All work is hard work, but some work is harder than others...

Military Training

A week after I turned 18 I left my home in the mountains of Utah to attend Basic Training for the Utah Army National Guard. I had enlisted a year prior with my mom's permission, and much to her chagrin. I spent the next 6 months at Forts Jackson, Gordon, and Benning for Basic Training, AIT (Advanced Individual Training), and Airborne school. As I am sure you can imagine, this was not any easier than working on the farm, although the food was considerably worse. I spent much of my time running, jumping, and doing push ups (FRONT LEANING REST POSITION!). At the end of my time I returned home after losing 20 pounds, and with about 6% body fat, and I was able to run 2 miles in just under 12 minutes. I went back to working on the farm and started preparing for the next step in my progress toward not having to work so hard. 

The Mission

I left the farm when I was 19 to serve a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Barcelona Spain. I thought that I would have an easier time just walking around Spain and chatting with the friendly people about the church and its beliefs. What actually happened was that I spent much of my time walking, occasionally trudging, around the streets of Spain looking for people willing to talk to me. It turns out that a mission is still a lot of hard work. I walked the length and breadth of Spain and even spent some time on the Balearic Islands. I got to meet some amazing people, and eat some even more amazing foods. 

When my mission was finished, I returned home a much skinnier and a little bit wiser version of myself than the one that had left only 2 years before. I lost more weight on my mission than I did in my time in military training. 

Marketing, digital prepress, Y2K, and the Internet

After my mission I entered the "real world" of jobs and had several different "careers", working as a Director of Marketing for a Dehydrated Food company, then working in digital prepress, and finally in the advertising department of the oldest department store in the United States. Each of these jobs and companies was very different, as were my responsibilities, but each also gave me the opportunity to learn new skills and improve myself. I learned how to get products into grocery stores, what it takes to prepare a file for printing and what a line screen is. I learned it is less expensive to send digital files to a printing press through a high-speed internet line (a T-1 line at the time, 1.544 Mb/sec), and how to configure a router. 

I also learned one of the most valuable lessons of my career: Sometimes you can to the right thing and still get chewed out because you did something good when the upper management wanted things to be bad. Something like saving the company a bunch of money when they were trying to make the company look like a loser so they could sell it off and make a ton of money on their stock holdings. That was a hard lesson to learn.

A new millennium and new opportunities

At the dawn of the 21st century and the new millennium, I found myself at a new turning point in my career. I could see that using film for prepress was a dead end, but there was a future in the internet and web development. So, I dove in head-first, working for an events company, then for my own company.  Working for myself was the hardest job I ever had, and I also learned a lot about myself, business, and even a little about web development. 

I learned you have to be willing to have the difficult conversations when you are only getting paid when the work gets done, and you are depending on other people to complete part of that work. I learned that you have to be the one to fix your problems, not spend your time and effort looking for an employee, client, or technology to save you from doing the work to make things move. I also learned that there are times when you need to take what you have learned, and what is left of your pride and close the doors; another hard lesson to learn. 

Now I find myself with two post-graduate degrees, working as a manager at a great company that I joined after another great company fired me, even though from my perspective I had done everything I was asked to and more (another hard lesson). In all the crazy twists and turns of my employment journey, across multiple states and jobs, I have learned that the physical difficulty of working on the farm wasn't really that bad, and life's emotional and mental difficulties can be even harder to carry than a bale of straw or a 50-pound sack of seed potatoes.

The only thing to do in these cases is to just keep working hard.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay