Here’s one: a 12 year old boy and his brother have a good family life. Their dad is heavily involved with their lives coaching baseball and basketball, while their mother is liked and well-known through her involvement in the PTA. One day, they experience the “disruptive” event of their parents divorcing and the boys go through very “dark” days because of it. The father admittedly “went crazy”. He was depressed because his career was on a downward spiral, his wife was unhappy, and the general societal stresses were unwinding him. So he split. Their mother could not raise a family on her own. She lost her job and her house was foreclosed. The only thing the mother could do was send her two boys away, even though they didn’t want to go. “She shipped us off” would be how he grew to describe it. And that she did, to a ranch her parents owned; “a gentleman’s farm” with a couple of acres. The 12 year old boy and his brother stayed at the ranch for a year or so, until their mother got a job and “back on her feet”. Then she came back for them, to take them home. But they didn’t want to leave that ranch. They liked it. That ranch life did something to them. Today, at 58 years old, that former boy credits his time at his grandparents’ ranch as “an extraordinary year” and one where he and his brother “learned something we didn’t even know we needed.” He describes his grandparents as “strict disciplinarians” who had them doing ranch “chores every day” (and we know that means working their butts off!). Among the qualities they learned at the ranch that built good character, “consistency and care and direction and responsibility” were the ones that stuck with him. Today he credits that defining time where he worked hard on a ranch as the period in his life where he picked up and formed his “work habit” and his “ethic toward work.” You may be familiar with this man’s hard work today. He is six-time Emmy Award winner Bryan Cranston, and the 2014 Emmy Award winner for Best Lead Actor in a Drama Series. If you get a chance, listen to his interview that was on Fresh Air (replayed August 26) – which is downloadable at NPR.org. The best part to me is that, here is this famous man – a six-time Emmy winner – a famous actor – extolling the virtues of hard work. Yes, the virtues of hard work. You’d be very hard-pressed to find ANYONE today who extols the benefits of hard work – especially with all the kid gloves people wear. Maybe you don’t approve of the subject matter of “Breaking Bad” but you would do yourself a disservice if you didn’t listen to him describe those “dark” days and his explosion out of them to a brighter place. You might even get a little inspiration from it. I know I did.
Posted on: Fri, 29 Aug 2014 13:07:57 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015