My first job in the adult world was a summer job when I was sixteen, in the main offices of Ameritech. I got hired to work on their website, only because my brother was the head of that department. My boss, who was about forty years old, reported to my twenty-eight-year-old brother, which made me even more nervous. The first day, the guy handed me a four hundred page operations manual with a million tabs all down the side, in a binder, and told me to make an exact replica of the thing.

I’d been hired because I knew HTML coding; I had no idea how to do this adult task that was presented to me. But I came back to him two days later without having asked anyone for help or advice, with an exact replica. I just broke that task down like an assembly line, and executed it. Which, basically, is what I’ve found to be successful any time an assignment overwhelms me: break it down into layers.

At the end of the summer, that boss told me he threw both copies away. It was an expired manual. From the perspective of a guy who’d been managing cubicle farms for twenty years, and was asked to hire his boss’s little brother, he wanted to test how sharp I was, and more importantly, whether I’d whine about it.