Bloom where you are planted. Imagine you stand all day in a confined booth and serve as a quasi cashier, exercising just one transaction over and over and over and over again.

Back in the day before automation took the boredom out of that kind of routine work for humans, you could see how toll takers would refer to their booths as vertical coffins.

But who says you have to join the walking dead when you step into a toll booth. Why couldn’t you dance while you issued change and tickets to one motorists after another?

That’s what the Dancing Toll Taker told author Charles Garfield, a leadership development authority and one of the 35 essayists in Learn Like a Leader. 

The Dancing Toll Taker even found inspiration in his meager glass-walled booth: “I have a corner office: glass on all sides and I can see the Golden Gate Bridge (from my office.)”

The Dancing Toll Taker, who dreamed of dancing professionally in the movies, had found his purpose. Garfield noted that the Dancing Toll Taker had “found what Archimedes said he would need to move the earth: a lever and a PLACE to STAND.” Even in a booth.