Before the years of riding commuter rail to work, I rode my bike. Before the challenge of navigating office culture, I had to navigate unkempt lawns and unstocked shelves. Those early jobs didn’t come with benefits, but they did come with important lessons. And some of the first, most valuable transferable skills.

It recently became fashionable for billionaire CEOs to share stories of the minimum-wage jobs they worked back in the day. On top of showing off how it influenced their hands-on attitude, it was also an attempt to come off as more relatable.

Granted, that last part may have been more of a stretch, but the reality is that we all started somewhere, and for most of us it wasn’t somewhere glamorous.

We don’t always include those jobs on a resume, but they’re still part of our story.

Before the support tickets, the project schedules, and the facility audits, I had two early gigs that helped shape how I think about work.

Job One: Lawn Maintenance

Technically, my first job was pushing a lawnmower.

It started at home and grew from there. I kept my grandparents’ lawn tidy, then added a few of their neighbors to my customer list. Eventually, I found myself mowing a small-town cemetery managed by my family. A lot of folks found that one creepy, but for me, it just meant 20 bucks a pop.

That early job wasn’t glamorous, but it did show me the benefits of hard work. And it taught me something even more important. When the work was done, the results were obvious. The grass was even. The lines were clean. There were no shortcuts or faking it.

That was my first experience with results-focused work. The timeline was semi-flexible (and influenced by the weather), but my customers definitely cared how it looked when I was finished. And the results weren’t obscured the way they often can be with more “adult” jobs. The quality was there for all to see.

Job Two: Video Store Clerk

My first “real” job, with actual taxable income, was behind the counter of a local mom-and-pop video rental store.

(Historical note: we rented both VHS and Betamax tapes, with a small but loyal customer base for the latter. A rarity after the ’80s version of a Format War. Yes, there was a “Be Kind, Rewind” sign.)

That job required a little of everything:

• Organizational Skills: those shelves didn’t keep themselves in order.
• Math: nothing beats manually checking the totals when closing out a register.
• Customer Service: you need to learn and remember individual tastes when the inevitable “what’s a good movie” question comes up.

That last one is interesting, as serving customers (in time, we may start referring to them as “clients”) is a cornerstone of so many first jobs. And as someone who has built a career around service, perhaps the most valuable skill I picked up was how to manage people and their expectations. I learned how to stay calm under pressure and deliver a decent experience. Even to someone unhappy about that 99-cent late fee.

These weren’t resume-worthy roles. But they laid a foundation. They gave me a respect for hard work and a focus on results. And they kick-started a habit of doing things the right way whether anyone was paying attention or not.

I may not be a CEO, but my humble beginnings say just as much about me.

So the next time you share a colorful story about that horrible job you worked back in high school, take a beat to think about the ways it might still influence how you do things today.