepping stones. The way we work at part-time jobs as kids builds the patterns for the integrity and intensity with which we do things we care about deeply in the future. What’s that saying—how you do one thing is how you do everything?
The eagerness and willingness to work required of getting into a passionate role or chasing passion individually doesn’t happen because we want it to, it happens because we learn how to do it in these stepping-stone positions that build our confidence in our ability to show up and figure things out.
I brought all of that experience, mindset and drive to my first corporate internship in financial reporting. What the leaders in the room saw and heard during my time there was a willingness to jump in, learn, try to improve systems and to serve well. I had a job offer for a position I was grossly underqualified for from that company before I graduated college.
Learning to work? It will change your life.
