Working for a living

Yoken’s, a restaurant I worked at for several years, is no longer in business — but the neon whale sign remains as a local landmark. (Tichnor Brothers, Publisher)

There was a lot I didn’t know about how people lived until I moved to Atlanta.

In Maine, the students I taught grew up the way I did. They went to public school. Their first experience of music lessons might have been when I became their voice teacher, even if they were sixteen or seventeen years old. They worked in the summers in restaurants, hotels, or retail stores, collecting hourly wages while serving the tourists who visited the seacoast in droves. College was accessible, but not easily.

Then, in my early twenties, I started teaching music lessons on the campus of an expensive, exclusive private school. My students ranged from itty-bitty yet already high-achieving five-year-olds to teenagers picking up their second or third instrument amidst a wide array of extracurriculars and other opportunities that my teenage self could have only dreamed about — if I had even known they existed.

These kids have gone on to be as successful as you might expect. Even the itty-bitty ones are now professional filmmakers or investment bankers with Ivy League pedigrees. However, I’ve come to believe that their childhoods weren’t better than mine, just different. While it would have been interesting to have my parents take me across the country for competitive tennis or to spend summers abroad in language immersion programs, I also gained so much from the jobs I held in high school and college.

To this day, I look back on the eight years I spent working off and on in various roles in the food service industry (including dishwashing) with a profound appreciation for what I learned and for the people I met. Though there were some hard times, I wouldn’t trade those experiences for anything.

I learned important lessons in self-sufficiency from the work I did as a teenager and college student. I have always had the knowledge that, no matter what, I can be successful as a server, cashier, or part of a cleaning staff. At first, I wasn’t a very competent employee, but I listened and learned in order to become one. I could do a difficult job like that if I could get one.

At the same time, I appreciate not having to do a job like that. I was very aware, during my stint working in food service at the University of Georgia, that being a college student was a tremendous privilege that my full-time colleagues would never have. We all went home sweaty and dirty, but then our paths diverged. That was a painful realization, but it’s one that kept me in college even when I was desperate to not be. I do not take my college experience for granted, and I have a deep respect for those who spend a lifetime working hard to provide for their families without having had the option of higher education. It is a lesson I’m not sure I’d have grasped if I had grown up differently.

After all, I chose to work in food service at UGA, serving my fellow students. It’s where I felt that I belonged. It didn’t occur to me to build my resume by getting an internship or volunteering, or to make real money by starting a business. Ironically, this led me into volunteering (for the Bahá’í community), primarily in food service. That led to some of the most joyful experiences of my life, where I thrived as part of a team working together to serve others (while still getting sweaty and dirty). Doing this work, I came to understand deeply that whether you enjoy a job or not has much more to do with your attitude and the attitudes of the people around you than with the substance of the work or even the paycheck.

That doesn’t mean that every job was a joy for me. It turned out that I hated working retail — I tried working in various stores, and every moment was agony. Quiet, tidy work environments are not for me (I guess that’s why I founded a music school and a middle school). I couldn’t do it. Luckily, there was always some restaurant or kitchen somewhere that needed help. And when the time came to run my own business, I was willing to work long hours to see it succeed, relishing the grueling parts along with the glory.

These days, I meet lots of parents who want their kids to have a leg up. They take them around to colleges and universities all over the country to find the perfect fit. They make phone calls to get them cushy office jobs or internships in their desired field. They pay their kid’s way through college so that they can focus on their studies without having to work.

It’s okay, I guess. Not everyone comes from a tourist area where there are more jobs than people to fill them in the summertime. I’m not here to say that these parents have the wrong approach.

On the other hand, I want to encourage any parent to let their teens work for a living. Let them deal with bad tippers and frustrating bosses. Let them come home smelling like french fries and exhaustion. Let them miss some afternoons with their friends — it’s not going to hurt them. In fact, it could really benefit them — not only in the short term, but in the long term.