What was your first job?

On Saturday, I took my 12-year old daughter to a babysitting training course offered at our local children’s hospital. She recently started taking care of a little kid in the neighborhood once a week and, unlike when I first started babysitting in the 1980s, the standards for childcare are much higher.

Adventures in Babysitting

I did some babysitting starting at about her age, perhaps a little younger. This short-lived career ended when I was babysitting for the poet Anne Waldman in Boulder in seventh grade. Her kid had gone to bed and I was sitting on the couch when I saw a spider, which I assumed to be a black widow, climbing on the wall of the living room. At home, I would scream and have my dad catch it and put it outside, but that wasn’t an option. I stood on a chair for two hours and waited for Anne to come home. Standing there on the chair I made the decision that babysitting wasn’t for me.

Holiday Paperboy

When I was in grade school, I did the paperboy thing. I delivered the Chronicle-Herald, the local newspaper in Halifax. I didn’t get a route, but instead signed up to take over a route for another kid during Christmas break. They had to travel and needed someone to cover for them. It was a great gig because it was during the holidays and you only delivered inside apartment buildings, so you got the holiday tips without braving the holiday weather. It only lasted for two years. The 5:00 am wake up and the horrible stench of the halls of the apartment buildings was just not worth it. I can still recall the smell—a blend of frozen dinners, smoke, and urine.

McDonald’s

At 15, I moved to Ann Arbor to live with my dad, his second wife, and their two kids. A year later, my stepmother demanded that I get a job. I applied and landed a breakfast shift position at a new McDonald’s that opened up near our graduate school housing apartment complex. I still had the early start, but that wasn’t why I quit after only a week. My career in fast food ended prematurely when I burnt myself (pretty badly) on the bun toaster.

Entrepreneurship

A few weeks later, I attended a baseball card show at a union hall in Livonia, a blue-collar suburb just outside of Detroit. Table after table of sports cards—it was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. I was there to buy a 1984 Topps Don Mattingly rookie card with my birthday money. I was named after Hank Aaron but grew up a Yankees fan and a near-religious Mattingly fan.

Just after buying the card, I witnessed one of the dealers at another table buy the same card from someone else for half of what I paid for it. It was at that moment that I was introduced to the difference between wholesale and retail pricing. Game changer. When you are on the other side of the table, you get any card you want for 50% off and you make a ton of money, so you can buy all the cards you want. Why wasn’t everyone doing this?!

The next month, my friend Davy Rothbart and I founded Slam Dunk Sports Cards. We printed business cards and rented a table at the same union hall. We did dozens of shows and walked away each time with a fat wad of $20s. More importantly, rather than making hotcakes, I was spending my weekends talking sports and learning all about sales and marketing. It was my first of what would be many adventures in entrepreneurship.

Perhaps what I loved most, however, was the baseball card community. There are no autoworkers or athletes in my family - we are doctors, academics, and social entrepreneurs. Selling cards in Union and American Legion halls in the Detroit suburbs introduced me to people I would not have met otherwise. I saw how a shared passion could bridge communities.

Looking back over the past 25 years, it is clear that a core part of my purpose emerged at Slam Dunk Sports Cards. My career has largely been about connecting people and bridging communities by finding our common ground. I see community as the most powerful way to create sustainable change.

The Role of Childhood Jobs

I used to look back on these early jobs and be embarrassed by the lack of resilience. But now I try to think of it more like an agile career model—necessary experimentation to eventually find my path. If my daughter gives up on her babysitting career, I am going to try to remember that rather than stew about the Saturday I gave up driving her to and from training.

What was your first job? How did you find your way?

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Aaron Hurst is the foremost expert on the science of purpose at work and in 2014 brought global awareness to the rise of the fourth economic era in history, the Purpose Economy. He is the CEO and Co-Founder of Imperative, the technology platform for leaders in the new economy. Sign up for a free trial of the Imperative platform here.