“I think everyone in the early part of their career should work in the service industry somewhere,” Patel tells Fortune. “I think it’s so great to really get, you know, like, a level of appreciation for hospitality and customer service, and it just wires you differently.”
As a young man, he was introverted and even had a stutter. While there were easier ways to make money, he deliberately chose a customer-facing job to push himself out of his comfort zone.
“What happened while waiting on tables is—and it wasn’t even a conscious thing—that I was an introvert, and I realized if I don’t talk to people and don’t entertain them and give them a good experience, I’m not going to make a tip,” Patel says. “And if I don’t make a tip, then I’m just working a lot of long hours without the return.”
“If you put your mind to something, you can basically figure out whatever you want to figure out.”
On the road to success, Patel thinks one of the biggest mistakes young professionals make is believing they can do it all on their own.
“Oftentimes, we let our pride and ego get in the way,” he says. “We’re like, ‘I’m going to try to be a self-made person.’ There’s no such thing as a self-made person; we live in an interconnected society where humans depend on humans, and so if you can stand on shoulders of giants, it just takes you farther.”
Because access to opportunity is not evenly distributed, Patel adds that receiving help isn’t something to feel guilty about. “If you have access to the resources and you don’t use them, then shame on you.”
Still, Patel warns Gen Z that confidence can quickly morph into arrogance. Instead, the key is to strike a balance between embracing opportunities that come your way while staying humble enough to recognize the privilege behind them and that others may have had to work much harder for the same chance.
Patel is not alone in having risen from the service floor to the C-suite. Some of the world’s most prominent business leaders started out in customer-facing roles.
“You can learn responsibility in any job, if you take it seriously,” Bezos said in the 2012 book, Golden Opportunity: Remarkable Careers That Began at McDonald’s. “You learn a lot as a teenager working at McDonald’s. It’s different from what you learn in school. Don’t underestimate the value of that.”