Tag Archives: Hard Work

Mike Rowe Scholarship Highlights The Lost Virtues Of Hard Work And Sweat, by Salena Zito

There’s nothing quite like an honest day’s work, it’s good for the soul. From Salena Zito at The Epoch Times via zerohedge.com:

Tracy Wilson is sitting in the cutest little ranch house in this Calvert County town. It is her dream house—literally her dream house, she explains, as she has had the image of this very home in her mind, down to the color scheme of the exterior.

It is 4 in the afternoon, and the single mother of two just got home from another dream—her job. She spends her days working as an instrumentation technician in the flight test program at Boeing.

“I get to spend my days working on F-18s,” she exclaims several times during the interview. She says it with such joy that her appreciation for her craft becomes infectious.

Life wasn’t always this balanced for the Exeter, Pennsylvania, native. In her senior year of high school, she underwent open-heart surgery for a hole in her heart after the healthy basketball athlete suffered a stroke. “The stroke temporarily took my speech and my handwriting,” she said. “So I was freaking out because I was so ready to start the next part of my life after high school.”

She recovered but found her life directionless after high school. Wilson explains that she wanted to go to college, but without any clarity on what she should pursue and little money to attend, she bounced from career to career, trying to find her greater purpose.

In between, she married, had two boys, divorced. She found herself still searching, still wanting to better herself, still deeply committed to the work ethic her parents had taught her, yet living on the edge of poverty, cleaning houses, exhausted and still struggling to put food on the table.

“One day, I was sitting on the couch feeling sorry for myself, watching TV, and I—this commercial came on for York Technical Institute, and something about it clicked in my brain. I went to their website, and the electrician program caught my eye,” Wilson explained.

“I’ve always loved working with my hands,” she told me.

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The Kinship of Producers, by Paul Rosenberg

There is indeed a kinship of producers, a kinship of people who create, recognize, and trade value. From Paul Rosenberg at freemansperspective.com:

There is a kinship between productive human beings; one that spreads all across this planet. It may be invisible to power and hierarchy, but we productive people recognize it. When we drive into a new town, we know, almost by instinct, that we can trust the hard-working carpenter further than someone permanently on the dole. It’s possible that the guy on the dole is a saint, but the hardworking man shares our specific ethics, and we are tuned to them. Even if this carpenter is a negative exception, we’ll be able to tell.

I’ve felt this kinship on multiple continents and among people of many flavors; not just on construction sites, but in truck stops, offices, grocery stores and trains. Productive people bear a specific ethic, and it’s consistent not only over distance, but over time. If you were somehow dropped into ancient Rome, the people you’d want to join wouldn’t be the Senators or the people in bread lines, but the people who build and maintain the aqueducts.

Even the old man, recounting his days of building, repairing and creating… He’s not just saying, “I was once strong,” he’s saying, “I am a producer. And even if I’m too old to work, I remain what I was.”

Ethics Born of Work

The ethics I’m referring to are those which are spawned by work… by productive, dedicated, creative work. And yes, even sweeping a floor becomes creative if you take it seriously and do it well. A shop floor is complex, and complexity must be overcome with on-the-fly creativity.

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China Overrated by Right-Wing Kooks: These Crazies Are Just Like Hitler, by Fred Reed

I spent a week in China last month, dealing with a drone company whose drones are far superior to anything American companies produce. Here’s news to those who say the Chinese can only copy. By definition you cannot copy something if what your building is better. The Chinese have the largest share of the drone market, by virtue of cutting edge technology. I was in Suzhou, which has 10 million people. It’s next to Shanghai, which has 24 million people. In my week in China, I didn’t see one fat person. Maybe a few pounds overweight, but they’d be considered normal, not even obese, here in the US. Everywhere I went, people were working, working, working. The US underestimates China at its peril. From Fred Reed at theburningplatform.com:

One often sees the silly assertion by right-wing extremists that feminists, social justice warriors, and other “cranks” are enstupidating American education. The purpose. according to these fascists, who are just like Hitler,  is “to make historically incompetent groups look competent.” The racism in these absurd claims is obvious. In particular such  Neo-Nazis say that mathematical education is being destroyed to benefit “retards.” This “dumbing down,” they say, will hand the future to China.

This is conservative drivel. Nothing suggests that China is gaining on the US in science and technology, except the evidence, and this can be ignored. It is particularly important to keep in mind that the Chinese cannot innovate, only copy American technology.

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