My first job was occasionally delivering newspapers for The Daily Gazette. I was nine or ten and it was technically my older brother’s paper route, but the work was punishing and my dad was sympathetic, so usually he drove the car and my brother helped out. On weekends I went with them. We woke far before sunrise, picked up the stacks of papers on the corner, and if it was raining or snowy or icy — or the possibility of being so presented itself — we wrapped each newspaper in plastic before binding it in a rubber band. Some newspapers were tossed on driveways, many others were placed quietly on porches, and some were slid even more stealthily from in between screen door and front door. It frightened me immensely to have to tip toe by supposedly sleeping neighbors’ picture windows; I feared they’d be standing there waiting for me — or worse, greet me at the front door. We worked for meager pay and the reward of the sesame bagels that we got to go with my dad to get once we were finished with the route on Sundays. From this job I learned about painfully early wake-ups, and the importance of tips. Also, my dad worked the hardest on that paper route.
My next job, at fifteen, was at a small family-owned French bakery. I made croissants, danish, muffins, cookies, and cakes by the dozens. I decorated cakes with their signature fresh flowers and learned how to write in frosting. I wanted to be a pastry chef, or open a cafe. I learned how to efficiently scoop cake batter with the cup-shape of my hand, make frosting roses, and saw that even women with long fingernails could roll rugelach. I learned how wedding cakes get delivered (always with fingers crossed), and how many secret shortcuts even the best bakeries take (many). From this job I learned how to courteously answer a phone and get precise order details correct, about the deep sickly feeling that comes from eating too much sugar, and how to treat a large burn on your arm the night before prom (aloe vera, straight from the plant).
At eighteen I worked briefly at the GAP and after being assigned a floor re-setting overnight shift, fell asleep while driving home, crashed into a guard rail, ripped the right side off my parents’ car and nearly killed myself. From this I learned I’m not suited to work folding pants until 5 a.m.
I despaired during my first year of college in Washington D.C. and was desperate to use financial freedom as an escape from academia. I was on a work-study program through my university, so in addition to working in the school admissions office (digitizing college applications), I worked retail (again), and also worked in a mailroom. Somewhere between 6-classes-per semester and 30+ hour workweeks, I wrote a food column for the college paper, and on a whim, sent these clippings to a restaurant in Berkeley (Chez Panisse) politely asking for a pastry internship. Somehow, I got it, and could afford to go because of working those other three jobs.
Before I started, Mary, who was running the pastry kitchen at the time, reminded me to bring in my knives. I had no knives to speak of, but blamed not being able to bring them on the flight regulations after 9/11. Chez Panisse was a dream of a job. I was 20, walked to work in the beautifully consistent 6 a.m. climate of the East Bay in the summer, and made ice cream for breakfast every day. I taste-tested fresh fruit, polished fig leaves from Alice Waters’ tree, pitted thousands of cherries, and ate beautiful lunches in the garden out back with the restaurant staff prepared by the garde manger. I learned how to perfectly brulee and shave chocolate without it melting and about the tiny seed that’s inside the pits of apricots called the noyau. Toast it and it’s a bit like an almond, but more bitter, and beautiful steeped in ice cream. I learned how pleasant it is to work with people who are excited about showing up every day. The GM of the restaurant used to arrive at 6 a.m. to chop all the garlic we’d need in the day. People took time to eat well and eat together. I aspired to find a work environment like this again.
Afterwards, there was a hotel restaurant and a summer doing research with a clinical psychology professor in Ann Arbor, Michigan who shared his love of Leonard Cohen. After I transferred schools to Cornell, there was a job at the reference desk of the main research library — Olin — the finest feature of which was the antique call number board above the reference desk that we occasionally got to use if we needed to go up to the 7th (half) floor, where the most rare of documents and books were stored. Students got a ticker number, and when their number lit up on the board, their materials had been found. From this job I learned about kind bosses. Mine, Carol, adored the library. She took great pride in her students who worked at the reference desk and accommodated exhausted and fickle personalities. A few years after I graduated I got an email from Carol and she had been diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease. She had less than six months to live and wanted to let anyone she’d worked with know.
I graduated, moved to Brooklyn, and planned to take a year off before planning to go to a PhD program at Brown. I took a gig in market research. It was mostly number-crunching and recycling huge piles of wasted paper. That was a bust, but I made some friends, broke the dress code often, and learned how frustration could motivate new pursuits — mine was photography.
I freelanced for 8 months, organized live events with a small creative agency, and took photos at hundreds of badly lit restaurants for New York Magazine. I learned I’m a poor self-employer (equal parts anxiety and money), but that I still preferred working enough more than academia that I wouldn’t go to the PhD program. I was excited about the internet and art and entrepreneurship and couldn’t see myself in university libraries and classrooms (and more debt) for the next seven years.
I spent two years at a photo agency and learned I was good at fostering relationships with artists, a clear communicator, and stellar at managing vast quantities of logistics. I also learned I was face-blind at recognizing celebrities, which is true to this day.
After seven months trekking, mostly in South America and then across the US, I spent the next two years at a subsidiary of a large newspaper, on a staff of three (to become seven). It was my first experience working in an environment that viewed itself as a startup. Digital skills mattered and I’d been honing these since 1995. I worked on a team of all women and learned how to manage interns and junior employees. I learned how to pitch and execute on stories from end-to-end and how exciting it was to get to be invited to travel for work. The magazine eventually folded; publishing was changing. I felt worse for my boss than I did for myself because she had a lot more riding on it all.
I vowed to take time off, but didn’t and continued freelancing and then working as an early employee of an art e-commerce business. It was a startup and I was still young, optimistic, and the mantra of follow your passion was entering the zeitgeist. I was cavalier about contracts and agreements, terms and a job description, and it always felt like if we believed in the thing we were making it would All Work Out. I learned an enormous amount about startup growth, the importance of culture, and that as I got older there was more monetary value attached to my time. I learned even more about contemporary photography and the behind-the-scenes of a gallery and met thousands of artists who inspired a curiosity about processes behind creativity. The company moved with the morphing web and the nascent mobile world. I learned to speak the language of both artists and engineers and to write and edit for disperse audiences. I learned my exhaustion had a limit and I couldn’t do my best work if I tried to do too much work.
I got married and lost a friend and made a movie with my husband and thought a lot about work, time, money, and making. I worked at an interactive agency and learned client work was not for me. I preferred small teams and direct communication and moving and creating quicker and differently than that environment enabled.
My friend Raul started Tinybop in 2012 and asked me to come on board as the ideas started to become a business to be the Head of Product. Tinybop makes beautifully designed educational iOS apps for kids. It is a few years old, and we have three apps in the App Store being played by millions of kids around the world. Our team is over twenty now. Everything I have learned about work — communicating with people, motivation, staying current with technology, building culture, valuing peoples’ time, cultivating strengths, pushing skill-sets, taking criticism, being ambitious, eating lunch together, being a considerate manager, not demeaning any level of work, trying to develop policies that are fair and consistent, and working hard but not overworking — come from the combination of every other kind of work that came before it.
The thing I’ve learned from working is that working is one of the best ways of learning. Nearly everything I have done or learned had little to do with my expectations going in (or anything I could have foreseen). If I had stopped to consider all of all the things I might do from ages 15–30, the truth is: I didn’t know most of the jobs I would take on even existed. Yet, all of those things have contributed to an understanding of how to make my work more meaningful, and to define what work means to me.
