My first jobs were all connected to food and food service. My first job, when I’d just graduated high school and was saving up money for college, was washing dishes at Pizza Inn. My first two years of college I had a job at the campus snack bar, mostly doing food prep like cutting tomatoes and lettuce for burgers but also working the cash register. My junior year I got a job waiting tables, and I continued to wait tables at a few restaurants while I finished my degree, went back to school for teacher training, and as a second job my first few years of teaching.
A month or so ago I had a meeting with a man who has a career-coaching start-up. At some point in the conversation, he said it was working as a waiter that turned him from a shy introvert to someone who knew how to talk to people. He was then able to go on to have a career in law and consulting. I told him that I had the same experience; I’m still a shy introvert, but most everything I learned about working with people I learned from waiting tables for seven years. I can’t imagine I could have been a successful high school teacher without the practice I got as a server.
So I want to pass on this advice to high school students and even college students: forget about fancy internship for now and get a job in the service industry. There’s a lot of pressure to get some kind of job within your chosen field, to work with people in your chosen field, and to have a job history within your chosen field as soon as possible. I understand that pressure and don’t necessarily disagree, but if you plan to ever work with other people, then you can’t go wrong getting some experience in a service job. It doesn’t matter whether it's waiting tables, working in a coffee shop, delivering pizzas, or working retail. Any job that puts you face-to-face with people, all day long, will teach you more than you expect. In an internship you may interact with the same dozen people every day. In a service job, you interact with dozens or hundreds of different people every day. There’s just a much bigger pool of experiences to draw from. A lot of the people I know with impressive-sounding job titles like CEO and law firm partner got their start working at fast food places or retail jobs. It teaches you a lot.
Service jobs teach you how to interact with people. In school, you practice talking in class or giving presentations. It’s a highly regulated and specialized environment. In the service industry you learn how to work with all kinds of environments. You learn how to speak with strangers. You learn how to “read” a customer’s mood—are they in a rush, are they having a bad day, are they joking, are they desperately trying to impress the person they’re with? You get better at understanding people just by watching them.
In a way, all careers are built on the same foundation: you collect information, you look for patterns, and you use the patterns to make predictions and act on them. Service jobs give you a fast-paced, real-life training ground. You’ll start noticing how different people react to the same situation. You’ll learn how small changes in what you say or do can make people respond better. And you get instant feedback. If you're kind, efficient, and helpful, people tip more. If you mess up, they complain. The results are immediate and measurable.
Service jobs give you practice solving problems quickly. In a restaurant, problems come at you fast. Someone's order is wrong. A drink gets spilled. A customer is angry because they had to wait. And you can't say, "let me learn more and get back to you next week." You can’t hide behind email. You can’t contemplate. You have to deal with it, so you learn on your feet. You figure out when to fix something yourself, when to ask for help, when to apologize even if you weren’t at fault just to make things smoother (that’s a hard one), and when to find a manager or expert because you’re out of your depth. That kind of fast, flexible thinking is useful in any job. Later, when you're in a meeting, or leading a team, or applying for a job, you’ll already be used to handling problems calmly and creatively.
Service jobs give you practice understanding the big picture. Service industry jobs—especially in small businesses—teach you about every layer of a team. In a small restaurant I worked in a space of maybe 5,000 square feet. And in that space, I regularly interacted with a dishwasher from a small town working his first job, cooks who were older than me and who had worked in kitchens all over the city, other college students looking for a way to pay their tuition, older professional servers who had worked in big hotels and trained most of the new hires, managers with business degrees, and the self-made businessman owner. Not to mention the customers. In an office job, you might never meet the people who clean the building or the ones who make big financial decisions. But in a small business, you might talk to everyone in a single shift. You hear stories, learn how decisions are made, and see how every role supports the others. That kind of exposure is incredibly valuable.
Can I give any specific examples of something I learned from waiting tables that was really helpful in other situations? Sure. Let me give two of the biggest lessons that I’ve kept with me for the decades since I moved on from waiting tables.
One afternoon a customer asked if we had something. I don’t remember what it was, but it was something we didn’t have, so I said “no, we don’t have that.” My boss overheard the conversation, and at the end of the shift he brought it up. He told me “when someone asks for something, never say no. If it’s for something you can’t do, say ‘let me see what I can do’ and then come back with some kind of offer. If you have multiple things to offer, they feel like they’re getting luxury instead of feeling like they didn’t get something.” This is basic Negotiating 101. Find a win-win, look for common ground, think outside the box, stuff like that. But “don’t say no, say let me see what I can do” is how I learned it. It means that you stay helpful, that you look for options, that you try. This approach makes you someone that people want to work with. It makes you think about possibility, and it makes you think about your own agency and power, even when you’re in a situation where you have little. Does it always work? Of course not. As a teacher I had students, parents, and administrators ask for things I couldn’t give them. I would find some kind of counter-offer, ideally several, and they still weren’t satisfied. But even in those cases the narrative shifted from “You asked for something and I chose not to give it to me” to “You asked for something and you chose not to take any of what I offered you.”
Another thing I learned over time working in food service is that people like charm, but they respect discipline. Being friendly is important, but being reliable matters more. I worked with plenty of people who were more charismatic than I am—most people are. But being good with people and having natural leadership instincts still don’t get you very far if you don’t also have self-discipline. Being fun and charming might help you get the job, but you’ll lose the job soon if you’re also flaky. Show up on time. Do your part. Be consistent. Learn as much as you can. Over time, that earns real respect—and bigger opportunities.
Service jobs may not sound glamorous or like the right path to the kind of career you aspire to. But they’re some of the best places to learn how to be a capable, confident person. It might not be the most “impressive” line on your résumé, but it’ll shape who you are in a way that can impress most anyone.
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