I started working at an early age for my father. He’s an auctioneer and at the tender age of ten, I was recording the bids at his auctions. As a result, I am in the 99th percentile of adults for writing speed. Impressive, eh? Then, at the age of 11, I got a paper route under my mom’s name since I technically wasn’t old enough to have one. By the age of 16, I had a résumé.
Today I am grateful for those jobs that I didn’t appreciate at the time. That pretty much goes for most of them. And this would fall into that category of “things that made me a better person that I wouldn’t recommend or do again”.
The first job that comes to mind is being a farm apprentice at an organic CSA farm in Lake Elmo, MN. It was my college internship. You know what I learned that summer? That I never wanted to be a farmer. Memories of chiseling at the dry, hard clay soil with hoes in 90 degree heat and getting up at 2am because the water line broke are a little bitter. This is also where I got my first exposure to food snobs and hippies and food co-ops. Oh, and things like kale. Most importantly, this is where I learned my deep respect for the people who produce our food.
Right after that summer, I went on to become the aforementioned Resident Assistant at UWRF. This is where I learned about Murphy’s Law. You know: “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong”. Give me any cliché college women’s issue and I had to deal with it on my wing- eating disorders, drinking, birth control, drugs, suicide, abortion, you name it. Even my first mutiny. Now I could call myself a leader.
In Chicago at my first corporate job, I learned about “lateral promotions” or how NOT to treat motivated people.
As a Mary Kay consultant I learned a lot about myself. I was relatively successful and had twenty women that I had recruited and paperwork in hand for the first company car when I quit. It was at my Landmark Forum (see www.landmarkeducation.com) that I realized how much I was suffering doing that job and what was fueling me was my fear of women and trying to prove myself by the challenge of it. And I learned to be a little more girly. So that was good.
All the other jobs are still a little too fresh for me to be able to step back and look at. All but one. But that one is a longer story for another day. For right now I am just grateful for all the colorful experiences that have trained me to be able to be the best boss and to have the wisdom that will make WeatherVane Creamery a success. Which, by the way, also entails being someone’s worst boss and knowing that I don’t know everything. Ha!
Curious about where I’ve been? Check out my LinkedIn profile here:
www.linkedin.com/in/sarah99