The evolution of my Puritan work ethics
I used to believe my inner hustle was the product of working as a waitress at a restaurant while in high school. But after unleashing some repressed childhood memories, I came to realize it started at a much younger age.
My older brother and I have a twelve year difference, and he has a nine and ten years age difference with my two older sisters. While most older brothers take the overprotective route, my brother decided to take a different approach. He figured it was more practical to be transparent about his own questionable adventures then give us the PG version of what happens in your teenage and college years.
This age gap somehow gave him the discretion to dictate how our extracurricular nightly events would be handled. In keeping with his motto of not sugarcoating, he did not mind waking up my sisters and I after coming home late. I value my brother's foresight, because he saw an opportunity to use his little sister's as a resource for preparing his drunk munchies. He figured if he was going to be making food late at night, he might as well use the three of us minions since we admired him so much.
Many nights between the ages of nine and eleven, I was woken up three hours after my father had tucked me into bed and quietly escorted into the dining room with my other two sisters where our work stations were fortunately already prepared for us. Two stations with cutting boards for the potatoes and one station with spices and a fork for the steak; my brother always had steak and homemade french fries for his late night menu. He taught us early on about the importance of having a well-rounded skill-set which is why he instituted the rotating assembly line process. One station was peeling potatoes, the second was cutting the potatoes into french fry shapes, and the third was poking holes in the steaks and seasoning them with chef’s spice choice for the night; we had the privilege of rotating through the three stations on a weekly basis.
Eventually, my late-night part time job caught up to me from the lack of sleep. It would hit me the hardest during recess while my classmates wanted to play in the monkey bars and I just wanted to nap on the slide. However, the nights shifts taught me the importance of working hard and whatever you work on, just do it well, even if it's potato-peeling. My parents somehow never found out about the small scale sweat shop that was happening in their own house while they were sleeping, but in a way they owe my brother some praise because it became the catalyst for all three of their daughters to start their careers in the restaurant business at very early ages and instilled my inner-hustle.