My first steady job (that didn’t involve working for my dad) was at a dollar store. My parents knew the owners and put me in touch with them. One brief meeting later, I was gainfully employed.
I was 17-almost-18 at the time. I had to travel an hour and a half to get to the store and an hour and a half to get home. As you can imagine, this sucked. I worked there for a year and a bit. Luckily, the chain was opening a location in Vancouver and I was able to get transferred to the new location. This is when I met Trevor.
Trevor was a friend of the owner. He was going to manage the new Vancouver location and I was going to be his first employee. I was a little bit in love with Trevor. He smelled like cologne and cigarettes. He bought me drinks during our lunch break.
Sadly, it was not to be as he was thoroughly and completely gay. :p
Despite my failed love life, he did teach me a lot about finance and hard work.
Trevor was an entrepreneur on the rebound from bankruptcy. He showed me that hard work could transcend any career setback. He showed me that starting over could a good thing, and not always a bad thing. From him, I learned you should never give your life to your job – because you never knew when that job would disappear. I learned that you should always get out while you still have the option of getting out – never let someone choose for you. And he engrained in my mind my “ideal” manager: Someone who you respected, someone who commanded all authority, but also someone you could trust and turn to for guidance.
One of the few regrets I have is that I did not stay in touch after I left the dollar store. I have never been very good at keeping in touch with people, and in those pre-Facebook times, I quickly lost track of him. But he was a big influence on my life. Even today, I am not afraid of leaving a job, a friendship or a home and starting again because there is always something else, somewhere else, someone else. For those reasons, Trevor is first on my list of People Who Have Inspired Me.
