Essay on No Job Is Beneath You

I will be using a passage called No Job Is Beneath You from Randy Pausch’s memoir to show how Pausch uses idioms, personification, symbolism, and metaphors to express his message that no job is beneath you. Pausch discusses his growing frustration on how many young adults have this entitlement that they believe they should start with a higher advantage and do not have to work hard. He deals with this entitlement by sharing advice, a metaphor, to the young people, “You ought to be thrilled you got a job in the mailroom. And when you get there, here’s what you do: Be really great at sorting mail.”(Randy Pausch 168-169). The usage of this metaphor is to show that no matter what you end up with in life, you must do your best if you want to improve the situation. Not everything that happens to you in life will be something you want, but you must have a good attitude and keep continuing that task. When the students’ firms would give negative feedback, they would use the term, “too big for their britches”(Pausch 169). This term, or idiom, is used to illustrate how overly confident the student was and how they would be getting ahead of themselves, thinking of the future and not the steps needed to get them there. That mindset will get in the way of working sufficiently. Pausch reflects, or flashes back, to a time when he was 15 and was working on an orchard. He had noticed how some of the workers were teachers, he had told his father how “the job was beneath those teachers”(Pausch 169), and his dad “gave me the tongue-lashing of a lifetime”(Pausch 169). The personification of tongue-lashing gives the audience an understanding that his father was very bothered by his comment and gives him a stern and deep talk about how his words were wrong and upsetting. This talk was very impactful on his and others' lives. Pausch goes on to say how his father would prefer he worked hard and became “the best ditch-digger in the world rather than... a self-impressed elitist behind a desk”(Pausch 169), his father would rather Pausch be a hard-working person with no money than a rich ungrateful elitist. All of these literary devices used in the passage, are there to emphasize that you are where you are for a reason and you get what you give.