To lead the room, you must first book the room. Your twenties are for learning; your thirties are for earning.

The Bag Nobody Warned You About

In Article 2, we left you standing in the right room. You learned that being close to the right people drives success, and that money can wait while learning cannot. You walked in. Now what?

Now, almost certainly, somebody hands you a bag.

Not the firm’s biggest client. Not the strategy deck the partners take to the board. You will be asked to collect the data, format and print the deck, chase signatures, set up the room, book the lunch, to carry the real or symbolic bag for someone more senior. The profession even has a name for it: carrying the bag. And a clever, ambitious graduate’s first reaction is to read it as a hidden demotion, proof that the world does not yet see what they are worth.

So in our third session, the Gen Z Squad from West University Timișoara — Maria, Ana Maria, Anelia, Siana, and a new voice, Adriel — tested the idea with Serban. The question was direct: when you hear carrying the bag, what comes to mind — humility, exploitation, or opportunity?

What happened next surprised the facilitator most of all.

“I wouldn’t see it as something negative. It feels like a normal thing you do at the beginning.”  — Maria

Nobody objected. Anelia found an image that stayed with us for the rest of the session:

“Like Santa with his sack. We keep gathering more skills, more knowledge, more people to learn from, and we carry them with us.”  — Anelia

That reaction — seeing the bag as something to fill, not a sign of servitude — is what matters most. Erika Ayers Badan, who built one of America’s most demanding media businesses, says it simply: your twenties are the decade to work as hard as you ever will. Not because suffering is noble, but because your time will never be cheaper. It is the one period when the cost of learning is close to zero.

Serban says: Nobody is handed the company’s most critical work at the beginning. You earn your way there one booked lunch, one printed deck, one flawless logistics email at a time. The path to the top of the building often starts at the photocopier.

An Old Idea in New Clothes

There is nothing modern about carrying the bag. For centuries, every craft followed the same path: apprentice, journeyman, master. The apprentice carried the master’s tools, his bag, not as humiliation, but as the price of entry. First you carry the bag, then you work at the bench, then you earn the licence to practise.

That system never disappeared; it only changed its clothes. A doctor still completes a residency. A lawyer, an auditor, or an accountant works through a learning period before signing their own name to anything. The basic work is not a detour around the profession — it is the profession, in its earliest form. Even where no formal system exists, the first years are an apprenticeship in reliability, hidden inside tasks that can feel routine, repetitive, or below the qualification you worked so hard for.

The mathematician Paul Halmos said the same truth more sharply:

“I read once that the true mark of a pro — at anything — is that he understands, loves, and is good at even the drudgery of his profession.”  — Paul Halmos, mathematician

Maria had already learned to see the situation generously, and her rule was surprisingly simple:

“At the start, I never said no to anything. If someone needed copies made and I had the time, I would make them — because that person will help you later. I don’t think there’s anything so ‘low’ in a company that doing it degrades you.”  — Maria

Adriel — carrying the bag at a technology giant before he had even finished his degree — added one important point. The task is rarely the problem. The reason behind it is.

“I’ll help with anything as long as I have the time — gladly. The only time it feels off is when someone hands me a task not because they’re busy, but because they want to remind me they’re above me.”  — Adriel

That difference matters, and we will come back to it. A bag given to you so you can learn is an investment. A bag given to you so someone can feel more important is a cost you gain nothing from. The skill of the first decade is telling the two apart and not letting the second kind spoil the first for you.

Ambition Meets Patience

Here is the tension at the heart of the early years. You are ambitious, everyone in the room is, and you want to prove now that you can do more. But trust builds slowly. The gap between what you can do and what you are trusted to do creates a quiet, constant frustration. How do you hold ambition and patience at the same time?

Maria’s answer was the cleanest line of the evening:

“What keeps me patient is knowing exactly where I want to be in a few months. The destination is what makes the waiting bearable.”  — Maria

Patience without a destination is just drifting, and it quickly turns into resentment. Patience with a destination is strategy: you accept the small task today because you can see the bigger thing it is buying you. The bag is not the point. The bag is the price you pay to learn.

How Trust Is Actually Earned

Words are easy, so Serban asked for evidence: a moment when a small, unglamorous task — nothing you would put on a CV — quietly earned you trust. Three stories came back. Together, they are a practical guide to how trust is really built.

