I worked my first job during my early teenage years when my tenaciously entrepreneurial father put together a small family business. During this time I learned what it takes to be a dedicated employee. The premise was simple enough: manage the yards and gardens of those who either couldn’t or didn’t want to do it themselves. This was the first time my parents decided to involve the full family and so my siblings and I began our first “real”jobs.

I know there are many with a knee-jerk reaction to disagree with the idea that a teenager doing yard work with his parents qualifies as real job experience. I can tell you that while I may have not endured the kind of responsibilities that come later in life, it was nonetheless a life changing experience for me. Putting my sweat and sometimes blood into accomplishing the goal that my family had set upon would end up changing my perspective on life. There were no teachers telling me what to do or how to do it. There was just the team working together. Each person helping out wherever needed. There were no exclamations of “I did my part” or “that’s not my responsibility”, just a desire to be useful; to provide value.

Additionally this experience gave me my first taste at having money that was mine “by right”. My parents didn’t give it to me out of love or charity, I had really earned it. Everything I bought looked shinier, smelled sweeter, and tasted better. There was some magical quality about it that I couldn’t quite describe at the time. It was the birth of my independence.

Now at this time in my life I loved nothing more than being outside. it was during those long lost days when I had more energy than I knew what to do with, as opposed to now when I have more things to do than I have energy to think about! 😝 So while it was at times very difficult work, I thoroughly enjoyed every moment of it. Since I felt this way I never needed extra nudging from my parents to go along.

The most memorable moment of this experience revolved around a single event. Playoffs. Eventually the novelty of the work wore off and it became more and more difficult to incentivize my younger siblings. My parents weren’t running a child slave shop so they never forced us to go along if we fought hard enough against it.

When the scheduled visits began to fall on the playoff days, the chain of events which lead to one of my earliest epiphanies began.

I’ve never been the type of person who was interested in watching sports. There isn’t a single athletic enterprise that held my fascination the way it did with the rest of my family. To me it was just sitting around watching other people have fun. While watching the game with the family I typically spent the time lost in my own thoughts. So, when the conflict arose between doing the yard work or watching the game it was a pretty easy decision for me: do the thing that I enjoy doing…

Those days were much harder than when the entire family would pitch in and they took much longer to get through. Regardless of the additional effort required I consistently made the decision to be out there with my father, who I knew was making a real sacrifice missing the game.

Being the child that I was, I hadn’t really thought through the business side of my decisions. At first I was just doing what brought me joy. Then after realizing the extra load of work put on my father when the others didn’t join I decided not to add to the problem; this pushed me to go out even on days when I wasn’t too thrilled about the idea.

It wasn’t until our next payday I realized there was a reward I overlooked. As my father was distributing the cash, I was given more than 3 times the amount of my siblings. This was immediately met with an uproar of disapproval.

It isn’t fair!! Why does he get more?!

While my father explained the reasons to the others I beamed with excitement. “Thank you!” I said, to which my father simply replied “You earned it”.

So why am I writing about this?

The reason is simple. This is when I realized that I provide more value doing something I actually enjoy. I vowed in this moment to create a life in which I get to do something I love every day. I understood my father probably saw honorable and altruistic motives, but the truth is I honestly just preferred being outside. In the end the motives didn’t matter.

When you find joy in what you’re doing, it’s easier to provide value to the people around you.