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✨✨Reliability: The Most Underrated Superpower in Business🤔🏁⏰
The hardest thing is the simplest thing.
A friend recently asked me what I remember most about working in an Amazon warehouse. Honestly? Not much. I left in 2021 after Covid hit. The managers’ names? Gone. The Prime Day slogans plastered everywhere? A blur.
But one person still stands out — a quiet, smiling woman who worked alongside me sorting boxes. She was a county employee, picking up extra shifts to save enough cash to buy a car in full. We bonded over our love for the sorting station — not because Amazon paid us by the number of boxes we handled (they didn’t. that would be illegal), but because it was the only position where we could check our numbers. Those numbers didn’t change our paycheck, but they gave us something else — a small, personal excitement. Like runners chasing a new personal best at each run, we wanted to beat yesterday’s count. In that laborious, mind-numbing warehouse, those numbers gave us a little joy to hold onto each day.
One day, she told me, “Once I hit my money goal, I’m out.” And sure enough, she did. Her last day arrived, and we planned a little farewell lunch. But she was 10 minutes late. Turns out, she had stopped at the manager’s station first — to check her numbers for the day.