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cause the figure not to come out correctly. So I had to learn to give really specific directions about making the corners line up and monitor them as they were doing so.
    I gravitated to the little ones. Every morning I would lead a small group into the meadow, where we would sit in a circle and play “Doggie, doggie—where’s your bone?” One would sit in the center with his or her eyes closed; the rest would pass around a spoon behind their backs. I would call “stop,” and the one in the center would have to guess who had the spoon. They never tired of the game.
    After two months I truly believed that I had touched these kids and was having an impact on their lives. I thought I had formed tight bonds with them, that they loved me, that they couldn’t wait until I came in the next day, and of course, that they’d miss me desperately when I left. They would remember me fondly as the woman who taught them how to make origami swans one glorious summer.
    As camp came to an end, all of us counselors embarked on a weeklong canoe trip. We made our way up to a remote launching point, and then we canoed back to the reservation. We stayed in tents. When we returned from that trip, we had to spend the night at the reservation before we left the next morning for home. I walked through the reservation, hoping to have one last visit with the children on whom I had had such an impact.
    â€œHey!” I said to one group of kids I’d recognized.
    They looked at me as if I were a stranger!
    The look on their faces was “Who are you?”
    After one week, they didn’t remember me. What a wake-up call. Had it not been for the brief layover back on the reservation, I would have left there believing that I had made an impact on these kids’ lives. But a week later, not only could they not care less about me, but they didn’t even remember who I was.
    The message to me was clear—little girl, this is not about you. This is about you coming and doing your little community service and feeling good afterward that you helped the poor little Indian kids. You didn’t help them. Their lives suck right now. And it wasn’t made any better by you, coming for a few weeks and running a summer program.
    You’re not even a blip on the radar in their lives. It was humbling.
    I GOT MY FIRST glimpse of the importance of being humble in the workplace during my summers working at Grumpy’s, a deli near the Toledo Zoo. I started in 1988, after my junior year in high school, the year that China loaned pandas to the Toledo Zoo. It was pandemonium.
    Jeff Horn and his wife, Connie, owned and managed Grumpy’s. Jeff named his sandwich shop as a warning for customers. If you were looking for good food, this was the place for you. If what you were searching for was a feel-good lunch spot, not so much. Jeff screamed at customers, and he wouldn’t hesitate to fire employees. During the first summer I worked for him, he opened his “annex” by the zoo. He started off with about twenty employees. By the end of the summer, I was one of only two left. I did it by keeping my mouth shut and my head down, and working my butt off. Grumpy and I got along.
    Jeff’s mind-set when it came to employees was simple. “I have to make money, and I can’t sit around and let the ineptness of minimum-wage workers make me less successful.”
    Translation: He would fire you in a heartbeat.
    I can’t tell you how many salad makers I lived through. One woman finished making a bowl of tuna salad but neglected to scrape off every ounce of tuna from the spoon. Grumpy saw her dump the spoon in the sink.
    â€œYou’re fired!” he screamed.
    Come in late? Don’t bother coming in at all.
    â€œYou’re fired!”
    Bad attitude? There was room for only one of those.
    Bye-bye.
    My sophomore year in college, when I was nineteen, Jeff and Connie opened a Grumpy’s in Port