5 Lessons I Learned From Being a Personal Assistant
How Being an Assistant Made Me a Better Person… Years Later
Does anyone WANT to be a personal assistant? You make phone calls, run errands, book car rentals, complete Amazon orders, and do God knows what else… Is it really a job where people find happiness?
Most likely, not. But it is a job that can make you a better person and employee… but only after you leave.
When I was 23 years old I lived in Los Angeles and worked for a director who owned their own film and theatre production company. I responded to an ad about an internship opportunity.
That internship turned into a full-time job offer and before I knew it was I was living in LA, working for a director, and driving around Tinseltown. It was great at first.
I worked from 10–6 on weekdays which left me plenty of time on the weekends to work on my non-existent screenwriting career. Because I obviously wanted to be a screenwriter. I was living the LA dream. Kind of.
Being an assistant is weird. I had so much power and yet so little. I did everything from grocery shopping to delivering scripts to picking her son up from school every day to impersonating my boss's identity over the phone.
But I also had access to her credit cards, pin numbers, online banking accounts, and social security number. She trusted me. I even drove her leased Mercedes around town.
Being an assistant can be humiliating. But it’s a foot in the door in the industry. So, assistants are willing to put up with a lot because sometimes they lead to incredible opportunities.
I got to work on the set of a feature film because my boss was directing it! Sometimes, it’s really cool.
Being someone’s assistant was a huge learning experience for me.
Here are FIVE lessons I learned that made me a better person and employee years after I left my assistant job.
Lesson 1: I learned to value other people’s time.
Because I was working on some else’s time, I felt I needed to use it as efficiently as possible. If I was given a task for the day, I worked hard to complete that task as quickly as possible.
Someone was paying me an hourly rate to help them complete their personal and professional tasks. And to be honest, the work wasn’t that hard. I should clarify that I was not my boss’ only assistant. I was more of an errand running and shopping assistant. That made my job a little less stressful.
Every day I would be given a list of things I needed to work on for the day. It was my responsibility to get as many things off that list checked while still fulfilling my regular duties like picking her son up from school.
I had to be great at time management to get through the day. And I learned how to run errands quickly so I could finish my list of tasks.
To this day, I do everything really quickly. I am not endorsing rushing through life, nor am I undervaluing the value of taking your time.
What I am saying is that I have the ability to get through tasks quickly and do more in one day than I ever thought because of my training as being an assistant. It’s an incredibly useful skill that I have used in multiple other work settings.
How does managing time better make me a better person? Well, it makes me see the value in other people’s time. I don’t want people wasting my time, so why would I waste theirs?
Lesson 2: I learned how important it is to trust the people around you.
I never considered myself an untrustworthy person. But when someone hands you their credit card, gives you their pin number, and says “now go buy these things for me” you begin to reflect.
I would never comprise another person’s financial information. But the temptation of picking up an extra thing at the grocery stores can linger in your mind. I had passwords auto-saved on my computer to make things run faster and smoother while working.
Those passwords remained saved in my computer for months after I left the job. I kept forgetting to delete them from my browser memory. I was never tempted to use them at all. But I did learn that I was trustworthy. Like for real.
I’m sure assistants abuse the information they are given all the time. But by not doing anything like that, I learned a lot about myself.
My boss always trusted me and made it clear she trusted me on a regular basis. She knew I would never abuse the power she gave me. She could sense that about me. SHE made me feel trustworthy.
Today, I think of myself as trustworthy, safe, and secure because of my experience working as an assistant and being trusted with incredibly valuable information.
Lesson 3: I learned how to navigate stressful and difficult situations.
This one is more practical.
I learned how to navigate through Los Angeles because of that job. It made me comfortable driving around a big city without crystal clear knowledge of my final destination.
I drove around delivering scripts and taking a kid to auditions. To this day I feel comfortable driving around places I’ve never been because I had to do it so regularly at my job.
It made me a much better driver.
How does being a better driver make you a better person? I’ll admit, it doesn’t.
It does, however, make you more confident and comfortable in situations on a regular basis. I don’t panic in stressful traffic and passengers trust my ability to navigate through certain situations.
There were times when I was running late and had a million things to do before the day was over. When you are battling the Santa Monica traffic or the horror of street parking, you learn to handle the stress and keep your cool.
I am so much more equipped to handle stressful and chaotic driving situations in unfamiliar places because of my job.
Lesson 4: I learned to get over myself
I complained about my job a lot. I had to do some ridiculous things that I didn’t want to do. I honestly felt like I had a terrible job that was going nowhere. In truth, my job WAS kind of terrible.
But it was not nearly as bad as I thought it was. And I didn’t see that until long after I left it. I used to dread going in to work to do… WORK. I don’t know what I wanted or expected, but it wasn’t the job I was doing every day. Looking back, I was being an IDIOT.
It wasn’t a hard job. It wasn’t easy all the time, but it was doable. And I was making money.
Why did I complain all the time? I still have no idea.
I only had to be at work at 10 am. And I had weekends off. Yes, fighting rush hour traffic from Santa Monica to Silver Lake every evening sucked. Yes, my boss wasn’t the easiest person to work for. Yes, I had to get her food or coffee whenever she wanted.
So what? That’s the job description. Those are the things I agreed to do when I took the position.
Learning how to get over yourself is a huge blow to your ego. I didn’t really know what I wanted to do with my life. I considered this the first step in the door of the entertainment industry.
And it was. I didn’t see how many opportunities I could have gained if I just tried a little harder and complained a whole lot less.
Lesson 5: I learned to grow up
I hate talking on the phone and having conversations with strangers. But my job made me do it. I had to speak with strangers on the phone or in-person on a daily basis.
I made phone calls about all kinds of things and asked people questions that I never thought I’d ask. Like “my boss wants to know if she can return this to-go order of food because it doesn’t taste like she thought it would.” WHAT? Who does that? Please don’t make me do this!!
One time I found myself on the balcony of a mansion in Bel Air having to make small talk with parents whose kids were at the birthday party I was dropping my boss’s son off at.
I was sipping champagne and overlooking million dollar houses with people who had more money in their wallet than I had in my life savings. I was way out of my comfort zone.
I had to interact with people and speak on behalf of someone else. This taught me to communicate clearly and confidently. I was representing my boss everywhere I went.
I learned about buying plane tickets, renting cars, phone plan services, the best cuts of meat to buy, the importance of saving receipts, and so many other boring life things that I would never have taken the time to really understand.
But my job forced me to. I had to grow up because someone was paying me to!
Long after that job, I found that so many small life tasks are so much easier for me now because I had to do them for my job. I ended up learning a lot more than I thought.
Am I a better person because of that job? Yes.
These are only five of the lessons I learned while working as an assistant.
I have a million stories or bizarre situations I found myself in while on the job. I didn’t realize how fun my life was at the time.
Looking back I can see that it wasn’t an awful job, it just wasn’t the greatest job I’d ever had. I needed to grow up and get over myself before I could appreciate that sometimes you have to do things you don’t want to do.
Being a personal assistant is a special kind of weird.
And it can be awful. And humiliating. But it can also teach you about yourself and the type of person you’re going to grow into being. If you can’t be a good assistant, there is a good chance you won’t be a good employee somewhere else in the future. That’s an important lesson.
One last thing! Some bosses are really awful people and they really abuse their assistants. My boss was scary and mean to a lot of people…but she was always nice to me for some reason.
I say this because there are some situations where an assistant’s job isn’t safe. Getting over yourself about working hard is one thing, but if your boss is actually emotionally, physically, or sexually abusive they can um.. well… go to HELL.
