No Experience in Your Life is a Total Waste

Robert Greene is one of my favorite authors. He is like the James Cameron of books. He writes a book every 10 years and it becomes a bestseller. When I interviewed him about his book Mastery, "no experience in your life should be thought of as wasted."

Robert did not start his career as James Cameron of publishing. Before he was 37, nobody knew who he was. He did research for Hollywood filmmakers.

Think of any film based on a true story: A Beautiful Mind, JFK, Catch Me If You Can. He may not have worked on any of those films, but Robert's job would be to research everything he could about a character, a period, etc.

And if you have ever read his books, you will recognize the influence his work as a researcher had on his ability to write the books he does.

I wasn't a good college student, which meant that jobs in management consulting or investment banking were off the table, and the only other job I could make that money from was in sales.

No one cared about your GPA if you wanted to work in sales.

My first job was selling medical transcription software to people who were more excited about winning a voucher for Bed Bath n Beyond than a cool gadget. Five days before Christmas, the company fired me.

After that, I spent the next 10 years hopping from one sales job to the next. In one of my interviews, a CEO who had not hired me said,

"Working in sales is invaluable to your career, even if you don't see it now."

It took me 10 years to find out that I hated working in sales, and another couple of years to see that me and a regular job were a match made in hell.

When I began my career as a writer, podcast host and entrepreneur, I couldn't help but think

I've wasted 10 years of my life. How could it be useful to be fired from all those sales jobs? That CEO who said that working in sales was invaluable was an idiot. I couldn't keep a damn job. When will I ever use what I learned from those jobs?

Twenty years after my first job in sales, a company called Radiopublic started a venture capital fund to invest in podcasts. I filled out an application and the investors invited me to pitch to them. I raised my first seed investment.  

All these years I thought I had wasted 10 years of my life and couldn't sell sugar to an ice cream maker. It turns out that the CEO wasn't such an idiot.

If you read this, you may hate your job as much as I did. You might wonder why you bother to show up at work at all and look forward to the day when you walk into your office and give your boss the finger.

You only realize it in retrospect, but no life experience is a complete waste.