Last week I wrote about a 17-year-old who spent his summer at a prestigious firm learning to make himself small. I mentioned that I usually tell high school students to skip the fancy internship and go get a real job instead.
This week I want to show you what that actually looks like.
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When he was in high school, he bought a lawnmower and started knocking on doors.
That was the whole business plan. Knock, ask if they needed their lawn cut, do a good job, come back next week. He was a teenager with a mower and some nerve.
Then it grew. He saved up and bought a used truck so he could reach more customers and haul more equipment. Demand kept coming, so he brought in a few friends to work for him. Summers were the busiest, but spring and fall weekends were packed too. And the whole time, he was also a student, and he still played sports. He was selling the work, doing the work, and managing the people doing the work, all at once.
I knew him personally through college, and I watched something happen that has stuck with me ever since.
He was the best student in the business courses. Not because he was the best test-taker. Because while everyone else was learning concepts in the abstract, he could immediately ground them in something real. He had priced a job wrong and lost money on it. He had made payroll for his friends out of what he collected that week. He had dealt with the unhappy customer, the truck that broke down, the competitor who undercut him. The theory was not theory to him. It was just words for things he already understood.
Building something real, even something small, even something that looks unimpressive on paper, teaches you things that no class, no credential, and no prestigious internship can. When you run a lawn business out of a truck, you are not learning one function. You are learning all of them at once. Sales, because you have to knock on the door. Marketing, because you need referrals. Customer service, because an unhappy customer does not come back. Operations, because you have to actually deliver. Finance, because it is your own money on the line. Managing people, because now your friends are depending on you.
Those are some of the hardest things to teach someone all at once in a corporate job. He learned them the only way you really can: by doing it, getting things wrong, and getting better.
And here is where it went. He carried that instinct into his career and it became his superpower. He went on to consult for businesses and help turn them around, and he was good at it for one reason: he understood how a business actually works, not just the spreadsheet. He could look at a struggling company and see the sales problem, the operations problem, the people problem, and how they connected, because he had personally been every one of those roles years earlier.
I have worked closely with him since, and here is what I would tell you about him: he is business-minded first, and spreadsheets and theory come last. Most people do it backwards. They start with the model and hope it maps to reality. He starts with reality and uses the numbers to confirm what he already sees. That came straight from the lawnmower. That, and a relentless work ethic, which running a business at sixteen tends to build whether you want it or not.
So here is what I want you to take from this.
You do not need permission, a title, or a prestigious program to start learning how the real world works. Build something, however small. Start the business. Take on the side project. Run the club like a real organization. Sell something to a real customer and feel what happens when you get it wrong.
The credential tells people you completed something someone else designed. The thing you built yourself tells them you can create value where there was none. When I am sitting across the table from a candidate, the second one wins almost every time.
The lawnmower is available to everyone. Most people just never knock on the first door.
Talk soon,
Jeff
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P.S. Hit reply and tell me: what is something small you have built, or could start building, that would teach you how the real world works? I read every reply.