So, today is Father’s Day and everywhere across the country people are celebrating in their own ways with their fathers and sons and daughters and wives and I had always thoroughly enjoyed celebrating it with my dad and my two brothers. That really changed back in March of 2013 when my dad passed away. This is the 2nd Father’s Day since he left us and it’s proven itself, to me, to be a bittersweet time. I get a chance to reflect on his life and what he taught me and how I believe I’ve molded myself to be like him in certain ways and unlike him in others.
Out of all of the life lessons he taught me, I value the ones about work and more specifically your work ethic more than others. When I think back to my teenage years, (as I was getting ready to join the military specifically) I remember him telling me that “nobody will give you anything in this life, anything that you want, and that you feel is worth achieving, you will have to get by outworking your competition”. I was already working every shift in 3 grocery stores I could get and had been since my sophomore year in high school so I wondered if he didn’t understand me and that I was already aware of that (at least then I thought I had it all figured out).
Fast forward to basic training and suddenly I found a whole new definition of work and what it meant to be totally drained of all of your energy. TMF or “Total Muscle Failure,” 3 days a week, was a way of life for 3 months straight. I remember the first time we were taken to TMF in our barracks by our Drill Sergeants, we beat our faces senseless with pushups, did leg lifts until my legs felt like they weighed 500 lbs., and did more situps than I even care to remember at this point in my life. Later that night, after it was all over, at about 10pm at night, we all finished in a collective heap of exhaustion and hit the showers. I remember standing there, with water beating down on me, thinking oh shit, what have I gotten myself into? I shook my head and laughed and went to grab the soap from the ledge in the wall and realized that, at that point in time, I could barely lift my arms about chest high to grab the soap. Even more to my distress, only seconds later, I realized I couldn’t wash my hair (or lack there of, it was basically just my scalp at this point in time) because my arms would not go over my head, no matter how much I willed them. I stood there in disbelief at how void of any strength or energy I was. It was at that moment I remembered my dad’s words about outworking your competition and so that’s exactly what I set out to do and in the end I made it through 6 months of basic training and AIT (Advanced Individual Training) in the top 10 of my unit and then deployed overseas for a year to Korea with all of the guys I went through basic training with and continued working my behind off over there. Dad and I talked about this when I came back from Korea and when I relayed that story to him he said “That’s it, that’s exactly what I was trying to say”.
I’ve continued to try and work as hard as possible to provide for myself and my family and it’s not always been easy, but his words and advice echo in my head constantly, even more so, now that he’s not here with us any more.
There are times when you look back at your life and wonder, how did I get here? I know how now and it’s because of what he shared with me, and it makes me happy when I think about him, and the great lessons he taught me, but more so than ever on Father’s Day.
Email me when Port City Technology publishes or recommends stories