I Hate Bare Minimum: What a Banana Chip Factory Taught Me About Career Growth
Three large woks in front of me. Each one full of frying banana chips. One wrong minute, one wrong lift of the drainer, and the whole batch burns.
That was my job. And while I stood there watching oil bubble, I kept asking myself the same question: is this the life I planned?
It wasn't. But that factory taught me the single most important lesson of my career — one that I still carry four years into working as a VA bookkeeper.
Bare minimum is a trap.
I Did Not Start in Accounting
Let me be clear about where I came from, because I think people assume bookkeepers start with a degree and a clean path.
I finished senior high school with an ABM strand — Accountancy, Business and Management. I enrolled in college. I dropped out. Whatever plan I had on paper disappeared.
This was post-pandemic. Classes were delayed. Everyone around me was looking for work. In our area, the jobs that were always hiring were the banana chip factories and packing plantations. If you had zero work experience, you would still get accepted.
That was the appeal. And that was also the warning.
The Interview That Asked Nothing About Skill
A classmate of mine was already working inside one of those factories. I asked if he could get us in — me and a few friends. He said yes. We rode motorcycles to the plant and stood at the gate.
The guard took our IDs and told us to wait outside. Thirty minutes passed. Forty. We moved into whatever shade we could find. Eventually he came back and let us in for interviews.
Here is what I realized about that interview: it was not difficult, because it was not about competence.
Nobody asked what I studied. Nobody asked what I finished. They asked two questions:
The work here is heavy. Can you handle it?
The hours are long. Can you handle it?
We said yes. All of us. I had no idea how heavy or how long — I just wanted to work, and my friends were with me, so it felt manageable.
We were on the production floor the same day. White uniforms. Hairnets. Masks. Strict hygiene protocols. No easing in.
The Slicing Area Broke Me
My first position was slicer.
The process at a banana chip factory goes like this: bananas are bought from local farmers, delivered to the plant, sorted, then peeled by hand. A machine pushes the crates toward the slicing area. That is where I stood.
The bananas soak in water before slicing, which makes them significantly heavier. We lifted them out of the crates by hand and loaded them onto the slicing machine — and the loading platform sat high, so every lift was a full-body movement. Hundreds of times a shift.
Two things made it worse than the physical weight:
We did not know what we were being paid.
And we did not know when the shift would end.
Our first day was our longest, because we had started late due to the interviews. When payday finally came, the amount was almost nothing. It did not cover food properly. It barely covered clothing. There was no relationship between how hard the work was and what we received for it.
My friends quit within one to two months. I planned to take a single day off. They never came back. Neither did I.
Not because the work was hard — but because they were the only thing making it bearable. Without them, it was just heavy and lonely.
The Second Factory: I Chose the Easy Station
I moved to a second banana chip factory, referred by a churchmate.
This time I asked for something different. I told them I did not want the slicing area again — I wanted something lighter. They put me in finishing.
Finishing is the last stage. The chips are already fried and dried. You sort them, remove rejects, and pack them into cartons for export. Compared to slicing, it was almost nothing. Long hours, but light work.
At first I was grateful. I had negotiated my way into an easier life.
Three months in, that gratitude turned into something else.
There was no challenge left. I had gotten exactly what I asked for, and it was slowly making me smaller.
The Habit That Changed My Life
Here is the part I want you to actually take with you.
The workflow at the plant meant that finishing regularly ran out of material. After frying, chips go to the drying area to cool. Then to sorting. Then to us. When sorting backed up, we had nothing to do.
Most people used that downtime to rest. I understood why. The shift was long, and nobody was paying me to do more.
I used it to walk to the cooking area.
Nobody asked me to. It was not my station and it was not my responsibility. But I had already learned peeling. I had learned slicing. I had learned finishing. Cooking was the one part of the process I did not understand — and I did not want a gap in my map of how the business actually worked.
So I stood there and watched. They eventually let me handle the drainer. Then they let me cook. They corrected my technique until I got it right.
That single habit — using dead time to learn the station next to me — is the reason my career looks the way it does now. Not motivation. Not a plan. A repeatable behavior.
Eventually I asked to be transferred to cooker permanently. Partly because finishing had stopped teaching me anything. Partly, honestly, because cooking finished its shift earlier than finishing did.
Why I Left, and Why It Mattered
Cooking gives you time to think. You are mostly alone with three woks and total focus.
And in that focus, an old thought kept surfacing: I was good at accounting.
In senior high school, accounting was the subject I excelled at. It was the thing I had prayed about and decided on. It was the career I actually wanted. And I was standing over hot oil, drifting further away from it every month.
At that time I had started training myself on QuickBooks Online. When our supervisor mentioned the plant used QuickBooks Desktop internally, I saw an opening.
I asked her directly: could she refer me to the office? I told her I had studied accounting. I knew computers. I did not want my training to go to waste.
She said yes, she would refer me.
I waited. The position was open. They were hiring.
They did not give it to me.
One or two months later, I resigned.
That is where my VA career started — not from a breakthrough, but from a closed door and the decision not to stay anyway.
What Bare Minimum Actually Costs You
I want to be precise about what I mean, because "don't do the bare minimum" sounds like generic advice until you have watched it happen to real people.
In every job I have held, I tried to be excellent at it. That is not a personality trait I was born with — it is a decision I make. But I have also learned this about myself: the moment I know I can offer more and I am not given the chance to, I have to move.
Not out of arrogance. Out of self-preservation.
Because here is what I have watched bare minimum do to people:
It breeds envy. When you stop growing, other people's progress starts to feel like an insult instead of a signal.
It breeds self-pity. Stagnation always looks for someone to blame, and eventually it lands on circumstances.
It erodes your sense of value. You stop learning. You stop asking questions. You start complaining more than you contribute.
None of that happens overnight. It happens gradually, in the exact way that comfortable jobs feel fine until you look up and three years have passed.
Growth Does Not Have to Be Fast — It Has to Be Real
I am not telling you to grind yourself into the ground or that rest is failure. That is not the point.
The point is direction.
Gradual is fine. Slow is fine. Small is fine. What is not fine is static. As long as there is progress — any progress — you are still becoming someone.
If I had settled at that first factory, I would probably still be a slicer today. Not because slicing is beneath anyone, but because I would have chosen it out of fear rather than intention, and I would have stopped asking what else was possible.
Instead: four years as a VA bookkeeper. Multiple clients, local and foreign. Corporate experience. A community. Content I get to make. Places I got to see.
None of that came from talent. It came from refusing to do only what was required of me.
Key Takeaways
Bare minimum is not neutral — it compounds. Doing only what is required does not keep you in place. It slowly moves you backward.
Use your downtime to learn the station next to you. In every job there is dead time. What you do with it determines whether you have one year of experience or four years of it.
Competence alone is not enough — you need room to grow. If you are excellent and still not given the chance to advance, that is information. Act on it.
Growth can be gradual. Progress matters more than speed. Static is the only real failure.
A closed door is not the end of the story. I did not get the position I asked for. That rejection is exactly what started my VA career.
Final Thoughts
If you are reading this, you probably want more than what you currently have. You have a dream, something you want to reach, something you want to prove.
You will not get there doing the bare minimum. Not because the universe is punishing you, but because bare minimum is designed to keep you exactly where you are.
Whatever you are doing right now — do it well. And when you have learned everything that room can teach you, go find the next room.
I love you, and God loves you. My prayer is that He plants a large dream in your heart, and that you refuse to settle for less than it.
Let's Connect
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Website: https://www.kylenelsonomac.com/