Maria volunteered for the rain. A project brought fifty Dutch students to Timișoara. Maria barely knew the professor running it, but when asked what she could do, she answered: whatever is needed. What was needed was a photographer. So she chased people across the city in a treasure hunt, ran the interviews, and stood in the rain to get the photo.

“After that, the professor became protective of me. She wanted me on every project, and she’d spoken to the general manager about how involved I’d been. I stood in the rain and the wind — but in the end the deal was super nice.”  — Maria

Why did the professor’s attitude change? Maria did not hesitate: she was the one still posting at two in the morning, answering the phone at any hour. Reliability, shown under a little discomfort, looks like character. People remember who showed up in the rain.

Ana Maria closed the loop. During a year of secretarial work at a law office, the thing that won the lawyer’s trust fastest was almost embarrassingly simple:

“At the end of every day I’d tell them exactly what I had done — and what I hadn’t. That transparency is what built the trust quickly.”  — Ana Maria

Nothing dramatic, just an honest, daily report that removed the most expensive thing a manager spends on a junior: uncertainty. Tell people what you did and did not do before they ask, and you become someone they no longer have to watch Adriel made himself the bridge. Half a year into his internship at the same technology giant, his team was moving data between two tools, working with a technical colleague in India. Adriel was only a support analyst but he understood the process better than his role required. So the lead manager began bringing him into meetings as the link between the two sides, the one who knew the data well enough to explain it. Soon other managers were asking for him too.

Serban asked about the feeling underneath it: exploited, or learning?

“I felt accomplished, like I’d taken another step toward where I want to be. They had a small need for me, and I felt I had a bit of importance there, however small. It made me want to learn more.”  — Adriel

That week, a leadership course had taught him a principle: do not just meet your manager’s expectations, set your own a little higher. That one move turns a support analyst into the person everyone wants in the room. As the investor John Templeton said, people who think they have all the answers do not even know the questions. The junior who stays curious about the why is already doing the work of someone two levels above.

The Line Where Trust Is Granted

If trust is the currency, when exactly is it given? Siana drew the line clearly:

“When they see you do your current job well — even the easy tasks — when you’re efficient and you keep your word, that’s when you’ve earned the next step.”  — Siana

A fair and very human standard. But Serban added what the textbooks leave out: in real life, the timeline is rarely that clean. How fast trust comes depends on the organization. In companies with high turnover, it comes much faster — people leave, work piles up, and one day you are simply the last one left, given responsibility because there is no one else. In stable, well-staffed companies, it is slower: you have time to prove yourself, but you must wait your turn. Neither is better. Both ask the same thing — be ready before you are asked.

Serban says: In a firm with high turnover, you earn trust by being the last one standing. In a mature firm, you earn it by being the one who never drops the bag. Either way, readiness has to arrive before the opportunity does.

Curiosity Is a Discipline, Not a Mood

Reliability gets you trusted. Curiosity stops the routine from draining you. But how do you stay curious when the tenth repetition looks exactly like the first — the same data run, the same standard report? Adriel’s answer was the most concrete of the night, and worth copying exactly:

“What used to take me six hours, I rebuilt — with formulas, with emails prepared in advance, restructuring the whole process — so I could finish it faster, at the same quality. That’s how I fed my own curiosity.”  — Adriel

Notice what he did. He did not wait for an interesting task — he made a boring one interesting by attacking it. The repetitive job became a puzzle: how many hours can this take without losing quality? That instinct — to improve the task you were given to get through — separates the person who only survives the routine from the one who quietly turns it into a sign of good judgment. Do not just book the meeting. Ask why this client, this room, this quarter. Curiosity costs nothing and changes everything.

The Devil, the Heiress, and Two Ways to Carry a Bag

Anelia, who brings a psychologist’s eye to the squad, named the real danger. It is not the bag. The danger is doing work that is permanently below you.

“If you only ever do work below your level, you get bored and you don’t grow. There has to be a balance — some routine, yes, but also things that stretch you. The right person in the right seat is the one who grows.”  — Anelia

Asked about colleagues who roll their eyes at booking a table or standing at the photocopier, Anelia turned it around:

“Flip it around. You were trusted with that responsibility. Do it well, and you earn the chance to be trusted with things that actually matter.”  — Anelia

To make it concrete, the conversation turned to two examples from film and television. First, The Devil Wears Prada. Siana, who would happily take the assistant’s seat herself, saw past the intimidating Miranda Priestly:

“Even though Miranda was demanding and hard, Andy could see beyond it. In the difficult moments, she looked for what she could learn from her.”  — Siana

Maria connected it to something everyone knows:

“It’s like the tough teacher in high school. The one who pushed you hardest is the one you remember — because that’s where you actually grew.”  — Maria

The second example was the opposite. In White Lotus season two, a young assistant named Portia works for a rich, unhappy woman who inherited her fortune. Portia is there only for the money. She complains to her friends, never settles in, never finds any meaning in the role. The same job as Andy — carry the bag for a difficult person — and a completely different result, because the inner attitude is the opposite.

