Nothing Was Wasted

My resume reads like somebody shuffled a deck of career cards and dealt them blindfolded.

Crime scene investigation. Fingerprint certification. Private investigator. Ninja. Pizza. Cell phones. Call center software. Novelist.

Hand that list to a career counselor and ask her to connect the dots. She will hand you a pamphlet and a box of tissues.

For a long time, I agreed with her. Every new job felt like starting over. Every time somebody asked, “So what do you do now?” I had to clear my throat first.

There was one guy at church who always asked. In the time I had known him, I had changed jobs three times, and not just jobs. Almost entirely new careers. So when I started somewhere new again, I knew he was going to have something to say about it.

He did.

“Why do you keep changing jobs so much?”

You have to understand where he was coming from. He was a milkman. He retired from a dairy brand that, to this day, still exists. It sells a product nobody buys, and it will eventually die off because brands like Great Value exist. His logic was simple: get a job, stay there 25 years, retire with a pension.

I am fairly certain their milk costs two dollars more a gallon because they are still paying his pension.

So I told him the truth. “I’m going to keep moving until people quit offering to pay me more money.”

I am a married man with kids. I have mouths to feed. He can have fun with his pension. I am chasing greatness.

But here is what I didn’t know how to say back then, and what I know now.

None of it was wasted. Not one job.

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Old wood

You have seen reclaimed wood. Barn siding turned into a dining table. Floor joists from a house nobody lives in anymore, sanded down and hung up as shelves.

That wood already had a job. It held up a roof or kept the rain off a tractor for fifty years. Then the job ended, and somebody decided it was not done yet.

And here is the funny part. Nobody pays extra for reclaimed wood in spite of the nail holes and the saw marks. They pay extra because of them. The first job is what gives the second one its character.

I grew up in Corner, Alabama, and my grandmother never threw away anything. Her reason was always the same: they didn’t have this in the Great Depression.

Some of it went full packrat. Some of it was honestly disgusting. But after I moved in with her, I got a lot of use out of my granddad’s tools, his workspaces, and all the odds and ends he left behind.

As much as I hated the junk, and a lot of it was junk, there were useful things buried in there. Some of them I still have today.

I didn’t know it then, but that’s how my career was going to work too.

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The nail holes in my resume

Fingerprints taught me patience. Comparing prints is slow, squinting work. Ridges, loops, whorls, one tiny detail at a time. You do not get to guess. That habit of slowing down and looking closer never left. It is the reason I notice the small thing in a story that everybody else walks past.

Surveillance taught me where to stand. As a 21-year-old private investigator, I learned that people don’t look up. Most of life works that way. The best view is usually from somewhere nobody else thought to stand.

Pizza and phones taught me people. Managing sales teams at Domino’s and GoWireless meant figuring out what makes a tired person on a Tuesday night try a little harder, and what a customer actually wants versus what they say they want. It also taught me to grow thicker skin.

One night at Domino’s, I walked out of my office and heard two of my employees making fun of me. One of them was doing an impression of my voice. This was a guy I considered a friend, and he was absolutely killing it. He sounded just like me.

My feelings were hurt. I backed quietly out of the room before anybody saw me, sat down in my office, and threw myself a pity party.

The problem with a pity party is that nobody shows up. And the ones who do never bring presents.

Somewhere in the middle of it, it hit me. Wait. I’m the boss. Of course they’re making fun of me. That’s what employees do. They talk trash about the boss. When you’re in charge, everything you do gets scrutinized.

And that’s okay.

Call centers taught me time. Today I teach call centers how to manage their people and their hours. Every week I watch the difference between work that builds something and work that just keeps the lights on. That lesson is the only reason I have finished a book while holding down a full-time job.

And the novels? The novels are where all of it goes. Every character I write has a little fingerprint examiner in them, a little salesman, a little guy up a tree with a camera.

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Check your own scrap pile

If you are standing in the middle of a career change, or you look back at a job and call it a wasted season, try this. Pull out a piece of paper and answer three questions about every job you have had.

1. What did it force me to get good at? Not what was on the job description. What you actually had to learn to survive it.
2. What do I still do because of it? A habit, a phrase, a way of walking into a room.
3. Where has that shown up since? Somewhere it had no business showing up.

I would bet money that the jobs you are most embarrassed by have the longest answers.

The nail holes are not damage. They are proof the wood was useful once.

Turns out it still is.