BE HONEST AND DEPENDABLE The Value Of Grunt Work.(LEADERS & SUCCESS)(IBD'S 10 SECRETS TO SUCCESS)

Byline: Amy Alexander

10 Remember your first job? Maybe you flip-ped burgers or swept floors. Perhaps you hammered nails, shoveled dirt or changed diapers. Whatever the case, first jobs are like seeds. Contained within them are important lessons about what it takes to be a leader in one's field.

"My first job was as a messenger for a printing company in Manhattan. I was 14," said Kenin Spivak, chairman and CEO of Telemac Corp., a Los Angeles- based technology provider. "I was given money for subways but told that if I could make the schedule, I could walk and keep the money. I usually did this, demonstrating that extra effort could turn into money."

When novelist Louis L'Amour (1908-88) left his hometown of Jamestown, N.D., at the age of 15, he was prepared to do just about anything -- from skinning cattle in Texas to bailing water out of ships bound for Asia.

"I carried a hoe, mixed concrete, shoveled sand or gravel, and dug ditches," he said.

L'Amour longed to be a novelist, but had to write during his off time. He never thought of his day jobs as a waste, though. When he felt like he couldn't dig another hole in the hot sun, L'Amour focused on the material it provided. He planned to make use of every single experience in a story later on.

"The rough times were made smoother by the realization that it was all grist for the mill, and that someday I would be writing with knowledge of what I was experiencing then," he recalled.