Simon Sinek argues entry-level jobs are a gift: low stakes let you experiment and take risks. Find a mentor who tells you hard truths, not a sponsor. Pick early jobs for the people and work itself, not the paycheck. Those who chased money early stalled; those who chose growth kept climbing.
Look, at the end of the day, when you're young and junior in your career.
It'S the most confusing, exciting, wonderful, awful day of your life, right? Because now it's you.
It's life's journey, right? You work your way up to eighth grade and you have to start again at ninth grade and you work your way up to senior and you have to start again as a freshman. You work your way up and you grad and then now you're nothing again.
But I think there are too many people who graduate school thinking that they have to have it all figured out on day one. Yes. And you don't. Because there's something wonderful about being junior inside a company, right? You probably don't have as many responsibilities as other people. You may or may not have a spouse, probably don't have kids. Vast majority of people don't have kids at this time. In other words, you can do anything. You can go try stuff out. Also, your cost of living is a lot lower.
And you can't really break anything at a company and bring the company down. This is the best. Like if you're senior and you make a bad decision, you can break the whole company. When you're junior and you make a bad decision, eh, maybe you'll lose a little bit of money, right?
There's not much you can really do that'll break the company. And so this is an amazing opportunity to practice and learn and practice and learn. So find a mentor. And a mentor is not someone who is your champion, who will put in a good word for you so you get the promotion, right? A mentor is somebody who's probably not even at your company. And if they are at your company, they don't have to be. In your chain of command, there's somebody who likes you and you like them and they believe in you and they see maybe a little bit of themselves in you and they want to see you do well and they give you candid and honest advice. In other words, come to learn, Come to be a better version of yourself to Too many people start off trying to prove that they are worthy of being there, trying to prove that they should be in charge. And yet everybody knows that you have no experience. We know, we saw your resume. Your resume says your gpa. And what, you graduate, you have no jobs, right? You wrote it down here. Cafeteria is not like the thing we're thinking of. We took a bet on you because we liked you and you're a nice kid and we tried to form, but we don't know you got no experience. So this is the best time to try things out and experiment and push the boundaries and make sure you're making friends and make sure you're taking care of others and make sure you find a mentor and enjoy the journey. If you take that route, you're more likely to be successful than not. I'll give you a personal example. Whenever I would interview when I was junior, they would always say, what are you looking for? And my answer was always the same. A mentor. I'd always say, I know it's like looking for love, but I'm looking for somebody who hopefully will take me under their wing and grow me. And I would turn down high profile, amazing jobs to take something that was kind of rinky dinky because I liked the person I would be working for more. And I remember working with colleagues who all they cared about was the high profile job with the high paycheck and every decision they made was paycheck, which one's going to pay me more?
Their lives. I know what happened to them because I've stayed in contact with some of them. They're the unhappiest people I've ever met. They made a lot of money in the short term, but then they ran out of passion and they ran out of love and they ran out of friends and their careers went like this and plateaued. And it's because every decision they made was money. And you talk about people who have no joy in work where the people who try to make the decisions based on who I work for and, and the kind of work, they made less money in the early days. I'm trying to do it with my hands. They made less money in the early days, but then it went like this later on to a T.
