Deception #10 The Dead End Job

The Dead End Job Trap is pervasive in today’s American culture and it comes in at least 4 versions. We believe that certain jobs have no future. But as cultural architect, Erwin McManus states, “your future is within you”.

I believe there are people wandering around disconnected from their unique destiny because they assimilated this deception. They were hoping to do something important with their life like play basketball or become a rocket scientist all the while their true genius lays in fast food operations or retail or somehow working with their hands. They could have been working at the C-Suite level at In n Out if they had just been willing to start flipping burgers. They could have been working at the C-Suite level at Nordstrom had they just been willing to fold and stock clothes. They could have owned their own Harley-Davidson dealership had they just been willing to get their hands greasy on a motorcycle chain. Or they could have set up a very successful farming operation had they believed it was worth starting in the fields. Let’s look at some people who were willing.

The Fast-Food Version

Probably no job is more maligned than working at a fast food restaurant. Most of us assume this job is beneath us and in many cases beneath our kids. With this in mind I clipped a lengthy article from my local newspaper back in 1996 and saved it away in a file. The article described the career of Susan Steele:

“When Susan Steele began her climb up the corporate ladder, there was one question she repeated day after days: “Will there be fries with that?” That’s because the first rung on her climb was a job at a McDonald’s fast-food restaurant in Phoenix in 1972. Today, as vice president in charge of the chain’s Bay Area region she sits in her headquarters office in north San Jose, responsible for 500 corporate-owned McDonald’s outlets and 5,000 employees. Her question: ‘Why all the put-downs of fast-food jobs?

We resent it when people say, ‘You don’t want to end up flipping hamburgers all your life.’
Steel started out after graduating early from high school making milk shakes and from there moved to the front counter. She gently pushed to work the grill, which was in those days a male dominated job. She enjoyed it so much she changed her plans to pursue literature in college and put her initial career goal of teaching school on hold.

By age 19, she was newly married and supervising workers. She bootstrapped her way to swing manager and then moved into the salaried assistant manager ranks. “I made the decision not to continued community college when I was promoted to first assistant manager. I was thinking, ‘I really like this. I’m going to do this for a while.’” Five years after she mixed her first milk shake she was given her own restaurant to manage. Successful there, she was then asked to open a new McDonald’s. She was promoted to field supervisor over seeing relations with owner-operated restaurants in the region and then went to Chicago to teach classes at Hamburger University.

Then came a move to San Diego working as director of operations and then the move to San Jose overseeing the entire Bay Area. At that juncture she had become an officer of the company. Steele states, “I finally made that, in the time frame I’d set for myself. All the way along I had precise goals. I wanted to be at a certain place by a certain date, and I wanted to be very good at it when I got there, not just have a title.”

Can you say “Mcopportunity?” There are no dead end jobs… only dead end approaches and dead end attitudes!