You accept your first job ready to conquer the world, with both fire and fear in your belly.... and then you start learning things. Some of it transforms you and your career in a positive way, and some stifles you and limits you. What are the things of value that you learn in your first job that can serve your career forever? The things you sometimes forget? Here's a few key examples, some of which may seem contradictory! But, then again, that's the balanced nature of learning!
Being bold: You learned that if you didn't speak up, with new ideas, or even on your own behalf, no one else would speak for you. If you were lucky, and your first boss was the type who "took blame and gave credit", your good ideas and efforts were acknowledged and rewarded. This taught you to be proactive and take initiative.
Being patient: You didn't always get your way. You saw people do things you knew were wrong or counterproductive. But, you couldn't always convince people to see the light. This taught you to pick your battles, calculate the risk/reward ratio, look for win-win solutions, let go of things you can't control, and wait things out when best.
Honesty: You saw people work the angles, protect themselves, cover up mistakes, and hopefully, you saw that this approach doesn't work out in the long run. Either you started with high integrity, or maybe you observed that over time, it's the only way. This taught you to build and maintain your credibility and reputational capital by being straight with people.
Never respond in anger: To learn this, you probably had to make mistakes. You mouthed off at someone before reflecting on a better answer, or composed a ranting e-mail and didn't wait a few hours to revise it. You paid for these mistakes. You saw that a measured response works better. You learned to criticize the action, not the person, and respond in productive ways.
Strive for excellence, not perfection: Perfect is the enemy of good enough. If you started as a perfectionist, you undoubtedly experienced frustration in learning that perfection is impossible to achieve. With consistently high quality standards and perspective, you learned how to create excellence: on time, on budget, with a satisfied customer.
Ask for help: Weren't we all such know-it-alls, starting out? Wow, then we learned what we didn't know, and, if you had a wise boss with a "no such thing as a dumb question" attitude, you learned you could avoid disaster by asking for help, and look even smarter and more capable than if you hadn't asked.
Look for improvement opportunities: You saw complacent people gathering cobwebs, being unhappy, being scorned by their colleagues, and fading away in the shadows. If your company had a continuous improvement philosophy, you learned to step outside of yourself and your processes, listen to input, and to always be open to considering a better way.
The customer is always right: Early in our careers, many of us thought that customers were dumb, demanding, unreasonable, and other things not fit for print. Sure, but when we discovered the way to satisfy them anyway, who won? We did, in the long run.
Two ears, one mouth: Smart people like to hear themselves talk. Eventually they see that you can get even more done, especially as a manager, by listening. Sales execs learn to close customers with the customer's words, not their own, by listening twice as much as they speak.
Turn difficulties into opportunities: If you are reading this, you are probably in leadership, so you were NOT one of the people who carried an invisible backpack full of obstacles to throw in your own path and the paths of others. But we've seen those people many times. Leaders learn that problems are challenges, and troublesome information is simply life's instruction on what needs to be done next. If you learned this, you became a leader in large part from this lesson.
Meet others at their model of the world: Last but not least, we originally thought that our perceptions were reality. Then we saw if we diminished or dismissed the perceptions of others, we couldn't get very far. Every individual we meet is simply asking us to meet them at their model of the world. This is one of the hardest lessons, but perhaps the most important.
How many of these lessons did you learn? How many do you still use? How many did you forget? Take a brief trip down memory lane to your first job, and see what you can recall that still serves you well today.
