So many of the things I’ve learned in my professional career have had very little application in day-to-day life. I’ve known people who can crossover their professional careers into daily life to the point that they’ve made something really useful but I’m just not one of those people. My skills as a graphic designer would do very little in my household except possibly make things more visually organized. At least with enough effort to make my time well spent.

With that, a lot of the things that I learned in supposed “shit jobs,” or the ones you’re doing while waiting to grow up, have given me some really useful skills that made my life easier. As an example, while bartending I learned a really useful way to quickly wash glasses so they don’t need to be dried all that much and dry without spots. You take two baths of water, one soapy and hot and the other very cold. Wash your glass or bottle or whatever in the hot soapy one and then immediately dunk it in the cold one a couple times and set it to drain. It’ll be dry and spot free in at most half the time it would take if you just washed and rinsed in similar temperature water. While this is an incredibly simplistic example of a learned skill, it’s practical. Much more practical (at least for me, especially right now) than being really good with spreadsheets or computer programming.

There are others and they’ve mostly come from jobs I’ve had in my youth. I’ll also add that these jobs do a lot to teach independence while office jobs keep you focused on the task. If your printer breaks in the office, there’s someone else to fix it for you. I can remember a lot of times in restaurant jobs where if something broke there was someone to fix it for you but that person would also teach you how to do it yourself if the time allotted. I think a lot comes from the willingness to learn as well. There were a few managers I had in restaurant jobs who were excellent teachers whether they knew it or not and that was independent from how good of a boss they were.

As much as I might not have liked some of the jobs I’ve had in the past, I certainly remember the good bosses. Those are hard to come by.