Advice…With almost a 98.6 % chance of being right, I predict that your first job won’t be your last one. So, get exposure to life. Talk to everyone. That means listen to them as well. Get a sense of the rhythm of an office. Throw yourself into it. Learn. Listen. Ask questions. Show up. Read stuff. Walk around and talk to everyone. Learn their names. Don’t focus as much as putting something wonderful on your resume as much as putting yourself into a place where you get a ground level look at how a place hums.

I believe it’s better to get an interesting job than one with a big company that sticks you in corner somewhere, and you don’t get to witness much beyond your cubicle. Nothing against big companies mind you. They have muscle. Proven Processes. Cache. And hopefully good office parties. No matter what anyone tells you, you won’t know it’s a good fit until your there for a few months. Time will tell.

If there is ever a chance to roll the dice, it’s in your 20’s. You have your youth. You still have your good looks—most of you anyway! You probably are not married yet. You probably have roommates who will sometimes drive you crazy. It’s all good. And I’ll tell you why. You have to go through all this stuff to grow into the person that you need to become. A person that considers others as well as themselves. A person who can see past their own needs to help others along the way. You will probably think you’re underpaid and overworked. Probably but most of the others are too.

“Letting there be room for not knowing is the most important thing of all. When there’s a big disappointment, we don’t know if that’s the end of the story. It may just be the beginning of a great adventure. Life is like that. We don’t know anything. We call something bad; we call it good. But really we just don’t know.”

—	Pema Chodron

There is no place God cannot take an ill-equipped, scared to death, willing person.

Had a flight delay from Amsterdam to Nairobi. The airline gave us a 40 Euro voucher as a way to make up for it.  We could use it anywhere in the airport, with one catch: you could only use it for one purchase.  You could buy a pack of gum or a steak dinner, but it was only good for one redemption, and then it was gone.

The bartender at gently reminded me of this as he sat a towering Heineken in front of me.  I thought about my predicament for a second, looked down the bar at the other gentleman quietly hunched over their drinks and said, “I’ll take as many of these as I can get for 40 euro!”  

I bought beers for everyone at the bar, and I struck up conversations with all of them.  When they were done with the pints of American goodwill that I had provided for them, they started to buy drinks for me and each other.  We drank for the ENTIRE 6-hour delay, and by the end I was learning the best drinking songs from Ireland, Scotland, and Holland.  I finally looked over at my watch and realized my flight was departing in ten minutes. 

I stumbled down the terminal and ran to my gate.  Just as I was about to get on my flight, one of the gents from the UK came running down with one of my suitcases.  “You forgot your bag.” He ran all the way up to the flight attendant desk and threw my luggage over the rope to me.  I caught it and fell backwards onto the ground, laughing hysterically.

Midnight Cowboy

Before Dustin Hoffman auditioned for this film, he knew that his all-American image could easily cost him the job. To prove he could do it, he asked the auditioning film executive to meet him on a street corner in Manhattan, and in the meantime, dressed himself in filthy rags. The executive arrived at the appointed corner and waited, barely noticing the “beggar” less than ten feet away who was accosting people for spare change. At last, the beggar walked up to him and revealed his true identity.

But above all I grew up tolerant of others’ opinions, particularly in the field of religion, remembering how irksome it was to hear myself mocked because I did not follow the majority’s beliefs. And at the same time I have remained totally devoid of that taste for anticlericalism which is so common in those who are educated surrounded by religion. 

I have insisted on setting down these memories because I see that many non-believing friends let their children have a religious education ‘so as not to give them complexes’, ‘so that they don’t feel different from the others.’ I believe that this behavior displays a lack of courage which is totally damaging pedagogically. Why should a young child not begin to understand that you can face a small amount of discomfort in order to stay faithful to an idea? 

And in any case, who said that young people should not have complexes? Complexes arise through a natural attrition with the reality that surrounds us, and when you have complexes you try to overcome them. Life is in fact nothing but this triumphing over one’s own complexes, without which the formation of a character and personality does not happen.

Italo Calvino, Hermit in Paris: Autobiographical Writings