5 lessons learned at summer jobs

‘Entry into the world of responsibility’

Summer jobs are the secular equivalent of a Bar Mitzvah. A really long, drawn-out, often swelteringly hot Bar Mitzvah. A hurdle climbed into something that foreshadows adulthood and entry into the world of responsibility. There’s no big party, but it is the first introduction into hitherto unknown delights — money, independence and self-respect.For many comfortable middle-class teens, it is likely the first glimpse into the reality of a working world that can be full of danger, drudgery and bad smells.

Karim Kanji, partner in a social media firm, thirdocean, in Toronto, worked at a pickle plant one summer. “I still remember having to keep my boots in the garage because of the stench,” he said.

This reporter worked as a runner on Wall Street in 1966 at just 15 years old. The job made me feel like a junior mogul, with my $35 a week paycheck and a crisp white shirt and tie. But it was bittersweet: I was crushed to learn that brokers sometimes break the law by consorting with communists … or at least communist goods.

The summer job is a lesson as important as history or math. Maybe more so. It’s definitely more memorable. Here’s five important things it can teach:

Not everyone’s cut outto be a “worker”:

Monsignor Fred Dolan of Montreal, the head of Opus Dei in Canada, worked mixing asphalt in the stifling Maryland heat when he was 17 years old. “There were no rules back then. The asphalt got up to 200°F. I drove equipment with no instructions. If I had made false move I would have been dead,” he said. He remembers working with an older man named Guy Schnook, who had a shack next to the plant.

“I was a kid from the suburbs,” he said. “Schnook was an unschooled West Virginian who had worked there all his life. He was a real hillbilly. I had never met a guy like that

before. I knew after that summer what I didn’t want to do.”

Like what you do so you

can do what you like:

Glenn Rowe, director of the executive MBA Program at the Richard Ivey School of Business in London, Ont., and a former Canadian Naval officer, remembers working at a warehouse in Dartmouth, N.S. “The human resources manager pulled me aside to say I was not working hard enough. That was 47 years ago and I still remember that,” he said. “It probably surprised me because I thought I was working pretty hard. I learned it’s easier to work hard at something you enjoy.”

This reporter had a job as an elevator operator in a cancer hospital in New York. My employer told me to cut my sideburns; I refused on principle. I was given midnight shift for the rest of the summer. No one comes into a cancer hospital in the middle of the night. I can still recall the memory of the excruciating boredom. Maybe I should have cut my sideburns.

There are times when hard work doesn’t pay:

Anthony Taylor, who now runs a business consultancy in Vancouver, worked at a service station owned by a Sri Lankan immigrant. “He was a really great guy who worked really hard. But it was a franchise, and the franchisor was always giving him a hard time,” Mr. Taylor recalls. “They kept tightening the screws on him till they forced him out. I learned there is no such thing as job security even if you work hard. I saw that if you want to be successful you have to create your own situation.”

You’re networking, even when you don’t know it:

“Some of the people I met at the gas station I still have connections to in the Vancouver business community,” Mr. Taylor said. “I meet people now and sometimes I’ll say that we already met. ‘I used to wash your car 10 years ago.’ And they remember. Everything you do will come back to you, good or bad.”

Successful people get to play by different rules:

As an American kid in the Sixties, I had been well schooled on the evils of communism. On my last day on Wall Street, one broker brought a bunch of us kids to an exclusive restaurant. At the end of the meal I noticed a box of Cuban cigars for sale in a glass display case. “I thought they were illegal?” I naively asked him. “Sonny boy,” he said, “you can get anything you want on Wall Street.” I bought a box for my grandfather. Anti-communism be damned.