He may have lost his pride. But now has a chance at earning dignity through hard work.
The best way to be successful is get the best job you can, and do your best at it.
Work hard. Show up early and leave late. Be professional. Do your best at every task handed to you, no matter how unimportant or menial.
Volunteer for the scut jobs and do them well. You will earn the respect and friendship of your peers, and the gratitude and positive notice of your superiors.
Basically, add as much value to your employer as possible. Do this, and you will be noticed in a positive way. (Unless, of course, you work for a union...then you might be in trouble)
If you do this, you will advance. You won’t sweep floors or sell cologne forever. And that won’t be lost time, either. Those jobs aren’t meant to be stayed in, and anyone who does stay in them for a long time is either doing them poorly or doesn’t have the capacity to improve.
And the thing is, you can learn from doing those jobs, you can learn plenty that will be invaluable. That was the best thing the military did for me.
In the military, you have to do a lot of scut work, work sometimes isn’t even necessary, work that is tedious, work that is disgusting. (I slipped and accidentally buried my arm nearly to the elbow in a broken urinal that had days-old, BLACK urine up to the lip while trying to clean the outside of the taped off ceramic opening) I had my entire body covered in jet fuel that turned my skin red where my clothes rubbed against my skin. I changed aircraft components on a flight deck above the arctic circle, and when I badly skinned my knuckle when a wrench slipped, the nickel sized flap of skin refused to even bleed. It just stared at the snowy white disk of exposed tissue, and it only bled later when my hands finally warmed up. My hands became so abraded and punctured that the act of reaching into my pocket for change was enough to make me wince in pain.
But all those jobs imparted valuable lessons on me that I have never forgotten. First, there IS dignity in them. Well, maybe not the cleaning of urinals filled with stale black urine, but...there is VALUE in them. Lots of value. Even in the absence of everything else, you can get value from “Hey. I am doing this for a job, and it kind of sucks. I want to work harder to get to the point where I tell people to clean the broken urinals with black piss rather than do it myself!” or “I love being a mechanic, but I hate being covered with fuel, grease and having my hands mangled all the time. I am going to get into the supply chain of parts!’ and so on.
I will bet money that every successful person had jobs that didn’t pay well or they didn’t like, but they learned a lot from them. I know I did.
Lastly, there are three things related to this that piss me off:
1.) People that whine about about their job.
2.) People that look down their nose at a job.
3.) People that try to increase the wages of low level jobs so they can make a “living wage” off of them.