Smash The System

Transcript:

Transcript:

Welcome back to The smashes system podcast. I’m Nino Prodan. Yesterday, we left off with me seeing the impending doom in my job. My contract was about done. And I’m gonna guess that your guess was that I got another job. And that guess would be partially right. I did get another job. In fact, I got another job at the same place because they saw the value I could bring in. So my capabilities, so they hired me for another position. But for them that came with a demand for me. I asked if I could start in a month after my current contracted ended that way I could travel the US. And so I saved for a few months in order to take a road trip around the US, and what more could a 21 year old want than to travel around sampling, local microbrews and this is Back in the 90s. So microbrews are really hard to come by and hard to find, couldn’t just Google it and a music tour. And back then I was a musician, and singer. And I brought my harmonica along and, of course, my voice. And we would go see bands and sometimes sit in with bands and jam with bands. As we took interstate 90 west from Cleveland, all the way to Seattle, stopping in Chicago along the way, having the car breakdown in Montana, in the middle of nowhere, thankfully, a gas station because we didn’t have cell phones back then. After Seattle, we went to the temperate rainforest west of Seattle, and then ventured on down the coast through Oregon, of course, stopping in Portland for some beer, and then down into California, spending a little time and what would become my future home San Diego and coming up with a bigger plan while we were there, this trip through all its ups and downs helped me start opening my eyes up to the rest of the world, traveling on tethered No worries. Only few plans helped me understand the freedom that I could have helped me understand that there was much more to the world, there’s much more to myself. And we started making plans for a bigger trip. And as we travel through the rest of the country on the southern route, through Arizona, into Austin, Texas, down in New Orleans, and then up through Memphis, really exposing ourselves to the art of crafting beer and, of course, the art of music and finding the music within ourselves. We took aim at Europe, and made plans to travel there in two years. And so over the next two years, we budgeted and saved And when I returned to my new job, after the trip, I really let them understand the value I could bring. I had a goal set, and it wasn’t anywhere related to work. My goal was to grow myself. And the method I was going to use was traveled. And after getting promoted after only six months, I realized something new about myself. I realized that the reason I dropped out of college, that the reason that I got bad grades in school, were all invalid. I started to understand that it was a story that I was telling myself, and that I had not learned how to learn. I didn’t learn how my brain worked and how my brain incorporated information. In the year and a half I had left in that position, which was created just for me. I did something that I didn’t understand the value of as I did it. I made myself replaceable because I systematized my position, I made it. So pretty much anybody could do it if they had a little computer knowledge, but good social skills. Unfortunately, the company didn’t understand what I did. They didn’t understand that the computer skills didn’t matter as much as the social skills. But when I left for my trip to Europe, and quit my job, I left knowing that the company would always benefit from the value that I added. But what I wasn’t ready for what I didn’t understand is what I would find during my trip, four month backpacking train trip through Europe, and I’ll tell you more about that tomorrow.

Transcript:

Welcome back to the semester system podcast. I’m Nino Prodan. This week, I want to tell you a little about something I learned as I became an adult. When I graduated high school, the expectation was that I would go to college, and I wasn’t a stellar student. In high school. I think I had like, a C plus average, my senior year, I tried to do better. So I had like a, b plus average, I really busted my butt. But before that, I didn’t really create the academic work ethic. So college was an expectation but it really wasn’t a desire for me. It was something that I just started doing because that’s what I was told I needed to do. But after about a year of that, I finally put on my big boy adult pants and said, You know what? I’m done with people telling me what I need to do. This is My life, and I’m going to direct it the way that I want to do it. I said to hell, what school quitting school, I’m going to start working. And at this time I delivered pizzas while I was going to school, but I dropped that and started working at a warehouse at a chemical company. And I put some extra time in doing data entry to that way, I had some extra money to spend on beer. And all was well and good. I had my own place. But at the end of the month, and one of my jobs only paid me once a month or so at the end of the month, I noticed that most of my paycheck was gone, and there wasn’t that much money left over for beer. So after a while, I got tired of this and said, You know what, I’m going to do what everybody else does when they’re in this situation. And most of the time people don’t ask for a raise. What they do is, they look for another job and that’s what I did. I had looked around and kind of ran the numbers and realized that my best bet was actually to work as a server at a restaurant. So I tried to work at TGI Fridays, but they refused to hire me because I had no experience. So I went to a more local place and got train there. And I definitely made more money than I made at the chemical company. I wasn’t really getting much over minimum wage, and this is mid 90s. Now, so that really wasn’t a lot back then. And the money waiting tables was really good. In fact, I was making about as much money as people were making, sitting at desks, working their nine to five. But there was some problems with it. One of the big ones was consistency. No, some days I could walk out with hundreds of dollars and other days I could walk out with pen. It really depended some days there was no business. Other days there was no tips and most of the days there was assholes. I had to deal with. And while I was working there, business started slowing down. So of course, I did what anybody else would do. I look for another job. And I got one. At TGI Fridays, they hired me this time, and I started making good money. But by this time, I had quite a few friends that were working standard nine to five jobs. They were working Monday through Friday, and my job had me working pretty much all weekend, during the times that people go out. And since I was the low man on the totem pole, it was really hard for me to get time off that I wanted, although the money was better, the money was still inconsistent. Not only was the money consistent, but my hours were inconsistent. It was like, I pretty much worked at whatever somebody when was, I would request days off and it seemed like 95% of the time I wouldn’t get them. So I’d be stuck at work. work while everybody was out having fun, and you know when you’re 2021 that’s a really hard pill to swallow. I started realizing that I wasn’t in control of my own life. It was like, pretty much at any waking hour. I could be, I would have to be working, because somebody told me to, and I didn’t have a choice in the matter. I was tired of somebody telling me what to do with my weekends. Yes, I was ma