How finding a sports camp counselor job set me up for life

From The CoachCorner Blog

This is a little bit of a stream-of-consciousness, and I might come off as naive, but bear with me here. I went to good schools growing up, I've worked at a few great companies, and I've even completed a handful of other professional side quests like a software engineering boot camp and a startup accelerator. Throughout these experiences, I've learned some valuable hard skills that have been crucial for my professional arsenal, but in terms of my development as a human being, all of these experiences pale in comparison to my time as an overnight sports camp counselor. Now, I'm not saying drop out of your summer internship at Goldman Sachs to go be a camp counselor, but at the same time, I'm not not saying it. (I know, so edgy.) What I am saying is that developing soft skills at an early age is paramount to success later on, and there's no easier way to develop these skills than as a camp counselor.

As a 17-year-old at Camp Ojibwa in Eagle River, Wisconsin, I was thrust into the position of leader, entertainer, caretaker, and of course, coach. To a bunch of 12-year-olds, my job was to be their idol for a summer. Juxtapose that image with a 22-year-old starting their professional career at the bottom of the corporate ladder. To me, it's funny that both of these fairly common life stages have completely flipped mentalities. The younger guy has to have all of the answers. The older guy has expectations, but he doesn't have to be that leader.

In school and in the corporate world, you're given a strict path to follow. You level up by passing exams, completing projects, or meeting quotas. No matter what the metrics are, you have an authority figure to tell you what is a "good" job. When you're in charge of 20 adolescents, you have 20 authority figures to keep happy. There is far more ambiguity in what a good job is. I remember going out of my way to plan late-night "missions" for my campers, an activity that nobody assigned to me; it was just something that I wanted to do, and I knew it would make my campers happy.

When you're in charge of people, no matter the age, that stoic, improvisational, results-oriented, "fake it 'til you make it", whatever-you-want-to-call-it mentality gets ingrained into your brain, and the earlier you get exposed to that, the better. Whether it's working on a group project for school or working as a developer on an engineering team of a growth-stage company, you can tell who on your team has that optimistic, collaborative approach when everyone's reputation is on the line. You can tell who's had to do something like disinfect the scraped-up knee of a crying kid who took a spill on the basketball court. You can tell who's had to share a cabin with five other teenagers and 20 more elementary schoolers and make the most of it.

There's something about trial-by-fire where you're just forced to execute from the exposure that being a camp counselor provides, and it translates into the business world. Some of the greatest entrepreneurs emphasize a sales-now/fulfillment-later approach.