The part you were handed

Most of what you do all day, you didn't choose. The new hire gets the closing shift. The junior nurse gets the rooms no one else wants. The trainee on the dock gets the heaviest pallets and the worst hours. You walk in and the part is already cast, and a lot of the resentment people carry is really just an argument with that fact.

Epictetus, who started life as a slave and had every reason to resent his part, offered a sturdier picture: "Remember that you are an Actor in a Drama, of such a Kind as the Author pleases to make it. If short, of a short one; if long, of a long one... For this is your Business, to act well the Character assigned you: to chuse it, is another's" (Enchiridion 17, Carter). The casting isn't yours. The performance is.

That's not resignation. An actor handed a small part doesn't half-mumble it because it's small — that's how you ruin both the play and yourself. The dignity is in playing it fully: the closer who locks up right, the junior who charts clean, the trainee who stacks the pallet square.

The work nobody wants is still a part. Act it well, and the smallness stops mattering.