5 Life Lessons I Learned From Working Minimum Wage Jobs In High School

At the age of 15, my parents gave me a pretty tough ultimatum. Go get a job and earn some money after school if you want to get the latest video games and hang out with your friends. They were going to provide me with shelter, food and the bare minimums of course….but they weren’t going to pay for my luxuries.

At the time, I couldn’t stand my parents for putting me in this horrible situation. I was 15 years old, none of my friends had to work. Why did I have to get a job? I was working maybe 15 hours a week earning $300-$400 a month.

Looking back now, I’m so glad that my parents did what they did. The hardships and struggle I faced during those years gave me a sense of gratefulness that many others don’t understand still later in their lives. I would do the same thing with my children and I absolutely recommend you to do the same thing with your kids.

In this post, I share 5 life lessons I learned from working minimum wage jobs in high school:

1. Life Is Pretty Damn Tough 

As a child, you take everything in life for granted. Making money? Oh that’s my parents job and it’s extremely easy. Paying bills? Oh, that’s easy too. It was only after I took a job and learned how all this stuff works that I realized that life is extremely tough.

Making money isn’t easy. You can make it easy with the right mindset and set of skills, but it’s definitely not something anyone can just wake up one morning and do. Even getting employed by someone didn’t mean that my job was easy. I had to do work I didn’t want to do and show up when I didn’t want to show up. Getting a job this early gave me a solid perspective on life and I really understood just how tough things are.

2. Do What You Love 

I was extremely fortunate to truly understand what career happiness meant at a very young age. Many of my friends only realized this after graduating from college and taking a job. I learned at an early age that if I focused on work that I didn’t enjoy, I would be miserable and I wouldn’t be successful at it.

From an early age, I had mentally decided that I would only do work that I loved. If it didn’t excite me and I couldn’t get obsessed with it, I wouldn’t pursue it. Learning this lesson from working various jobs that I was disinterested in contributed to me doing the work that I do today.

3. Comfort And Change Don’t Go Together 

If you want change in your life, you’re not going to be comfortable. I quickly learned that by working these minimum wage jobs in high school. The change I needed was a salary and money to do the things I enjoyed. However, doing these things didn’t make me comfortable at all. I was very uncomfortable and unhappy with the circumstances.

If you want to change something in your life, you have to be willing to give up comfort. If you really want something bad enough, you are willing to do so while you’re uncomfortable. Just remember, change and comfort won’t go together and you have to choose one or the other to attain what you want in life.

4. Always Have A Bigger Picture 

Even when I was working each of these minimum jobs, I always wanted something more. I wanted more pay, more freedom and to do something more meaningful. I quickly learned at high school that you can never be satisfied with where you’re at, you always need to have a bigger picture.

Many people find their careers in an endless loop because they don’t have a bigger picture. To get the most out of life, I knew from an early age that I had to always demand more and have plans for something more.

5. Always Learn 

Even though I didn’t enjoy most of the minima wage jobs I took, I always made sure that I learned as much as I could. I asked my bosses and managers as many questions as I could and I was always focused on learning every single day. That mindset and mentality has NOT changed today.

If you continue educating yourself, you’ll get yourself better opportunities down the line. Working as a project manager for a web development company gave me the education I needed to launch my own multimedia agency a few years later. By keeping my eyes open and learning from people smarter than me, I was able to launch my own entrepreneurial career using what I had learned during my time working.

Conclusion 

In this post, I shared 5 life lessons I learned from working minimum wage jobs in high school. What are some life lessons that you learned from some of your first jobs?