At the beginning of summer vacation when I was 14 years old — the very first day of summer vacation in fact — my mom came into my room right before leaving for work.
She woke me from a drooling teenage slumber and told me that a) I would have a job working 20 hours a week by the end of the week and b) I had to do something athletic over the summer.
I was absolutely furious and threw an epic squawk (it was the first day of summer, all my friends got to hang out, my friends didn’t have to get jobs, why me, etc.) but she didn’t budge.
She calmly explained that her terms were non-negotiable and that until I satisfied a) and b), I would be confined to the house, no friends over, and would have to finish a daily chore list before she got home. She kissed me on the cheek and left for work.
By the end of the very first day I had a part time job working at the neighborhood pharmacy and had joined the swim team at the local pool. The prospect of sitting around the house all summer while my friends tore through the neighborhood engaging in all sorts of juvenile tomfoolery lit a fire under my ass.
I was reminded of my mom’s little lesson last week when I touched on the story about the huge increase in the number of Americans who are now receiving federal disability payments.
As I wrote, these days those whose 99 weeks of unemployment come to an end are simply switching to another government program – disability — to continue riding the gravy train.
Those who game the system without really being disabled are acting immorally and dishonestly for sure, but such value judgments these days seem almost quaint. Yes, they likely see the one percenters getting away with even more dishonesty and economic carnage, but that’s not an excuse either.
The real problem as I see it is the karmic damage such a mindset exacts on an individual and what happens when such a mindset becomes pervasive in society.
Let me see if I can explain what I mean…
Thanks to mom’s little lesson when I was 14, I had loads of different summer and school jobs and I actually enjoyed all of them.
I worked as a dishwasher at a ski area restaurant; a mover; a gopher on a construction site where I humped sheets of drywall from one place to another all day long; a pharmacy delivery driver; a landscape construction manager; a barback (bartender’s assistant); a scaffold builder on another construction site; a waiter; an assistant at an international economic school, and even a piano mover… Okay, that one did suck, but the money was great.
Why did I enjoy them?
First, I always had my own walking around money. My friends who didn’t work had to rely on their parents for funds. Not me. I had a level of financial freedom at an early age that they didn’t.
Second, and more importantly, because I learned about the value of work at an early age, I believe it gave me a level of professional confidence that has served me well throughout my professional life so far. The returns were actually compounding in those early years because with every subsequent job, I was given more responsibility and reached mastery in less and less time.
The upshot of this isn’t to pat myself on the back. I was your typical lazy, teenage shit back in the day. I was an absolutely terrible student who barely graduated from college, and I’ve always considered myself of only average intelligence in any case (I once told my brother in fact, that while I wasn’t necessarily the smartest, I sure was “perseverancy”… which I guess proved the point.)
No, the upshot is that because of the strong work ethic that my mother instilled in me, the idea of a job or career has never intimidated or worried me. I’m confident that if I was out of work tomorrow, I could have another job in a few hours. It may not be the one I want necessarily, or at the pay I want, but I’d eventually master it.
How many of those falsely claiming disability have a strong work ethic? I’d venture to guess very few, or they couldn’t bring themselves to take a government handout.
Yes, times are hard, but the stigma and shame of being “on the dole” is gone. And so too is the idea of a work ethic – taking pride in your work for its own sake, mastering a craft, trade or profession, and choosing to excel at it just because.
This is what I mean by karmic damage. Dependency on the state is utterly destructive to the soul. A strong work ethic on the other hand virtually ensures self-reliance and self-empowerment. We desperately need to recapture that mindset and as parents we can do our part.
My kids don’t know it yet, but some early summer morning a few years from now, as they lay peacefully slumbering they are each going to be in for the same rude awakening my mom gave me a long time ago.
That’s because a strong work ethic is one of the most valuable gifts a parent can ever give their children.
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