This might be controversial, but we're going to put this out there and see if that cat licks it up: Dream jobs wouldn't be dream jobs if they were easily attainable. And if we learned anything from this week's Top Shelf with Michelle Phan, it's that sometimes the first job you want isn't always the one you need (but that doesn't mean you won't come back to it later). Michelle isn't alone in her unconventional career path—in fact, some of the biggest fashion and beauty industry influencers have had circuitous roads to success. Now when you're struggling, they're there for some moral support. Read below for some tips:

Have fun when you can
Oribe—yes, that Oribe—like so many New Yorkers, moved to the city expecting glamour. Instead, he ended up serving tables. “I was a big dreamer, attracted to the glamour of the movies,” he told ITG back in 2013. “I thought I wanted to be an actor, so I moved to New York City and got a job working at a club called the Blue Angel. It was French and had dancers, but unless you were the star of the show, which I wasn't, you were a server. I served salad and dessert. Between courses, I would go upstairs and change into magician costumes and G-strings and pick up naked girls. You do crazy things when you’re young.”

Bother the right people
Vanity Fair's Fashion and Style Director Jessica Diehl quite literally once told herself “You know what, I’m going to be that girl that’s 38 and maybe getting a bit part on an Off-Off Broadway play—if that," when she moved to New York to pursue, of all things, acting. Good thing she quit to become a bartender—"an illegal one because I wasn’t 21 yet, but I lied"—because that’s where she met a market editor for Marie Claire who, upon much pestering gave her her first magazine internship. The rest, they say, is history.

Change your hair, change your outlook...
Before starting her own media empire, Jane Pratt “felt like a loser. People didn’t know I existed and I was really depressed,” she told ITG in her Top Shelf. Her solution? A makeover. “I started wearing a ton of makeup and doing my hair, for hours, to look like Farrah Fawcett. When I went back to school, people thought I was a new student. I just went with it. I was like, "Why not? Why even remind them that I was that girl from the year before?"

Fake it 'til you make it, right? It's a cliché for a reason.

Oribe, Jessica Diehl, and Jane Pratt all photographed by Emily Weiss. Read more quotes here.