It wasn’t long after I started making all those horrible choices, that I about made the worst one. I was ready to quit my marriage, I didn’t care who got hurt. I was so angry at everything that none of it mattered anymore. My employees were dropping like flys because of my weakness, my kids saw and heard me at my worst and my wife got a monster at home.
I’m sure some people probably will make excuses for me, others will say I probably haven’t gotten any better. But the truth is I was weak and I was angry. Mostly I was angry at myself.
To her credit my wife never gave up on me. She had every right to, but she didn’t. And it was her faith in me that ultimately brought me back. I realized that things weren’t perfect, and that maybe they never would be, but she loved me enough to try and help me after all of that and she deserved better. Everyone deserved better.
I started with fitness. Mostly at home workouts. Heather supported me and the kids loved joining me. Then it was a random day in April that my growth would really take off.
I randomly looked at my Instagram account and saw a post from Kevin Hart about going out for a Sunday runday. I thought to myself that it was crazy that this guy was going out for a run. But it motivated me.
I slapped on my shoes and I hit the streets. I don’t remember the run that much, but there was a part of me that was unlocked that day. Some part of me that had lay dormant for most of my life that knew that I wanted challenge in my life. My first fun run in my life and I ran 5 miles. I was exhilarated, I was full of pride, I also couldn’t walk right and it took another week before I ran again. But that day changed the entire course of my life and lead me to the next two steps in the evolution of my life and to finding my own grit.
So I keep talking about grit, but what is it. There’s many ways to define it, but to me, it’s our ability to deal with tough situations and keep moving forward. It’s our ability to not quit when it looks hard or even impossible. In a word, it’s stubbornness.
Some people would say that how much grit we have is decided by the conditions we were raised in our even our genetics. But I fully believe that regardless of our parents or our past circumstances, we are fully capable of growing our grit and hardening ourselves to be able to endure anything.
But you’ve got to want it…
You’ve got to take a cold hard look at yourself and say that the easy path isn’t the right one for you. You’ve got to embrace the fact that if you want to grow, you’ve got to embrace and love the nasty challenges that life throws your way. In 2016 I had no grit, and was ready to give up on everything in my daily life.
I went to work each day, and I was just angry with my crew. Nothing they did was ever good enough, and I became a “I’ll do it myself” man. The job would get done, but I wasn’t helping my crew members grow, I was actually setting them up for failure. All I could see were people that weren’t doing anything for me. So I’d over caffeinate with soda all day long to get the job done myself.
Then I’d go home and keep that same mentality with my wife, Heather. I’d let me frustrations with work out when I got home and I’d snap at her over the smallest things. I just wanted to be left alone so I could block out reality with video games and junk food. So she’d take the kids to my in-laws every night so they didn’t have to see hear me yell at her.
Of course they would hear me yell later those nights anyways, because I blamed her for our hardships at home as much as I blamed my crew for them at work. I couldn’t understand why nobody cared about me and what I wanted. I couldn’t understand why nobody would just give me what I wanted. That Christmas was hard. I remember sitting there on Christmas morning and opening presents and she and I tried to act like everything was great for them, but presents of love to each other just seemed to incite sadness.
There were also nights when I would go out to karaoke with friends as a way to feel “like I still could do fun things”. This would also make me angry because Heather never wanted to go with me, and I said it was just because she didn’t want to have fun. It didn’t matter that we didn’t have a sitter for the kids, I blamed her regardless. Then I would come home drunk because I found alcohol was an even better escape from reality than video games. I still remember, snippets of a conversation she had with my buddy as he dropped me off one night. Remember him telling her that he definitely thought I was trying to get away from something. Then I blacked out as she closed the bathroom door so the kids didn’t see me covered in vomit the next morning.
I had no grit. I didn’t care about life’s challenges. I wanted things to be easy. I wanted everyone to just do what I wanted and felt I didn’t owe them anything. I didn’t know what I know now, that if you really want to enrich your life, you had to enrich the lives of others and have the grit and strength to be better for them.
One of my favorite philosophies for getting through things comes from my time in the fast food industry. I learned a lot during that time, probably more than I learned at any of my past jobs. I definitely started to realize what hard work really took.
I could tell you about the day I worked through lunch serving everyone with only myself, and three other people. Or I could tell you about the Cinco de Mayo from hell. But one of the hardest days came when a water main broke for half the city.
One of our businesses had to close for the two days that the water main was broke. It also happened to be our busiest location in town and due to a lack of critical thinking, they told their whole staff to take the day off. So you can imagine that when all of their business came flooding into my location with half the staff, it was a shit show for a lack of better terminology.
