My first restaurant job was washing dishes. I was fourteen, and it was the only job open to someone that age. My uncle was a manager there, and he never wrote my review or promoted me. Every step after that came from someone else who had watched the work: prep cook, line cook, and at fifteen the wheel, the station that runs the tickets for the whole line. On Mother's Day that meant about two thousand people. The cooks I directed were in their thirties and forties. No one told them to trust a fifteen-year-old. The work told them. I had already made theirs possible, first with the pans and then with the prep.
A PhD mathematician hired me later without a degree. Years after that I walked into an investment firm with a title only a game designer would invent, later renamed member of technical staff to fit the standard scheme. I had been a chief technology officer elsewhere. The title was decoration. The scope was not. I had capital to deploy and the freedom to choose where, with one check: every deal needed a written case of twenty to thirty pages, argued to a board whose members had led agencies, firms and universities. The titles caught up later.
In each place the label trailed the work. The pattern is to show up, do the work, and either the recognition comes or you leave for people who can see you. Recognition from people who owe you nothing is the kind that counts.
Leaving is not always a career move. My great-grandmother's brother was good with numbers. He did the sums and showed that the man who owned the land had shorted the sharecroppers. A grown man in Alabama had reason to fear, and the family has always said he left before he could be lynched. I knew him as an elder. He protected his body and his soul, and in New Jersey he ran a heating oil delivery business of his own.
For an investor, this is a diligence habit. A flat title understates a person. Read the scope they ran: what they were allowed to decide, who checked it, and who promoted them. A promotion from someone with nothing to gain is the best evidence you will find.
Sources: Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns (2010), on how planters could rework a sharecropper's settlement and the danger of disputing it; Equal Justice Initiative, Reconstruction in America: Racial Violence after the Civil War, 1865–1876 (2020), on violence against sharecroppers who demanded what they were owed. The restaurant, the title, the firm, the board and the family history are the author's account and cannot be independently sourced.
Related: Choose the Job That Teaches. This is the author's account and is not investment advice.