Burger King or Goldman Sachs?

That’s not the exact choice most teens get to make when choosing a summer job, but the question is: What’s the better bet?

Well, if Goldman Sachs is really calling . . . hmm. But a grueling, sweaty summer gig can give kids more grit than they’d get at any air-conditioned accounting internship.

And grit can take you places plain old resume-building can’t.

“For two summers in Ireland when I was 16 and 17 I worked on a farm,” says Mike Neill, a writer in New Jersey. “My main duty involved dagging the sheep before they could be shorn.”

“Dagging” is the process of removing the clumped wool from a sheep’s behind.

Lesson learned? Save up and leave. Neill got himself to New York the next year and found a tabloid reporting job. “Basically doing the same kind of work, but without the lingering smell.”

A stinky, real-world job can light a fire in kids. “One of the benefits of a low level job is learning how to practice goal-directed behavior,” says Matt Fastman, a clinical psychologist at Cognitive Behavioral Associates in Great Neck, Long Island. Once you realize that the amount you work is the amount you make — that’s self-efficacy.

Consider Greg Greeley. He did the farm thing, too: hay-baling, weed-spraying, even one project for an insurance adjuster that involved measuring many square miles of wheat fields to determine how much grain fell to the ground after a hail storm. Did all that hustling lead directly to his executive positions at Amazon, Airbnb and his current gig — CEO of Simon & Schuster?

Can’t say it didn’t. Just look at the first jobs many celebrities had: Brad Pitt wore a chicken suit for El Pollo Loco. Jennifer Anniston was a bike messenger. Chris Rock bused tables at a Red Lobster in Queens.

It’s not where you start, it’s where you finish. And starting closer to the top can’t always deliver the independence-building kick of being a rank newbie.

Elsa Barry was terrified of heights when she got a summer camp job. Task assigned? The ropes course! Fifty feet in the air she had to attach kids to the harnesses on which their lives depended.

You can call that a summer job — or the kind of exposure therapy parents pay good money to give their anxious kids. “It pushed me out of my comfort zone,” says Barry, now a marketing professional moving to DC.

A swank summer internship might have taught her more about marketing, but less about facing her fears. Facing fears is more important.

As is simply facing the day. Getting yourself to do something supremely unappealing is a master class in overcoming what shrinks call “mood-directed behavior.” As Fastman explains, when you let your mood direct you — “I don’t feel like going to the gym, so I won’t” — you sabotage yourself. Learning to conquer your mood is learning to conquer the world.

Bev Weintraub spent a summer opening industrial-size cans of tuna and mixing it with mayo. That was at a summer camp. She spent another summer opening pallets of Pampers at Toys “R” Us — and bleeding from boxcutter cuts. In other words, she learned how to deal with boredom and pain. Priceless. Weintraub went on to write, “Wings of Gold: The Story of the First Women Naval Aviators.”

At their best, what may seem like dead-end jobs can actually open kids up to a whole new world.

Barbara Sarnecka worked as a preschool teacher’s aid and realized she loved asking the kids questions. “Why don’t animals talk?” “Why does it get dark at night?” Today she’s a professor of cognitive sciences at the University of California-Irvine, specializing in early childhood development.

Barbara Leaf found summer work at Busch Gardens in Williamsburg, Va. “I got a job there in Merry Olde England,” she recalls. “I had to dress up like a servant wench to serve essentially Krispy Kreme donuts at ye olde pastry shoppe.”

Okay, it wasn’t really England. But it was sort of work in another country. Leaf went on to become United States ambassador to the UAE.

A summer job doesn’t have to be great to launch a great life.

Lenore Skenazy is president of Let Grow, the nonprofit promoting childhood independence and resilience, and founder of the Free-Range Kids movement. See her TED Talk here.