My short list from 15 years of non tech work: * I grew a couple acres of Zucchini with my dad when I was in middle school, and learned about profit margins, mi

My short list from 15 years of non tech work: * I grew a couple acres of Zucchini with my dad when I was in middle school, and learned about profit margins, middlemen ripping you off, cost of labor and the basics of business. We did it as a hobby, did almost all the work ourselves (besides paying some neighborhood kids to help us in picking), ended up almost breaking even (a ~$50 loss) after a few months. Never did it again :) * Worked on an assembly line for Motorola after high-school, assembling taxi two way radios. Learned about how companies operate at scale and how you can optimize processes at every point (I found an optimization to some manual assembly process that reduced the probability of defects in the assembly and got recognized for it). * Worked for a few years as a writer and editor in print media. I've learned so much about how the world operates and power dynamics, I can't begin to detail it. But a good lesson was that anyone is just a couple of phone calls away, and that you need to maintain a social graph. Also got an affinity for meeting deadlines I've still yet to completely shake off despite years in tech where no deadline is ever met. In print media a deadline is a deadline. I've also learned how to tell a story in a compelling way which is a skill that's still important. * Worked in content in the early days of the web. Learned how powerful of a medium it was and realized it's going to take over the world, and that what I really love to do is coding (which I was doing as a hobby since childhood).