Would your first job be at a Robotics firm or a Car Wash?
My first job was teaching martial arts when I was 14 years old. I walked into the studio one afternoon in early July and told the owner I wanted to teach. I was a student at that studio for about seven years. He looked at me for a moment and said "okay I'll text you". That was the whole conversation.
Later that day, he texted me with the offer. I didn't think about pay. I didn't think about what it would do for my future. I had been training since I was around six or seven years old and the studio felt like the only place I actually understood. So I showed up. I taught classes. I cleaned the mats after everyone left. I locked up and went home and came back the next day.
Looking back, that job taught me something I didn't have words for at the time. It taught me that the work itself was enough of a reason to show up. Not the title. Not what anyone thought of me for doing it. Just the work.
I've been thinking about that a lot lately. Specifically because of a clip I came across from Joe Rogan's podcast on my Youtube feed. It was a recent episode with Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO of Social Capital and former growth executive at Facebook. I wasn't looking for it. It just appeared and something in the first few seconds made me stop scrolling.
Chamath is a venture capitalist. One of the earliest executives at Facebook. A man who has spent his entire career thinking about leverage and risk and where to put his attention. He was sitting across from Rogan and he was talking about his 17-year-old son. Not about markets. Not about AI. About his kid. And about a car wash.
Chamath had been pushing his son to get a job before college and nothing was happening. Chamath started texting people. Friends. Contacts. Anyone who might be willing to give his kid a shot. He was pulling strings. Trying to line something up at a robotics firm. One of his contacts agreed to do an interview. Chamath called his son to let him know.
His son picked up and told him he already had a job.
Chamath asked him what he meant. His son explained that after he walked out of the birthday party he went downtown on his own. He walked around. He went into a McDonald's to ask about work. While he was standing there he noticed a woman at a desk struggling to fill out a job application in English. He sat down beside her and switched to Spanish. Helped her work through the whole thing. A man eating lunch at the table next to them had been watching. He introduced himself as the general manager of the car wash down the street. He told the kid he liked the way he handled that. He offered him a job on the spot.
So Chamath's son ended up working both jobs. The robotics firm his father arranged through a favor. And the car wash he found entirely on his own by helping a stranger in a McDonald's.
When Chamath got to this part of the story his whole demeanor shifted. You could hear it. He said he was proud of his son. More proud than he had words for. But he was specific about why. Not the robotics firm.
The car wash.
His son would come home from shifts and say things like "dad you have no idea how people live." He was talking about what he found when he had to vacuum out strangers' cars. Clean out their trunks. The things people leave behind when they think no one is looking. The small private mess of other people's lives that most of us never get close enough to see. Chamath called that exposure a gift. A real one. He said everything else he had set up for his son was manufactured. The connections. The interview. All of it came from his own anxiety and insecurity. But the car wash was something his son built from nothing on a random afternoon because he chose to help someone. That he said is the thing people will actually respect when it counts.
There is a question almost nobody asks when they are picking their first job. Most people think about pay. They think about whether it sounds or looks impressive. They think about whether it is something they actually want to do. Those are reasonable things to think about. But underneath all of them is a quieter question that rarely gets asked out loud.
What is this actually going to build in me?
The robotics firm is the obvious answer to every question except that one. It sounds serious, modern, and ambitious. You mention it and people nod. It signals that you are going somewhere.
But the car wash does not let you hide. There is no name to borrow credibility from. No title that protects you from a bad shift. You show up and you perform or it is immediately obvious to everyone around you that you didn't. That kind of environment builds something that the polished job rarely does. You learn to finish the job when you don't feel like finishing it. You learn that your mood is a separate thing from your output. You learn humility not as a concept but as a daily practice because the work demands it regardless of who you are.
Chamath put a name to this feeling. He called it the engine room. He said the engine room is hot and uncomfortable and nobody on deck can see you. But it is where the ship actually moves. He said there are entire weeks where that is all he does. Not managing how he appears. Not performing for anyone. Just in it doing the work until the work is done.
And then he said something that I keep coming back to. He said when you take what the engine room teaches you and you point it at something you actually love the output becomes something else entirely. The hours are still hard but now they are aimed at something that matters to you. That is when effort stops being effort and starts becoming something real.
I think about the martial arts studio a lot. I was 14, taught classes for five to six hours everyday after class in high school. I swept those mats every night, turned off all the lights, locked the main door, and I came back everyday because I wanted to be there. Not because of how it looked. Not because of where it was going to take me. Just because it was the work and I loved the work.
That feeling is harder to find than most people realize. And I think the car wash is one of the places you find it.
So here is the question I have been sitting with.
What is your engine room? And are you actually willing to get in it?