Just because they aren’t “Working hard” as kids doesn’t mean they won’t be successful … wait… what did I just say?
My wife, Becky and I worry that we aren’t raising our kids to work hard – we don’t live on a farm, they don’t help us mend fences or feed animals. They don’t cut the fields or carry hay. That doesn’t mean they don’t “work hard” Those types of things, that my father did, aren’t what our kids are going to be doing. We don’t live on a farm, we don’t have hay to cut or horses to feed.
My dad did these chores as a child. He was out in the dairy fields, at age 8, de-weeding the crops and doing other odd jobs on the farm. I was raised in the city, so those things weren’t an option for me. My dad worried about my brother and I… would we be hard workers if we weren’t raised working hard in the fields? Doing manual labor? He worried that my brother and I wouldn’t know what hard work was or if we could keep a job with the understanding of what it was to do heavy labor.
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When I went off to college, I would come home and my first summer home, I applied for a job to work in a steel mill. It was hard work, but I enjoyed it. Being raised not working hard, with my hands, didn’t translate into not working in the real world. I did work in the real world. I worked hard, long hours in very intense heat, doing a very laborious job. I did this for years and saved up enough money to buy Becky’s engagement ring.
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