Rob Walling

And I had a string of pretty normal jobs.

As I said in the intro, what a courier, an electrician, and developer, and then managing developers.

And at the time, none of them felt like entrepreneur training.

But in retrospect, I can definitely trace a straight line from things I learned as an employee to things that later helped me as a founder.

So hopefully hearing this can make you look intentionally at the things you do day to day in your day job that you might be able to learn and use to your advantage.

But I do think you need to be pretty deliberate about doing so.

Or I should say, I think the more deliberate you are and the more you seek it out, the more you'll get.

So I have 11 lessons that I learned throughout my entrepreneurial journey.

And I'm going to kick it off with the first one.

And it was as a teenager, as I was a career in the Bay Area, I had to learn how to figure things out when instructions were unclear or when there were no instructions.

So this was pre-cell phones, it was pre-GPS, and oftentimes I was given vague instructions.

and expected to deliver or pick something up.

There were locked doors.

There were buildings that were in the wrong places.

There were construction sites that didn't match up with the directions.

There were no addresses.

You know, I just had to figure things out.

And I had to find people when it wasn't obvious where they were.

I had to troubleshoot addresses that were wrong.

Roads were closed.