CNBC's Becky Quick has reached what she considers the pinnacle of her career, now at the top of her game in a job that she loves. But she started at the bottom, getting coffee for her coworkers.
Originally from Gary, Indiana, the financial journalist and "Squawk Box" co-anchor first got her foot in the door as a news associate for The Wall Street Journal, which she says "basically meant that I got people coffee, I made copies, [and] I answered the fax machines."
Although these are typically considered "the jobs nobody wants to do," Quick says that she still did them to the best of her ability.
"You can really stand out if you do that," Quick says. "And people will appreciate it."
"You do those jobs, and if you do them really, really well, people are grateful and they will give you opportunities to try other things. I wrote over 100 stories for The Wall Street Journal before they made me a reporter and that's because I was filling in on other beats."
Quick recalls that while her colleagues were on vacation, she was filling in. And even though she worked from Sunday through Thursday, she often found herself showing up at the office on Fridays asking, "Is there anything I can do? Are there stories that I can write?"
Quick also says the best career advice she ever received was to consistently show up.
"Showing up is 90% of this whole game. You've gotta show up every day," she says. "And if you do that, you'll stand out. Because it's hard. It's hard to get up every day, and it's hard to give your best every day. But if you do, people will notice."
In terms of her best practices, Quick lives by a centuries-old mantra: The early bird gets the worm.
"I'm not a morning person, naturally — or at least I didn't used to be. I used to have a hard time showing up for work at the Journal at 10 a.m.," Quick explains. "Now, my show starts at 6 a.m. in another state. And I have to get made up before I come out. So it was a real shift, just getting up that early. But I think lots of good things happen early in the morning."
She credits this mindset to one of the nation's founding fathers: "'Early to bed, early to rise makes a man or woman healthy, wealthy, and wise,' are Ben Franklin's famous words. And he is right, hundreds of years later."
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