What does it take to be successful? What does it take to be happy? Well, the good news is, the pathway to both is open to everyone. EVERYONE. The bad news is it’s not going to be easy. Zo and Bill get deep into the hows and whys on this edition of The Virtue Signal.
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4 replies on “The Work Ethic”
Remember, “Dress for Success”? It wasn’t just about what you were wearing, but attitude.
My widowed grandmother tortured me if I sat down and turned on the television. In WW II she and her sister were the first two Rosie the Riveters, bulging biceps still evident. “Don’t you feel guilty that your parents, after working all day, would come home to a driveway full of leaves?” Getting out the broom, I’d sigh and go do it. I had trouble sitting still anyway. Dealing with chestnut hulls sucked. But work was no stranger, as I had to rake and cut neighbor’s giant, oak tree-filled yards from the age of 12.
My medical school recommendations came from 4 doctors whose yards I kept up.
I’ve posted this (too often) before. The Protestant work-ethic was partially a result of their abstinence from alcohol. Up until the rise of that sect of Christianity, most everyone was Catholic. In the Middle Ages, a significant amount of calories in peasant’s diets was from Beer. Water was dangerous, so even the kids imbibed. Protestants took advantage of the New World’s coffee. Coffee houses were where business was done.
Turns out working intoxicated is more likely less productive than being caffeinated.
You know what will beat the stupid out of a guy real quick? Having kids.
Before I got married I was travelling around the world doing interesting things. According to my wife I was quite a romantic figure but she was obviously biased. This continued for a while after I got married and my wife said to me …
“Honey, you’ve got two boys to raise and you can’t do that by remote control.”
We had a very long talk that night and she explained to me what raising those boys with a (mostly) absentee Dad was doing to her and the family. It didn’t help a bit that the work I was doing was a somewhat hazardous and there was always the possibility I might not come home from it.
So I left that interesting job and took anything I could get. And we went from mediocre well-off to poor as a result. For a while I drove semi-truck because my Dad and my Grandpa had both done that and it was simply something I knew how to do. That didn’t pay well but if I hustled the way truck drivers do I could keep our financial heads above water. Then I got a job at a lumber yard because I was still out on the road and gone too much. That didn’t pay squat. Some of the time, being a licenced driver, I drove a lumber truck with a dump bed and just dumped units of lumber on the site where the contractor wanted them. That wouldn’t have been so bad but my boss, the owner of the yard, got a real good percentage on sheet rock (gypsum wall board) so I and another guy would often end up unloading semi-trailers of rock on contractors sites.
If you’ve never unloaded a trailer full of 12′ sheet rock, with the contractor pointing out places in the unfinished house, upstairs and downstairs, and saying “I want six there, I want four there, I want eight there …” etc. — Or done something similar like Zo is talking about, then you don’t really know what hard work is. I’m not slagging on you for that, I’d have been every bit as happy to not find out about hard work like that myself. It was way harder work than bailing hay as a kid growing up. Even for a farm kid this was backbreaking labor.
(I don’t resent the lumber yard owner for any of this either. It was a job I agreed to do because I needed a job and that was what was available. He was actually a really good guy and my job there was seasonal. So we worked out a deal where I would come to work in the Spring, work Spring, Summer and Fall, then quit. Then go to work for an agricultural installation where I had worked my way up to Foreman after being there several seasons. I’d work there until the harvest was done in early winter and make enough money to pay the heating bill for the winter. This was in a Northern Tier State and the heating bill ran around $1500 per month for several months. When the harvest was over that company laid me off and being laid off I could collect unemployment. Which the lumber yard didn’t have to pay because I had ‘quit’. This worked out good for everyone and I managed to make ends meet year round.)
But I was home almost every night. And we never had to go on welfare or anything like that to survive.
Later I got better jobs but the point here is that having kids to feed and clothe will lend a whole new perspective on life. Eventually everything worked out and I got back to doing some interesting work again, more locally this time.
Then I got hurt. Pretty bad. And I had to reinvent myself all over again. I got hurt badly enough that no one wanted to hire me because of the liability involved so I was forced to create my own job and I started my own business.
No one ever told me life was easy. Or fair. I heard all this prosperity attitude and prosperity preaching nonsense and it doesn’t work. Take my word for it. If you’re poor and working hard it’s not because you failed to imagine something vigorously enough. It’s also not because you’ve done something wrong and God is mad at you so you need to stop doing that wrong thing and voila! Ala Joel Olstein all of a sudden you’ll be well off.
You can’t bribe God and He won’t bribe you.
Today both my boys are good men and true, both with respectable jobs and sound, intact families of their own. The youngest just retired from a Naval career and the oldest is an electrician. The Navy career was more glamorous (he’s a pilot) but I love and admire them both equally. They both did well and …
It was worth every blister and every sore back and every night I came home too tired to stay up later than the kid’s bedtime. It was worth every bottle of Bourbon that never made it to my house and every cigar I didn’t get to smoke during those years. It was worth wearing beaten up work boots with holes in them and jeans worn until they virtually fell apart so my boys would have decent gear to wear to school. Having kids will beat the stupid out of you real fast.
(This is a highly condensed low resolution account of several years of my life and much has been omitted for the sake of brevity and clarity. I’m trying to get a point across, not write an autobiography.)
I can definitely relate to your story, I grew up in a Catholic family with 3 sisters in a 3 bedroom, 1 bath house. My dad had a desk job his entire career, but he worked every weekend doing construction and improvement projects for co-workers, family, and friends to earn extra money.
As soon as I was old enough(around 11-12) I was “volunteered” to help him. We did concrete work, framing and building patios, roofing, painting, outdoor sprinkler systems, fences, etc. I didn’t like it a lot of the time, but I was paid for my work. And I learned how to do all of those things. We even built a lot of the furniture we had in our house growing up. Most of it is still in the family.
Your experiences unloading drywall sounds very familiar also, I drove a truck and delivered printed materials(paper is very heavy) for a printing company for over 13 years, and then did the same for an office supply company(Office Max) for over 17 years. Hauling all of that weight up sets of stairs, or sometimes down wasn’t a lot of fun, but I was good at it. I never made a lot of money, but my wife and our 2 kids did alright.
We bought our own home in 2000, raised two successful kids who are married with their own families now, and we have 4 grandkids.
I’d like to think that my work ethic had some impact on our kids growing up to be “normal”. I had to work some part-time jobs on the side like my dad, but that’s how I was raised. We never got anything unless we worked for it.
That doesn’t seem to apply anymore.