If I Had A Million Dollars..

I remember my very first job. I was a grocery story bagger and it was 1993. The interview was one more suited for a teenager and asked the question, “well do you want the job or not?” I’m going to sound like a very old man here for a second but when I got that job it was a different time. You had to be there so I won’t bother elaborating too much further on it except to say that I ate cookies, smoked cigarettes and drank soda off the defective rack in the back of the store and that was the best part of the job for me. You can get in trouble for that now.

Back then the attire wasn’t a golf shirt and a nice pair of khaki colored jeans. It was a shirt, tie, slacks and a VERY RED apron….to bag groceries and clean bathrooms. The only thing personalized was my name tag which was a blank face with my label printed name on it. I’m talking the punch labels not the new thermal printed ones. I worked part time during the week after school and on some weekends. When I turned sixteen my dear parents entrusted me to get their navy-blue with tan accents, Eddie Bauer edition Ford Aerostar back to them in one piece. The drive to work was fun because it was independence for me.

My friends would come to my job and tell me I looked like a dork in my uniform. “I dress like this to get paid” I’d say to them. That would shut them up pretty fast. I worked four hour shifts at my very first job and every hour was painfully slow. It usually is that when you’re a teenager. I wanted to go hang out with my friends but I was saving for my own car. Grabbing carts in the heat while sweating in a long sleeve white shirt and wearing an undershirt fully buttoned up with a tight collar was something I remember well. There’s a picture of me somewhere standing mid-isle with a mop in my hands. That was courtesy of an upset toddler whose mother had let him have way too much to eat before carting him off in a hot car to the grocery store.

I talk about all of this because as I got older and had different jobs, my work went from the day being too much time to not being enough time. Throughout my years of working I would ask myself if I would still be working if I had a million dollars. I would revisit this question every few years and I wasn’t very much surprised at my answer changing. I’ve had jobs that I liked and jobs that I really despised. My poor mother never heard the end of it no matter which of the two the job was. In my younger years I would have told you that I would get myself a nice house and car and pay those off and never work again because I would have taken the rest of it to start a business (which you still need to actually work at).

These days I’ve asked myself that question again. Even if I had that million dollars I would still want to work. Maybe the pay grade would be something I could be more flexible on but I would still want to work. Heck lets face it. I NEED to work. Even with that amount of money I would still feel super naked without a job. Working isn’t just something that earns a paycheck to me. It’s something to be proud of. It’s something that says I have this opportunity to bring my talent to a company and provide for my family and then when people ask what I do, I can tell them I work for “so and so” doing “so and so” and in a social setting, I’m on the same level with all of those successful people. But even at its most basic, I just need to stay busy and I need to stay busy in something that helps me make a difference.

So when it comes to having a million dollars, I’d still be working. The time that a job shift allows has gone from being too much to too little. I used to be made to stay out and work late but in my last few positions I’ve done it because I feel I need to even when it’s not necessary. To me its that little extra effort that makes me stand out in what I do. I don’t want to be someone who “does a job”. I want to be someone who puts everything I am into the position I’ve been entrusted to do in order to help the company I work for grow while helping my bottom line grow as well.

The other question that always follows the “million dollar question” is what someone actually makes over their life time. I read this article that talks about this what the a person makes in their lifetime. Ironically, it’s over a million dollars. Wouldn’t it be interesting to get that full lifetime amount at 20 years old to see what you’d do with it?