It was the summer between seventh and eighth grade, and I was enrolled in a small private school. As the son of parents who ran their own small business, we were on the constant roller coaster of success and however you want to define “not-success.” To cover my tuition, I spent that summer working on the school janitorial team, helping pay my own way. My main job was cleaning lockers, and there were hundreds of them. I learned the tools of the trade – which solvents remove permanent marker, the perfect technique for scraping gum out of the corners, and at one point the wrist motion for repainting the football field shed.
I scraped and I scrubbed those lockers until they gleamed. Over time, I came to realize this job was one of the most valuable experiences I could have ever had.
Here’s what I learned…
First, life’s not fair. There are no handouts. The best way to get what you want, no matter what that may be, is to work for it. Hustle. I took this for granted in middle school. In fact, at the time I hated the fact that I had to work for my tuition. It was embarrassing. In my mind, it wasn’t fair that I was pushing mops and scraping ABC (already been chewed) gum while all my friends had to do was show up on the first day of school. Why couldn’t my dad just pay for it like everyone else? I didn’t realize back then that life’s just not fair. It is what it is – deal with it.
The second thing I learned cleaning those rows of lockers is that the right tool makes the work go fast. I had four or five different solvents and cleaners at my disposal, metal scrapers, scrubbing pads, and some rags. Depending on what I encountered inside a locker, specific cleaners handled the job and others didn’t. The secret to making the work easy was to pick the right can, spray it, and then let it do the work. Once it had set for a moment, the cleaning part was easier as long as you grabbed the right scraper or scrubber. The key was always in choosing the right tools.
Third, and this is universal throughout life, a little elbow grease goes a long way. Sometimes a locker required a little more work to get done. I opened lockers that looked like they had been tagged by world-class graffiti artists, where the only way to bust through the layers of marks was to scrub, and scrub, and scrub some more. Rarely was the job easy, and as I think back on my boss, “good enough” was not part of our summer vocabulary.
That summer started off brutal, but as the weeks passed, it got better. The work was hard, sometimes embarrassing, and didn’t feel fair. Looking back though, it ended up amazing. My coworkers were like me, paying their way too, and over the summer we developed a relationship something akin to the Breakfast Club. This was our tribe, we made the work fun, and I wouldn’t trade those days for anything.
My workplace today doesn’t resemble school halls lined with metal lockers, and my tools are no longer spray cans of solvent and metal scrapers. As different as life is today though, the lessons I learned in those hallways have stood the test of time. There are still days when life doesn’t feel fair. I still have to pick the right tools. Hard work and elbow grease are still a must have. And having the right tribe by your side makes it all go a little smoother.
The Takeaways
Life’s not fair, get over it. Pick the right tools, they make the job easier. Hustle, then hustle some more. Do it all with a smile.