We had a great crew, but it was a lot. Wait times were thirty minutes and we were mean mugged and harassed all day long, while we sweat our asses off online. But this is a fine example of what I call “in the trenches”.
One of my favorite people that motivates me, David Goggins, has spoke about building mental toughness, and it goes hand in hand with this. I’m paraphrasing his words, but you’ve got to block out all external factors, find the greatness that exists in each of us, and use that to fuel you through life’s challenges.
It’s not always going to be pretty. It’s almost never going to be perfect. But sometimes the only way out is through. You’ve got to remind yourself, that you just have to keep trudging forward through the trenches, no matter how slow or long it takes. And you’ve got to remind yourself that no matter what challenge you are facing, it will, one way or another, come to an end. The day is only twenty-four hours long, your shift may only be eight hours long, or in my case at that time twelve to fifteen, and that if you keep pushing you’ll make it to the end.
The last lesson I learned that day came towards the end of the day. I finished an order for one of my regular customers, and he looked at me and then his watch, and says, “Thirty minutes? Really?”
I just looked at him, tried to explain that we were busy and unstaffed, and asked what he wanted me to say. He said maybe just apologize. So I took a deep breath and said, “I’m sorry, is there anything else you need?” He said thank you and that he was good. To his credit he came back the next day and apologized to me and said that he didn’t realize the water main broke and that the other location had closed.
So my second point is this: do your best to get through the trenches as fast as you can, and when it isn’t enough, apologize and keep moving forward. Apologize to yourself, your partner, your family, whoever needs to hear it and try to be better in the future. Use moments like those to remind you why you need to keep striving to be better.
How I managed to change who I was into who I am now is important to showing why I feel I have any right to give advice on not giving up and the importance of hard work, for sure. But for you to truly appreciate how far I’ve come, I’ve got to go back to my younger years.
Growing up for me was never very easy. At least not to the best of my recollection. Academic achievements came easy enough for a while, but socially, it was hard. I grew up in a family that didn’t have a lot going for it financially. Hand me down outdated clothes didn’t do me any favors with other kids, my hobbies and interests remained juvenile, far beyond the usual timelines of other kids, my hair was always a mess and my fatherly example was a stepdad who never quite matured himself. I wish I could say that I was known as the kid from the other side of the tracks, but really I was just viewed as the weird kid that people would rather ridicule and bully than befriend, and I would remain that way, and even embrace that persona, for many years.
My mom and stepdad struggled with drugs and alcohol on and off over the years, so our lives at home were chaotic in their own right. I have few memories from during those years, save for the worst. I still remember nights when they dived into whatever substance they felt they needed to deal with their own demons, and my younger sister’s and I were left to our own devices for entertainment and food. I also remember the punishments that came from my stepdad whenever I did the “wrong things” on those nights. Now that I’ve made it through the fire to the other side I tell the stories of those punishments to people that I feel close to, for shock value and laugh at their reactions, but I’ve recently started wondering just how much of an effect these things have had me.
As I grew into my teen years I became more strong willed against him and anyone I had an issue with at school. Fights between my stepdad and I were commonplace from day to day, but they hit their highest levels on holidays. Coincidentally during these years, grades at school became less important. I showed a particular affinity for art and writing and was banking my future on going to art school, but it just wasn’t in the cards.
I know that some of these things don’t cast the best light on my mom, but the truth is I learned my first lessons in perseverance from her. I remember one particular fight, when she was defending his actions, and I asked how she could keep standing up for him. She didn’t have the words to answer me, but in that moment the look she gave me spoke volumes. I saw a woman that was just trying to help us survive. It might not be the best life, but we weren’t homeless, we had food most of the time and we were still in school and in those days that’s what mattered.
These days I’m so proud of her and happy for her. She got herself out of that situation, got herself out of the hard stuff, and she’s living her life with a man that truly shows love to her and the rest of our family.
I learned many lessons in those days, though I didn’t know it, and it would take years for me to be able to understand it. But it wove itself into the core of my being. When push comes to shove, you do what you have to to survive and definitely whatever you have to do to take care of your family.
There are so many things that we will face, that will make us want to give up. But if I can make it to where I have after everything I went through, anyone can. I’m nothing special, yet I overcame bullies, battled self-loathing, depression, loneliness and constant fear. I’m just a teen that grew up and found a stubborn steak that wouldn’t let him quit no matter the challenge.
But all these things take their toll, and I grew a major chip on my shoulder. One that only got bigger over the years. And unfortunately, I wasn’t strong enough to keep myself mentally hard against my own bitterness with the world.
The Gritty Dad 