I was reflecting on leaders I’ve had and how they have impacted me over time. Whether it is the guy who ran the gas station, who told me he hired me as a joke that he could hold over my old man, or the woman who sacrificed her career for others. There have been some fantastic lessons in leadership that have caused this crazed person I’ve become.
When I was growing up, there was this perception that you’d better hustle, and I started working around the time I was 9 or 10. Don’t get me wrong, before that, I worked, but we called it “chores.” Mowing lawns with open rotary-powered mowers, driving tractor mowers, raking the clippings, and bagging or burning them with gasoline as a six-year-old was pretty normal then.
Before the millenistas and zippydodahs say, “What ev boomer?” first, I’m not a boomer; I’m an X’er, and second, STFU. It’s just how life was, not some tragedy of walking uphill both ways in a snowstorm to school. Besides, unlike you youth worship conformists, I usually skipped school if it snowed.
I realize that people formed my opinion and shaped my worldview through influence, logic, creativity, and, occasionally, slapping me around like a baloney sandwich in a Labrador Retriever bite range. How you treat other people is just about as important as how you treat me is one of the lessons. From that perspective, know that people are constantly learning from you.
Take my youthful exuberance of pumping gas at a local gas station. I was given every garbage job, every horrific task, service work with oil and grease, and the expectation to always look clean as a whistle. I was called names, jerked around physically, pushed, pulled, sweated, and then had my pay held back because of some perceived slight or wrong likely made up. I was belittled in front of customers but kept plodding along. There is no nobility in this, for sure. I didn’t know any better. Little did I know others were watching me, too.
One slow Sunday, I came in early and worked for free because I hadn’t gotten a task done the night before. I was standing at the counter sorting screws and bolts into these tiny little gray box squares because my boss poured them out and said do it again as he said one was in the wrong square when one of the top customers of the garage walked in.
This customer had half a dozen 60s muscle cars that the shop serviced. He also owned a fleet of fishing boats and a few charter boats. He was coming in to buy a soda from the coin vend machine. I asked him if he needed anything, how his GTO was running (delivered a few days prior) and opened the door for him as he left. He asked a few questions about my motorcycle, my dad, and the brunette he’d seen me with a few times. I hesitated when he asked if I’d work for him starting the next day. I’d owe the boss some notice, and though I appreciated it, I couldn’t do that.
When I walked into the shop the next day, the owner fired me on the spot. He threw what was less than half my owed wages at me and told me to GTFO of the building. Waiting outside in his sports car was the other guy. He said now you can work for me. If I continued working there, he’d threatened to pull all of his business from the gas station and shop owner.
Fair? Legal? Right? I don’t know. It was a fortuitous situation. I’ve often felt in my life like a mildly inebriated Mr. Magoo bi-focal-wearing but mostly blind buffoon moving through the world. I spent a year working for the sports car driver. He taught me about profit, loss, receipts, and cash flow. He gave me ideas for starting a business. When I owed some time to my godparents, he asked about their business. He quizzed me extensively, and I explained how they operated and what they did. So, he started using them for some of his projects. He told them to give me a commission (they did) as I was their best sales rep. To say the experience was night and day difference isn’t giving credit to either of those situations. After a year, he pointed me to a few other opportunities and told me to chase one. I wasn’t fired as so much as launched.
I’ve always thought of this as the definition of mentorship. When I returned home from the Marines, we had a beer together. I asked why he took the time to teach and gave me so much experience. He said, “Discipline and keeping your mouth shut can be taught but are rare naturally.” He knew I was an angry young man, but that I kept just eating the turd sandwich the situation was handing me. He said, “If you eat all that fertilizer day in and day out, then you will be amazing with room to grow.” So, he decided to invest in me.
I was shaped by going through military basic training not once but TWO times. I successfully completed both the Army basic training and the Marine Corps boot camp within a year. I’ve completed some military training with 80% to 90% drop rates. I’ve never been the recruiting poster military guy. I ran too slow. I was too fat. I am ugly, and those are some of my most endearing military features. My only redeeming factor is I didn’t give up.
Pain is an opportunity, whether yours or others and is often a choice. I’ve had numerous influential female leaders in my life. To the sillies who complain about mansplaining the woes of others, take a chill pill and listen. No hush. Sargent R and later Gunnery Sargent R walked through my life a few times. As one of her troops, she manhandled, guided, bopped, and persuaded by foot my understanding of the world. She represented the raving red-handed reality that a strongly opinionated woman is considered a b*tch in a world where the same behavior by a man is rewarded.
A school system is often a competitive environment where seniority does not bestow success. So, she and I were peers in the classroom, and she was a superior on the parade deck. She taught me that those willing to be led will succeed regardless, and those who select out will fail. In a volunteer in structure, she said if you work with her after classes (extra work), she will make it far more likely to be standing at the end. The 12 out of 85 that opted in with her were the 12 that finished the class. She gave first, held firm on commitment, and drove towards a vision of success. That is leadership.
I would see her again a few promotions later. I had been looking to move up to Sargent (I didn’t know my world would explode a few weeks later). She had put on Gunnery Sargent and was maxed out in her MOS and approaching her 20th year. Her choice to lead instead of politic had set events for her career to end. At a fortuitous meeting (among so many in my life), she sat me at a picnic table where we discussed things. Along that conversation, she said, “The Marines are not for you. You are good for the Marines. The Marines is not good for you.” We discussed opportunity and leadership, and she counseled me on the difference between dogma and motivation. She argued that pithy sayings and posters on the wall are not leadership. She told me the one thing that stuck with me, “Leaders build leaders, not followers.”
I was not the cool kid in school. I was far from that. I was not a nerd, geek, jock, grunge, or anything else with an identity. Being a nameless and absent tribe builds self-resilience. Regardless of a lot of toxic traits, I was most assuredly not part of what would become a toxic hustle culture. I mostly went to school and worked 40 or 50 hours a week at whatever part-time jobs I could put together into cash. The cash bought my freedom, a car, and a place to stay, and attracted the youthful hyenas of the financial world, teenage females. That, though, is a story for another time.
Reflecting on these early lessons is a lot of garbage most people likely feel doesn’t apply. I wasn’t given many opportunities due to my work product, but what I did with my actions and behaviors resulted in an opportunity. You never know who is watching and who is intrigued by how you comport yourself when it doesn’t matter or you have no choice. Similarly, leadership lessons sometimes result from the worst things you experience. I am intrigued by the leadership lesson modern corporate America teaches the millenistas and zippydodahs.
Similarly, I would hope that the flashfire response to be called millenistas and zippydodahs with hostile emotions instead of reflection on the totality of the message might ring with irony. However, the lessons of mentorship, leadership, and resilience are likely lost by most. That few who listened over the years to the prattling of a Gen X’d DILLIGAF fat man and succeeded; I salute you.