To no fault of their own, most don’t know what working physically hard looks or feels like.
“‘Kids today’ don’t work hard because they don’t know how.
Nobody is teaching them.
We are creatures who evolved to take the path of least resistance.
Do you think they just stumble their way into working hard?
Work ethic isn’t an assumed trait.
It’s a learned behavior.”
-Ray Zingler on X
I get it.
Our kids put in a ton of hours at school, memorize information in the short term, and make good grades.
That’s great.
To a point.
But can your kid get the gas/oil mix right, in the blower and run it for 8 hours?
Of course not.
He can’t even get the electric one to start.
I know this because as early as 2012, I’d put out feelers for side work (trash haul off, yard work, moving furniture, etc.) and there would be a feeding frenzy of kids competing for the jobs to make some extra cash.
Now, in 2024, I have to WORK to find teenagers to PAY, to do simple tasks.
And at first, I was asking myself, “What in the world? When I was 16, I had thousands of dollars in Tupperware bins under my bed from doing all kinds of side work, all the time, and now I can’t pay kids 3x what I was making back then to do less work?”
But then it hit me.
Few kids are willing to take me up on the work because they don’t know how.
Forget knowing how to crank the leaf blower.
They literally don’t know how to give physical effort.
They have no idea what it looks or feels like.
As crazy as it sounds, it’s 100% true.
Many kids live their lives mentally stimulated by screens and apps that will do things for them and then the extent of their “physical labor” is a couple hour sport practice littered with regulation & sanction.
I’m not implying bring back the old school Oklahoma Drill (though kids were far tougher back then) but kids today aren’t even tackling in practice.
HS Coaches are following the practice plans of New York Jets and then they wonder why their kids don’t tackle well in games.
In today’s world, if you can learn how to work hard, I mean actually WORK HARD, and then do it, the space in which you can distance yourself from the pack is immeasurable.
Why?
Because not only will the masses not work hard..
They don’t even know how to do it.
We’re so advanced in today’s world, we’ve forgotten what actually works best:
Real Work.
