All Jobs to Date & A Handful of Lessons

• Soft Lessons Learned from being Low Skill Labor
• Hard Lessons Learned from being Low Skill Labor

I recently listened to a podcast where the hosts were talking about their various jobs. It made me reflect on the many I’ve had in my first 30 years.

I get the sense that most of my peers worked during HS/undergraduate to have extra spending or fun money. My first 10 years of work was to provide myself transportation and to feed myself. The most difficult point was during my undergraduate years, where I reduced my eating to twice daily. I had an underweight BMI until Post Undergraduate.

Soft Lessons Learned from being Low Skill Labor

• Be kind. Even if I was having a tough day, I made the effort to be kind & polite. Others will naturally reciprocate, and it’ll end up making your day better.
• Always tip. If you’re out to eat, you should factor in tipping as part of your meal.
• If you’re in university, these low skill positions will lower your debt burden. I ended up with a quarter of my counterfactual debt amount.
• “If you’ve lived exactly the life of another person, you’d likely be in their situation” is a mantra I still hold dear. I think this deepens empathy while also respecting one’s agency as two people can have identical experiences but have different outcomes. Certain situations will have associated outcomes on average but with some variance. The goal then should be to find what led to the extraordinary outcome and replicate if possible.

Hard Lessons Learned from being Low Skill Labor

These lessons are meant to be for my younger self and not widely applicable. They are written mainly for my younger brothers but generalize decently well for those also coming American poverty.

• Be respectful but detached. For low skill positions, they will exploit you since you’re so easily replaceable. Never share personal details and don’t expect friendships to form here.
• Coming from a working class background, the belief that “working hard” will eventually pay off is very bad advice until Post Undergraduate. I think “working smarter” is strictly better than “working harder” as the former can be sustained (caveats apply that I won’t go into detail here).
• For minimum wage jobs, the goal should be working toward the minimum level of effort required. That seems fair. This does not mean slack off but more about respecting your own boundaries and avoiding injury. At 30, I have back and knee problems likely caused by 8 years of manual work.
• After my undergraduate working full-time, high skill employers seriously do not care about those low skill positions. The competition was able to secure internships/research roles while you were trying to survive. It is in the employer’s best interest to choose the talent who has slightly relevant work experience & uncertain work ethic VS no relevant work experience & equally uncertain work ethic.
• Notice the irony between the last two points (i.e. work toward the minimum effort; employers think you’re doing this). It’s extremely unlikely any of your high skill employers will reach out to your low skill employers to see if you were the exception.
• Note, I explored the naive “work harder” approach with a modest return. I learned these lessons over the course of 8 years but think these sunk in after about 2 years. Therefore, I’d recommend loans over full-time work (unless it’s research-related & paid).