Doing the Grunt Work

Unless you are a child from a rich family and intend to inherit millions, you are going to have to look for a job. Everyone has to start somewhere, and it is usually at the bottom. It does not matter how much you have spent on your education and how qualified you think you may be, when you enter the workplace, there are going to be a lot of things that are completely new for you. You are going to have a lot more to learn about the real world.

More often than not, this learning process involves a lot of grunt work. You might be doing unpaid internships and have to stay in the office for long hours and no compensation, doing hardly any meaningful work. The people in the office might have you doing paperwork and photocopies, sometimes even ask you to fetch them some tea. Of course, holding a college degree, this kind of work might seem to be beneath you and you might start feeling like these menial tasks are not what you spent thousands of dollars and took out a student loan for. In times like these, you need to remind yourself that this grunt work is not meaningless. Every day you are learning something new about the office. You learn how the corporate culture works. When you do the paperwork, you see how companies maintain records and learn about accountability and just being in the same office, you learn how the people successful in their jobs think, how they operate, and how they manage their day. These are things that no number of books can teach you and they are the foundation of a workplace. One day when you are sitting in your own corner office, you will think about how far you have come. So, never be disheartened and make sure you give a hundred and ten percent every day in every job.