Kids these days...

Recently I found myself in a coffee shop. It seems to be something I’m doing a lot lately, not because I don’t want to be at home, but because I don’t have internet at home.

And internet is becoming all the rage in my life lately. A necessity almost.

When I lived in Santa Cruz, Calif. I went to coffee shops religiously. I went to write in my journal, you know those deep thoughts you have when there is space in your mind to think. Space that comes with not worrying about your future, but worrying about yourself.

That was almost a decade ago now, but the conversations I hear seem to be very much the same. People worrying about their future, their kids, their remodel, gossiping about their friends, dreaming about leaving, etc.

And I heard something in my recent coffee shop visit that I agree with and disagree with at the same time.

“Kids these days don’t know what it means to work,” this gentleman told his friends. “Sometimes I even wonder about my own grandkids.”

Perhaps kids these days don’t know how to work, or they don’t want to work, or their parents should have taught them to work or whatever, but it got me wondering what exactly it means.

I will readily admit to not finishing college the first time around because frankly I didn’t feel like it. There was more I wanted to do with my life, rather than start that life cycle of work and worry all the time. So I quit.

Flat quit, and then I worked as a waitress, a pizza delivery gal and a soccer coach. Sometimes I worked all three together, at the same time, but more often I just worked two.

What I’m wondering is — is this the kind of work ethic they are talking about, or is it not having the ethic to work toward a goal that they see value in?

I was working toward my goal of getting the heck out of town. Leaving and seeing what I could find for myself. “Finding myself,” or whatever you want to call it. And I did. I got the heck out of town but unfortunately, finding myself was a longer process than I anticipated, and it’s something I occassionally achieve before losing it again into the abyss of life.

But I did have a goal and I worked toward it. Now, my goal was not necessarily my parents or my grandparents vision for my future. To travel or to do whatever I wanted was not exactly a good way to set up my future.

They thought, literally, that I had gone crazy.

In reality, I just caught a whiff of doing what I wanted to do and I liked it. I worked hard to live that way. It was a path I followed until I was 25 and I don’t regret a single second of it because it was pretty sweet.

So in a sense, that gentlemen in the coffee shop got me riled up. I took it personally because I was that person being talked about who didn’t have a work ethic, even though I did because I worked hard to make the money I needed to leave over and over again.

In another sense, I totally agree with that gentleman. I spend a lot of time with kids. I’ve coached, babysat, worked for the YMCA.

And I can tell you that over the last 10 years, the way kids respond to having to work hard has changed. It’s harder to get a group of kids to do something well, to do something correctly, because it’s almost like they’ve never been asked to work like that before.

I’m referring to coaching, of course. To get my team to perform how I know they can has taken a whole season. At the beginning of the season I pushed, prodded, screamed and once I even walked off the field. I was frustrated with lollygaggers.

It’s one thing to not be physically able to do something, it’s another thing completely to not do something because you don’t feel like it. They pushed back, moaned, walked, acted like to even ask for an extra effort was way out of their league.

And then we got to the first couple of games and they had a hard time, because you can’t just turn it on whenever you feel like it and expect to get the job done, you have to work at it so it becomes habit to perform.

And now they see it, they realize the difference between when they work hard and when they don’t. And they like to work hard because the results they get are fantastic and it feels good.

But it took almost four months to get to this point and the season will be over next week. And hopefully whoever gets them next expects the same or more than I expected of them. Because the habit of work ethic will die if it’s not re-inforced.