My First Job Was Not the Dream It Was the Bridge

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1:28When you are entering into the professional arena for the first time, you really have to have a lot of trust in your ability to work things out, meaning in your ability to figure out what the pathway is going to be that works best for you. When I graduated from Undergrad University Tampa and then I went to Officer Basic Course in the fall of 1991. In that particular instance, I told myself that I had plenty of time to put off what I am going to do tomorrow. But then in February 1992, tomorrow was then today. And what do you mean by tomorrow was today? At that particular point, I had gotten out of the military in terms of doing my officers basic course and now I was in this unique situation. I was done with my undergraduate education. I had my biology degree. I was done with my military obligations. Now I had to figure out what I wanted to do next. Now let me tell you, this was an interesting dynamic for me because I often times joke

2:29with people when they say, you didn't go back to Pine Bluff, you didn't want to go back to Arkansas. And the funny thing is my mom wanted me to come back. But again, I've shared another video. She didn't want to shape my decision making. She could have easily said, Tony, I need you to come back home because I want to give you a chance to work some things out. And I think that she does that. She probably knew a couple that might be some resentment. But the bigger thing is that she wanted me to do things on my own. So what I did in the fall of 1992, when I got out of the military, I went back to Florida. I didn't have any job. I didn't have any interview prospects. I didn't have anything. What I did was I ended up going back to Florida and I moved in temporarily with one of my good buddies and lived on his couch in his apartment. And you probably say, wait a minute. So you had a bedroom back at your house in Arkansas and you're going to go sleep on some random person's couch in Florida. I think, well, first of all, I wasn't a random. This was a guy who I had known for college for four years and we were cool like that. And he offered to let me stay there.

3:30He didn't, he wasn't charging me rent. He wasn't charging me electricity. He wasn't charging me any of those things. He said, listen, stay here until you can find you, it's probably a job. Which is what I needed. I needed someone to give me the ability to explore different places. But the bigger thing I needed was not only just the ability, somebody to give me the ability to explore because let's just be clear. And Tampa at that time, I had plenty of places, I had places to go. I had Fratt Brothers in the area, I had my college friends in UT in the area. I had people I could have turned to. What I needed was someone to give me the ability to make the next move on my own terms. Because at this particular point, I knew one thing. I did not want to go back to Pinebluff, Arkansas. And for those of you who think I'm throwing shade on Pinebluff, Arkansas, that's not what I'm telling you. My world had been shut Pinebluff, Arkansas for 15 years. I moved there when I was three years old. I spent all of my formative years there. My lens in terms of my world view was shaped through being in Pinebluff. I wanted to see what else the world had to offer.

4:32So when I got to Florida, I fell in love with the state. And so I wanted to stay there. I wanted to see what else does the world have to offer. Because when I was in Florida, I had friends who were from New York, had friends who were from, you know, South Florida, had friends from the Caribbean. I had this wealth and quanta copia of people who were from all these different walks of life that I didn't meet when I was in Arkansas, not trying to say you couldn't. But I did hear. And so I wanted to see, I wanted to move in my own world or my own terms in this world and see what that meant. But I also didn't know what that was going to look like. I had no clue. Remember, when I got to the University of Tampa, I got there thinking I was going to be a doctor. Well, once I decided I wasn't going to be a doctor, we now have to ask yourself the question, well, what are you going to do now since that's not what you want to do? And so for me, I just needed a little time to figure it out. And so that's why whenever I hear my friends now whose kids come back home, they're trying to figure it out. And I'm like, you know what? I'm mad at them because if they, if you don't know what it means to have to try to figure

5:33it out, what you're going to do next, you're missing out on a joyous, but sometimes painful experience because sometimes life puts you in those situations where you're just not sure. When I got back to Tampa, Florida, those first couple of months didn't necessarily feel grueling because when people asked me what was it, hard, was it rough? No, it was just, I knew I needed to find a job. I wanted to find a job that would take advantage of my major. And more importantly, I wanted to find a job that would give me the ability to give me more time to figure out what I wanted to do next. So when I found myself, you know, going to the University of Tampa, going to the employee student resource center to get job opportunities when I was applying for jobs. Because remember, there was no indeed or LinkedIn or Monsters.com or all these other sites where you can find jobs. You had to do it the good old fashioned way. You had to go into places and actually look at papers and so forth like that. When I found this job in Tallahassee, Florida, for me, it really wasn't that I was, oh, I found my dream job. I'm going to go to Tallahassee, Florida.

6:34No, it was my first job. It would give me the ability to pay my car note because I just purchased a car a few months earlier and gave me the ability to have income. But it also gave me the ability to stay in Florida, which is what I wanted. And it gave me the ability to explore what was going to be next on my terms. And let me tell you what happens when you don't know what you're going to do next. Your philosophy about how you move starts to evolve. It starts to come up because when looking back now, back in 1992, 30 plus years ago, what I realized is that I started to develop this philosophy of what do I want to do next. That became my underlying philosophy for everything I did. I would get into a situation instinctively, figure out how can I leverage my opportunities to pursue something else and what can I do next. Now don't give me your own. A lot of instances I would go to these jobs and I would want to kick back and relax and chill. But during those early years, formative years, I was restless.

7:38So I would get into a job. Maybe within a few months, I would be great. But then I would start saying, okay, what do you have here? What kind of programs do you have available? What can I explore? And we cannot underestimate how important it is for us to be in that mindset of saying, okay, I want to decide what I'm going to do next. What is my philosophy about what I'm going to do going forward and more importantly, recognizing that you do it on your own terms? I slept on a couch for two months and during that two months time period, I was struggling. You know, my buddy and I kind of split my food accordingly and so forth. I had residual monies from when I was in the military that I tried to stretch out as long as I possibly could. Were there ways that I could have made life easier for me? Could I have gone back to Arkansas? Could I have gone there and try to reevaluate what my next move would have been? Absolutely. The struggle for me was part of my process. In order for me to figure out what I wanted to do and how I could do it on my own terms, this made sense to me. Now let's just be clear.

8:38It didn't make sense to anybody else, but it didn't have to make sense to anybody else. It only had to make sense to me. And in the long run, it definitely benefited me. So I always tell people when people ask me the question was, you know, were you excited about working with the state? And I'll tell you, it wasn't my dream job, but it gave me the ability to explore what my next opportunities would be pursuing my ultimate dream, which was effectively, what do I want to do next? At my bank, I was literally getting pennies using wallfronts. Chacheng! There's this much that I'm getting an interest and I didn't have to do anything. Clients like Angela earn up to 4.2% APY on their cash with the Wealthfront cash account. Get started at Wealthfront.com. Clients like $8,000 for their testimonial creating a conflict of interest outcomes vary. 3.3% APY as of January 30th, 2026 as representative variable and earned on funds swept to program

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