Sunday, December 11, 2011

Don't Under Estimate Yourself

Let me tell ya a little story......

A guy was being lazy and sloughing off on his work on a construction crew. This construction crew did a lot of concrete work, sidewalks, parking lots and curbs mostly in subdivision settings......things like that. The supervisor of the crew told the lazy man he was fired and that a woman could do a better job than him. The lazy man looked at the supervisor with utter and total disbelief and told him NO WAY! The supervisor looked at another man and said do you know a woman that can start tomorrow? The man thought for a moment and said yeah actually I do, my wives best friend is the toughest country girl I have ever met and would love a great paying job! He called this woman right away who happened to be recently divorced and wondering how she was going to feed 2 children working a below minimum wage job for cash under the table at the present moment. She jumped at the opportunity and told him yes, she would accept this job that was union work and paid $18 an hour for a general laborer plus time and a half for overtime!

The Supervisor called  her later that night to confirm and tell her where to show up the next day. So the next day this woman shows up on sight and every man on the crew stops working to see such a sight and see what would step out of the car. Now this woman had lost quite a bit of weight in the divorce proceedings so she stepped out of the car at 5 foot 6 inches and weighing a whopping 105 pounds.

Every man on the crew including the supervisor dropped to the ground rolling in laughter thinking this is gonna be good, she won't last an hour!

That first day was a 17 hour day of some of the most back breaking work you could imagine. They had a huge parking lot they were working on and afterwords ran over to another site and did several hours of curb work on a 100 degree day. As general laborer this tiny woman was shoveling concrete and hauling steel frame beams for the curbs all day. She was setting pins and setting up the forms and basically doing all the grunt work that concrete finishers do not like to do. By the end of the day nobody was laughing anymore, this tiny woman lasted the whole day and returned the next. 5 other men were hired that day and at the end of a whole week, those 5 men were gone yet the woman was still there gaining muscles and strength every day. Each day she reminded herself of the 2 children at home she needed to feed which gave her the strength to keep going anytime she thought of quitting.

After the first week, what had started as a joke made company history for she was the first woman in the company's history that ever worked out in the field side by side with the men that did not include just being a flag girl. She stayed the duration of the season, and could of easily returned the  next season......however a car accident had left her with no car to return the new season.


That woman was me when I was 27 years old.

The point of this story is never say you can not do something, never under estimate what you are capable of doing....if you can dig deep inside yourself and find the motivation of why you want to do something..........ANYTHING is possible. The only limits we have are the  ones we put upon  ourselves. Remove any idea of limitations and the world is full of unlimited opportunities and we can accomplish more than we ever dreamed of being capable of. Find something to deeply motivate yourself and the world is yours. Do not limit yourself with I CANT'S, dare to dream, dare to be and open your mind to the I CAN'S and see what happens.Anything can be accomplished with proper motivation and strong desire.

2 comments:

  1. Awesome story! I love when things like this happen!! Congratulations on hanging with the big boys and getting a good wage to support yourself and your children.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thankyou! Although that seems like so long ago now (because it was LOL)
    Now my focus is on staying home to homeschool my 2 youngest and create work from home opportunities, the same motivation still applies!

    ReplyDelete