The Job That Taught Me How To Stay Curious

The Job That Taught Me to Stay Curious (Even When I Thought I Knew Better)

When I was in high school, I worked at Suncoast Motion Picture Company, a mall store that sold VHS and DVDs. It was my first real job, and it gave me far more than just spending money.

I learned how to make sense of the chaos; organizing entire walls of content by genre, subgenre, and obscure franchise hierarchies. I made friends with people from other shops in the mall. And one time, I sold George Lucas a stack of DVDs taller than me. (Yes, that George Lucas. Yes, he set off the alarm because the demagnetizer didn’t work. Yes, I was mortified.)

It was retail, and like all retail, it came with awkward scripts and required pitches. The one I remember most: “Would you like to sign up for a 30-day free trial of Netflix?” We were required to ask every customer. Most declined. Some rolled their eyes. And even I—teenage know-it-all that I was—didn’t see the value in it.

That was the year 2000.

By the time I left Suncoast in 2001 for a similar gig at The Wherehouse (CDs), I still didn’t see what was coming. But a few years later, I returned to that same mall after graduating college. Both stores where I got my early experience were gone—shuttered. Replaced. Rendered obsolete by the very thing I had been pushing as an annoying add-on.

Netflix was the future. But it didn’t look like the future at the time. It looked like a piece of paper stapled to a receipt.

I think about that moment a lot when evaluating new ideas. I remember what it felt like to stand on the other side of innovation—too close to see it clearly. And I try not to make the mistake of assuming something won’t work just because I wouldn’t use it (yet).

Today, I work in marketing and operations, helping companies build scalable systems and make sense of emerging tools. And I try to keep that 17-year-old version of me in mind—busy organizing DVDs, trying to meet his quota, and unknowingly handing customers the future of digital media tech.

Sometimes, the next big thing doesn’t look like the next big thing. It just looks like a trial offer stapled to a receipt.