My dad was a dentist and he moved us across the state of Arkansas to open a dental practice, and then told me to get to work to pay for college and the highest paying job in Bentonville, Arkansas in 1984 was Walmart Warehouse at $6.50 an hour compared to McDonald's at $3.35, so I chose Walmart.

I went to graduate school and paid good money to get an education that's worth something, but I learned more in the first six months at Walmart than I learned in 5 1/2 years of post-secondary education.

Volunteer for something extra, volunteer for something hard. One of the reasons that I got the opportunities that I got was that I would raise my hand when my boss was out of town and he or she was visiting stores or something, and someone needed to pinch hit and go to a meeting, I would go, and if I knew the answer to the question that came up, I'd share it, if I didn't, I'd say, "I don't know, but I'll find out fast and get back to you." I then put myself in an environment where I became a low risk promotion because people had already seen me do the job.

Don't take your current job for granted; the next job doesn't come if you don't do the one you've got, well.

Today, Walmart employs about 2.1 million associates. The vast majority of our management team started as an hourly, just like I did. If you walked around here, not just here in Arkansas, but around our company, you would find a lot of people with more than 20 years of service, and you'd find a lot of people who've joined the company to climb up the ladder and create opportunities for themselves.

Other tasks and other jobs changed, which enabled us to create new jobs that paid more and have fewer of the older jobs that went away. I hope what happens as we lead through this is that there will be pluses and minuses, but the net ends up being even more people because we have more ideas of how to grow.