This morning, my son sold vegetables. No, really, he did. I even bought eggplant from him. At his new school, students help run a weekly farmer's market, weighing produce, making change, and saying "thank you, come again." The academic benefits are obvious--addition and subtraction, weighing and measuring--but I was amazed as I watched so much more going on. If all the early-riser kids who came were to take part in the venture, they really had to work together. In order to make the venture work, they had to step outside themselves to talk to each other and to their customers. For a group of children likely used to being on the other side of commerce--the "I want"ers in the store, not the "how can I help you"ers--this was a quick education in seeing things from the other side.
It is unbelievably easy to see only from your own side of the fence. To assume that because your resume has all the right keywords, you have to make the cut. To believe that if your email isn't being answered, you are simply being ignored. To feel as though you are the only one on your journey. But when we step back a little, it is unbelievably easy to see that jobs are about more than keywords, that other people have a variety of things besides email filling their days, and that a whole lot of people are making a journey very similar to ours.
At the school farmer's market, my son was called upon to move from "I want" to "How can I help you," to see things from the other side of the table. Not a bad lesson to learn at 8, or at any age.
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