There is the whole psychology of carrying the bag, in two characters. Believe there is something to learn from the person above you, and you can accept a lot of difficulty and grow from it. Decide it is only a transaction, and the same tasks wear you down. The bag is identical. The person carrying it is not.

Serban says: Two people can carry the very same bag. One is building a career. The other is just getting tired. The difference is never the bag — it’s what they decided it meant before they picked it up.

The First Decade, Year by Year

Near the end, Serban asked the squad to look far ahead, across the whole decade. What happens in year one, year three, year five, year ten? Their combined picture was strikingly honest.

Year one is about feeling like an impostor. Siana expects it to feel hard — the sense that you know nothing and do not belong, while you adapt to a completely new way of living and working. Anelia describes it more gently: you are the one learning, guided closely by a mentor.

Year three is belonging. You start to feel part of the organization; Your confidence grows. But routine arrives too, Anelia warns — the turning point where you either turn repetition into curiosity or let it bore you into leaving.

Year five is the turning point: a likely change of position, real responsibility, and the first experience of mentoring someone junior — carrying your own bag while teaching someone else to carry theirs.

Year ten, in their imagination, is full mentorship — and, surprisingly, a return to the beginning, as higher positions bring new challenges that make you adapt and learn all over again.

Ana Maria added an idea that reorganized the whole picture: a career takes roughly three shapes. The linear one — the same thing throughout. The varied one — something different every day. And the spiral — where every seven to nine years you reinvent what you do, but carry forward everything you have built. She sees herself spiralling, perhaps a complete change at twenty-seven. The only reason that feels possible, she said, is the value and trust she saved up in the years before. There is the quiet main idea of the whole series: the bag you carry well in your first decade is the credibility you spend in your second.

One honest exception, which Serban raised himself: this whole conversation assumed you are joining an organization. The entrepreneurial path follows a different pattern — its own apprenticeship, its own kind of bag. That is a conversation for another evening.

What the Bag Teaches

The closing question was the one that mattered most. Imagine that, five years from now, you listen to this recording again. What do you hope carrying the bag will have taught you? Every answer pointed, remarkably, to the same place — not skill, but character.

Siana hoped to learn to handle any situation — the courage to do the task nobody explains to you. Maria went straight to empathy:

“I’ll know exactly how it feels to be the one carrying the bag, so I’ll understand the people just starting out — what they’d want to do, how they’d feel about a task I gave them.”  — Maria

Ana Maria wanted to set standards with firmness but also with empathy — and, charmingly, to learn how Adriel organizes his ideas. Anelia’s answer was almost a blessing:

“To master the information until it comes easily. To grow my patience and my tolerance for the people just entering the field. To learn how to pass what I know to the next person. And to be able to tell myself: it was hard, but you made it.”  — Anelia

Adriel closed the circle where he had opened it — with the search for value in the smallest things:

“To find opportunity even in the most basic task. And to help the people just starting out develop better than I did — because maybe I didn’t have that person, and I could be theirs.”  — Adriel

Look at what every one of them wanted from this the beginning of their professional career. Not a promotion. Not a title. Curiosity, patience, the courage to handle the unexpected moment, and the ability one day to make someone else’s bag lighter. They understood, instinctively, what takes most people a decade to learn: the bag is never really about the bag. It is the training that turns you into the kind of person others will one day trust with everything.

We are already in June — the season of exams for students, and of graduation. Congratulations to everyone who graduated, and good luck to all of you taking your exams! The squad is five strong now, Adriel’s bag freshly on his shoulder, and the next question is already forming — the one everyone gets wrong.

Class is in session. Stay tuned for Article 4: The Passion Myth. Should you chase the money, the competence, or the hobby? The answer is not the one you expect.

This article is the third in the series Winning Your First Professional Decade. It is based on a session recorded on 15 March 2026 with Maria, Ana Maria, Anelia, Siana, and Adriel from West University Timișoara, facilitated by Serban Toader.