If you knew me in high school, I was adamant that I would never work for someone. I would have scoffed at the idea of being an employee.

To me, the entrepreneurial dream was to never work for someone else a day in my life. The narrative you hear is of the entrepreneur that started a business in school and never had to find a job.

That all changed when I went to Kammok. I learned more in that one year than I would have if I spent 10 years piddling around with some ideas in my room.

In my year at Kammok, I learned more about building community and a brand than any class could have taught me. I learned little shortcuts to running a business that no textbook teaches. I was exposed to the right tools that make running a business easier.

I’m going to say this because nobody else is. It’s okay to check your ego for a bit and work for someone else. Go ahead and learn from others experience.

One professor of mine put it this way, If you’re going to make mistakes, why not do it on someone else’s dime.

In my book, there is one valid excuse for not wanting to work for someone else. Time. Not having enough hours in the day to pursue your own venture and work for someone else. Unless you have your plan figured out and the time is now, go work for someone else. There will be a time when it’s 11 pm and there’s a critical deadline. You’ll be forced to make a choice, work on the business or work for your employer. But until then, it’s okay to learn by interning for someone else.

1. Get Organized
Let’s start with the least sexy lesson. Organization. At first, I thought it was ridiculous that such a small company took time to processes and playbooks for every little thing we did, but we did and over time I came to appreciate it.

Even for a company of one, it’s important to organize and build processes for how you handle situations. Create a system for storing passwords. Create a system for storing photos and videos. It’s worth taking time now so it doesn’t become a challenge later. These days I even standardize what goes in each pocket of my pants (keys, (front right), earbuds/misc (front left), phone(back right), wallet(back left)), in order to avoid having to remember if I have my keys or not.

It’s great when you need someone to grab a file off of your computer to be able to tell them exactly where it is even if you can’t see the screen or tell a friend where something in your apartment is without them having to dig around for it. The $30 you spend on containers and organization will pay for itself each time you don’t lose something you otherwise would have.

Randy Paush, a late Carnegie Mellon Professor, made the point that you have better things to do with your brain power than keep track of things. You may be smart enough to remember where you put something or how to complete a task, but you have much better things to do with your brainpower than remember these unimportant details.

2. Stories Do the Selling
Before working at Kammok, I couldn’t understand why people spent $100 on a hammock when you could buy a $50 hammock and use the other $50 to buy twenty-five pints of ice cream from the corner store instead.

But as I understood the story, people, and process of what went into the product, I started to buy into it. Turns out, so did the Kammok community. The story created a framework for why this hammock was better than others.