Personal Narrative: Life Lessons Learned In My Life

There have been tons of things that I have learned and been taught in my life, by a number of people such as family, teachers, or even friends on occasion. The things they taught me vary from math and other related subjects to just some truly simple yet meaningful life lessons. However, there is nothing quite as unique, quite as special as a person teaching themselves a life lesson. It really is an amazing accomplishment for a person to teach themselves something. It is not quite as simple as another person teaching them something because it is not just the transferring of information from one person to another. The person instead has to start from scratch and process the information they have in their mind in order to come up with a new thought

or idea they have never had before.

I have taught myself several things in life, but one of them sticks out more than all the others, and that’s the lessons I have taught myself during my experiences with my first two jobs. These learning experiences I have had have helped me to mature and grow into an adult, and they have changed my life for the better.
I have had two jobs in my short lifetime, one with a lawn care service and one with QuikTrip. These two jobs vary from each other greatly, and they are both pretty much on different ends of the spectrum. I have really liked the fact that these two jobs are so different from each other, and I think it has helped me to mature in a wide variety of different ways. Lawn care is a fully outside job, and the worker usually has to work really hard in the scorching sun and so they end up sweating a lot. I actually enjoyed it a lot because of the outside aspect

though, and also for the fact that it was a job that was only needed about 8 months out of the year. Another aspect of lawn care is that there is usually not very much interaction with the customer. QuikTrip, on the other hand, is pretty much total interaction with the customer, something that I enjoy immensely. Pretty much all the time I spend there I am expected to put the customer first. This “customer first” mentality is done in a lot of different ways, including things such as making sure the store is clean at all times, working the cash register and giving every customer that buys something a welcoming greeting, and working back in the small kitchen and preparing pretzels and pizza. Another characteristic about QuikTrip is that it is primarily inside. There are a couple small jobs to do outside, such as taking out the trash and checking all the pumps, but it is not The kind of get all dirty and sweaty job like mowing is. In the end, I really like both of these jobs, and because the experiences with each were so different, I learn from the a variety of different things and grew in numerous ways.
Mowing was my first job, and I started it the summer after my sophomore year.

It was my job for two summers, and was a great, exciting first job. One of the aspects that was very neat about it was the fact that I started it once school got out for the summer, and then once school started back up at the end of the summer I stopped working so I could put all my focus into school. I was primary weed eater for my first summer, simply because I was the newest guy on the job and also the youngest. I didn’t enjoy this near as much as I did mowing, but it taught me a lot about what hard work. We mowed a really big trailer park every other week, and I was in charge of weedeating the whole thing. I had to weedeat around all the pipes and poles sticking out of the ground, and although there was a bunch of those I didn’t really mind that part of the job much. However, the part of this that I absolutely hated was that I had to weedeat two or three decent size hills that were too steep to get a mower on. The worst part of this was that it was a job that couldn’t be done in the morning because the steep hills would be too slippery from the dew, so usually I would have to wait until the extreme heat of midday. This was one of the hardest things I had ever done before, and I truly hated it. However, because it was one of the hardest things I have ever done, it taught me what hard work really was. It taught me how to work hard, and showed me the rewards of my hard work through my paycheck

each and every week. Another thing I learned from this job was the matter of seniority. My second summer on the job I was allowed to mow more and not as much of the weedeating was on my shoulders. This was really nice because I enjoyed mowing way more than weedeating, and it taught me that hard work can help a person move up in their job and eventually lead to them getting to do something the they enjoy more. Another lesson this job taught me is how great it is to make have a job and get paid. This was my first time experiencing it, and I loved it. I still really enjoy getting a paycheck and putting some of it into my savings account, and it is really cool not having to ask my parents for money anymore as well. Probably the last thing that this job taught me was that even though work is usually something that most people think of as annoying and not fun, it can be very fun if a person surrounds himself with a good environment and people that he truly enjoy being around. I got the pleasure of getting to hangout with some really neat, funny guys that summer, and that helped make everyday very entertaining. Lunch breaks were always fun, and sometimes we would take a short little nap afterwards. Also, we would drive out to Kansas to do a bunch of stuff on the other side of Kansas City about once a week, and the car ride was always very interesting and a pretty good time. This just goes to show that having a job can sometimes be looked at the wrong with, and that a person can make it enjoyable if they go into it having the right attitude.
My second job and the one I currently have is at QuikTrip. I am a part-time clerk there, and I usually work Tuesday night, Saturday morning, and Sunday morning every week. I have only worked there for about a month and a half. but although I don’t have a lot of experience I have already learned a lot of lessons from it. Probably the biggest thing it has been teaching me is how to treat customers. It has taught me how to treat customers, but it has really just taught me how to treat people in general as well, and I am truly grateful for that. Quiktrip has tons of customers come through their doors and buy food, drinks, and other goods every single hour, and their employees are expected to greet each of them with a smile and top of the line customer service. We are also required to give every person we check out a form of greeting when they first come to the counter, usually I say something along the lines of “Hi, how are you doing?”, as well as a required thank you and bye at the end of each transaction, and usually I go with “Thank you, see you next time.” This can get extremely hard at times, for multiple reasons actually. First of all, after being friendly and putting a smile on for so long, a person can tend to get kind of grumpy. Also, at the end of an 8 hour shift a person can become very tired, and they can start mixing there words together. This has happened to me before and I would not be surprised if it happens again. Another thing this experience has taught me is how to learn and retain information fast, as well as how to fullfill all my duties fast. QuikTrip has so many little jobs that the employees do, and not only is a worker supposed to be able to do them all, they are supposed to be done very precisely. These include things such as cleaning counters, making coffee, and making sure cups are stocked properly, as well as bagging ice, stocking hot dog buns, stocking coolers, and filling the grills with the right food. These may all seem very easy, but they are all expect to be done in just the right way and they each have a required amount of time they have to be finished in, and this makes them a lot harder than they sound. This has been a very good experience however, and has helped me to become a much better learner and faster worker, as well as a good time manager. It is kind of neat how I’ve been able to relate the things I’ve learned to other aspects of my life as well, and I’ve really done a lot better at time managing things such as homework and hanging out with friends.
The most important lesson having a job has taught me is to not be lazy. There are way too many people who make excuses for not having a job or not having money, yet there is a lot of irony in this. The people who usually sit around and make excuses are usually people who do not do anything to try to find a job or way of making money. These are just lazy people who want things handed to them, and they do not do anything but get money handed to them by the government and barely get by. My philosophy would be go out, get a job, go to work, and make some money. A person should be expected to make something of themselves instead of just being lazy all the time. I agree with what said when she wrote “Aristotle taught that without a fully active role in community life one could not hope to become a healthy member of society” (Gatto 180). This is very true, and I think we find this very apparent in today’s society. If a person is without a job, I would have to say that they aren’t playing a fully active role in society. And usually these people with no job are definitely not healthy members of society. They are usually the lower class, who wonder why they are in the lower class. Yet they are also people who are usually people who are on drugs and receiving just enough money from the government so that they can live, and that doesn’t sound like a very healthy life t me at all. They aren’t making much contribution to society, but are only getting money from other people’s taxes. We should expect people to get a job, and even go as far as to require them to if we could find a way. If we required people to get jobs, we would see a rise in the standard of living in this country. People would be doing more to make money and better themselves, and they just might be able to learn some of the very important lessons that I did in the process. It would be truly amazing to see how drastically it would change some people’s lives, and not only would it do that but it would also improve our country in the process.