During summers in college, I went back to Wisconsin to work in my dad’s automotive parts warehouse. Hoods, fenders, and headlights all became every day objects surrounding me.
My work projects included barcoding the entire warehouse space, ordering and assembling new racking, unloading semi-containers with a forklift, and moving inventory, pallets, and boxes.
Even in some of the years afterwards, I wondered what all this had to do with building my resume or career. Shouldn’t I have spent those summers doing a marketing internship? My goal wasn’t to become a warehouse manager, so what did this have to do with my brand? At least I had the paycheck and an agreeable boss.
Years later, I began working a great job at a nonprofit. Some of my regular duties included counting inventory, moving pallets and boxes, and working around forklifts, pallet jacks, and industrial racking.
You can only connect the dots after they’ve happened. And sometimes they’ll never connect.
So instead of wondering when they’ll connect, or spending energy trying to force them to, often the best thing to do is to just let life unfold. None of us know what the future holds.
Choose to pour into whatever situation you’re in currently. You can decide that whatever you’re doing right now – however menial, however tangential, however boring – is worth doing well. That boring could become a building block.
Stamp your name and reputation on everything you do. It’ll never be wasted. At worst (and as I hope you’re seeing, there really isn’t a “worst”), you’ll be proud of your work and learn how to work hard. At best, it could be the beginning of a new thread that will lead into the future.
