The value of a horrible job - especially when you are young

Someone asked if LBJ was born in a log cabin, LBJ said "no, I was born in a manger."

At Thanksgiving 6 years ago, I was hiking with my nephew who is 18 years old and a senior in high school. He wants to major in classical music; he plays the piano very well. I was encouraging him to put together a classical music group to play at weddings or other events this coming summer. I told him that if he would put together some YouTube videos of his group playing music and send the link to churches and other places that would hire his group, I would give his group $100 but when he earns $1,000, I would get $50 back. He did not seem all that motivated to do this. In fact, he does not seem to be motivated to work much at all. To which I said. You need to get a horrible job.

To be fair to my nephew, he practices the piano many hours a day for many years to get to the level he is at. I do not want to downplay his passion and dedication for music. But as he is contemplating his future work career that will make him successful - as only he can define success, I want to share a few thoughts with him and the rest of you.

In the book ‘David and Goliath’ by Malcolm Gladwell. He highlights that sometimes a situation that was horrible in a person’s life in the past, is actually the event that makes him or her successful. My first job was working in a farm field detasseling corn. I had to get up at 5:30am in the morning to take a bus from the city to work in the fields. My second job was working as a dishwasher at the “Lucky Steer” restaurant – which is a contradiction in terms because no steer is lucky and the steers that were on the plate were very unlucky. I know – I know, I also walked to school – barefoot - in the snow - uphill - both ways.

Another benefit of having a horrible job when you are young, is you can say how hard you had it when you are old ??

These 2 jobs were not the most enjoyable but they did teach me a valuable lesson. If I wanted to get a better job – a job that I would enjoy and one that would give me the most opportunity, I needed to work hard studying. Working to get an Electrical Engineering degree at Purdue was not easy. Even though I was getting As and Bs, I almost switched major to a less demanding degree. (As one advertisement in the student newspaper stated: engineering major changing his major to humanities; wanting to trade study lamp for a nice soft pillow.) I am glad I stuck it out because having a BSEE has given me the opportunity to do some really interesting things that I find very interesting and I believe has made a difference in the world.

My concern when we make it too easy for kids and don’t encourage them to work for work's sake – even bad jobs, is they are not motivated to study hard and just get by. My 82 year old uncle told the story about the time when he was a boy about his father. My uncle told his father that “he wished he was a millionaire so he did not need to work. To which his father said, even if you were a millionaire, if you lived in my house, you would still work.”

This story reminded me of the story of Calvin Coolidge Jr. “the eldest son of the Vice President of the United States when working on a farm in Massachusetts, earning $3.50 a day, when his employer brought dramatic news. President Warren G. Harding had died; Calvin Jr.'s father was now President Calvin Coolidge. To this, young Calvin replied simply: "Yes, I suppose he is. In which one of the sheds do you want me to work this morning, Mr. Day?" Calvin learned the value of hard work from his father. When a fellow worker later said to him, "If my father was President, I wouldn't work in a tobacco field." Calvin responded, "If my father were your father, you would." “

https://scoutingmagazine.org/issues/0010/d-wwas.html

I have just finished reading ‘The Glass Cage’ by Nicholas Carr. In it, it highlights the danger of relying on technology too much. Use GPS all the time and you can no longer figure out directions on your own. As technology makes our life easier, it will be easier and easier to use that technology but in doing so, we become helpless to the technology. If we are not careful, we will become slaves to the technology. When I lived in Spain working for Motorola, I had a roommate who had a saying, “go a different way each time you go to a place to get a different perspective.” This is not the most efficient way to get to a place but you will never discover something new if you always go the same way.

Just like it is so important to exercise your mind even when technology can provide so many of the answers without thinking, it is important to exercise your body as well.

“In 1966, five healthy men volunteered for a research study at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School. It must have sounded like the opportunity of a lifetime; all they had to do was spend three weeks of their summer vacation resting in bed. But when they got out of bed at the end of the trial, it probably didn’t seem so good. Testing the men before and after exercise, the researchers found devastating changes that included faster resting heart rates, higher systolic blood pressures, a drop in the heart’s maximum pumping capacity, a rise in body fat, and a fall in muscle strength.

In just three weeks, these 20-year-olds developed many physiologic characteristics of men twice their age. Fortunately, the scientists didn’t stop there. Instead, they put the men on an 8-week exercise program. Exercise did more than reverse the deterioration brought on by bed rest, since some measurements were better than ever after the training.” https://www.health.harvard.edu/newsweek/Exercise_and_aging_Can_you_walk_away_from_Father_Time.htm

This study helped to change medical practices about treating injury. Rest is usually not the best. If you want to age people 30 years, put them on bed rest – and let them atrophy.

In the article, How to retrain your brain, 

 https://www.latimes.com/health/la-he-1024-neuroplasticity-20151024-story.html

it highlights that if you want your brain to atrophy, do nothing novel and and rely on GPS, the computer, google and Siri to give you all the answers and attend long meetings and work long hours. I think I do my best work just after a walk or bike ride in the woods.

As a technologist, I was looking forward to getting an exoskeleton but after reading the ‘The Glass Cage’ and these articles, I realize that I need to keep moving on my own 2 feet and use my own brain for as much and as long as I can! I remember the story of my Grandfather who was 89, he had bad knees and he was trying to decide if he should keep up the struggle of walking or start using a wheelchair more. The one statement I remember was that if he relied on the wheelchair too much, he would permanently lose the ability to walk. For some people, a wheelchair is absolutely necessary but for others, taking the easy way out, is not the best for their health. My rule of thumb is to exercise to 70% of your max – especially when you are older and there is a risk of overdoing it and doing more harm than good. But in our society, I believe we error on the side of too little exercise and thinking. We need to be motivated to keep moving.

Two years ago, I biked around the KCMO area the equivalent of the Oregon / California Trail (2,000 miles) in 4 months to just get a small prospective of what the pioneers did 170 years ago . The first day of the journey, I bike the trail for 50 miles to Westport MO where the Oregon Trail began. My goal was not to just bike the trail but to meet interesting people. I also walked 13 miles in 1 day which is the average the pioneers did each day when going on the trail. https://www.facebook.com/groups/405559039518702/

This journey helped me get a new appreciation of the area I live in and the biking slowed me down to see things that I would have missed if I was just driving by.

Life's a journey. We live in a day where we have the opportunity to search for work and opportunities that we can be passionate about. But, this will not be handed to us – it takes effort. I have a saying, there are many bad jobs out there that are easy to find but the best jobs – the ones you can be passionate about, requires work to find them but the reward is worth it. Fortunately for me, I have a passion for technology and engineering that makes it easier for me to make a living. For those who have a passion for music or the arts, finding a career that can make use of their passion is harder but it is not impossible.

It just takes work.

“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.”

Robert Frost Mountain Interval. The Road Not Taken