For a while now, the corporate “9-5 job” has been getting a pretty bad reputation. As someone who has, for the past five years, worked for herself, I am quick to agree that there are plenty of issues with how businesses and organizations do things.
However.
There is an important part of my history that came from a corporate job that offered me a lot of opportunities and crucial learning that made this lifestyle possible. And not acknowledging that – even celebrating it – seems a bit like throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
So today, I thought I would dedicate this blog post and a little mental space to a few of the things I am grateful for about my corporate experience:
Learning the nuts and bolts of a business – I would never have thought of this before going out on my own, but I learned so many of the basics of running a business from running business units at my corporate job. I probably wouldn’t have ever had exposure to a P&L, EBITDA, or basic systems without my early work years, and this knowledge ended up being a crucial piece to succeeding out on my own (or doing so more easily than others who didn’t get that experience ahead of time).
Understanding influence as power – there is a longstanding story we have that people with the highest/best title are the ones in charge and have all the power. In certain ways, this may be true, but what we don’t know until we experience it is the power that can come from people without a leader’s title. This is more about influence and, in my opinion, is so much more long-lasting and impactful than someone simply holding a VP or CEO title.
Dusting yourself off after screwing up – I didn’t think it then, because at the time everything seemed so important and vital and career-threatening, but having a corporate job was a place where I could make mistakes and had a team to help me learn from them (and sometimes help me clean up those mistakes). Being out on my own means I no longer have that safety net, so I’m thankful that I had the chance to make so many mistakes early on in a place where I had people around to help me learn and reflect and grow from those. I also got more than a few doses of humility and servings of crow. Yuck.
Not to mention that I also met many of my closest friends in that time, worked on some very interesting projects, and got a chance to build my financial foundation…as it turns out, my corporate experience was a huge contributor and springboard to this beautiful life.
What did your early work experiences (even if not in a corporate setting) bring you that you still find valuable today?
Just gettin’ shit done, the way I do…(big points to old co-workers who can name where this was taken!)
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