
I didn't land on Earth as a bad ass, mega pan wielding social eating entrepreneur. In fact I have had about every crummy job going and some great ones too. I have come to realise that half of our collective problems stem from an idea about what work is and what our time is worth... Tap up any successful person who isn't just in to money and you will hear the same story... Do what you enjoy and stop working in ways that you really don't like... What a waste of energy! Easy to say, you say? Well really isn't it harder to continue to do what you don't like rather than take a risk on what you do like doing?
Can I get a rewind?
Aged 12 doing a newspaper round for £2.50 per week and crying on Saturday when the supplements came in because they were so heavy the man from the newsagent use to lift me up and give me a push off on the bike. Aged 13 babysitting for the alcoholic Mick and his vulnerable young wife. Getting driven home at 2am by this loon and running from the car as it wheeled homewards.
Chicken Factory misery for £2.50 an hour!
Getting sexually harassed by the greasy Casanova Mufeed in a pizza joint. Grassing him up to his wife and seeing him on my last day with cat claw scratches across his face... Priceless.... though I'm not sure I'll ever erase the image of him wielding a salami and trying to gaze into my eyes.....
Working after getting my higher 2:1 degree in a factory where my sole job was to scratch a bit of cardboard with a nail so a toy could be adhered to a cardboard box (me getting sacked because I worked out how to build a tower out of these boxes and go to sleep inside them).... Working in a crisp factory in Scunthorpe where I had to spend each day shouting 'cheese, prawn, beef!' to alert the forklift drivers as to which hopper needed filling...Getting sacked for persuading Pat the forklift driver to plough through a cardboard tower I'd fashioned out of Skips boxes and it turning out that the bottle of 'water' he'd been sipping was actually pure vodka .... Every awful hour I have 'worked' led me to rebel about what was possible in the pursuit of getting paid enough to 'live'....
I have had lots of bad jobs where I got paid crappy money and I did it for that crappy money because I didn't know any better....In my early twenties I was working at Uni for a journal having just finished at a Cadbury's Creme Egg factory line. I vowed to work less hours and enjoy my hours off more. I vowed never to work in a factory again.... That decision shaped my future work probability. Since making that choice things got better. I got better work, did less hours, earned more and enjoyed my work more. I learned how to live cheaply, how to cook cheaply, how to actually thrive on little money/lots of time....
Next post I'll talk a bit more about how the idea for Secret Kitchen came about and hopefully I'll inspire you to think again about what it is you do, and how you might want to tweak things to suits yourselves more. I'm not saying quit your job.... I'm just saying that I have learnt a lot of stuff along the way and it is high time I shared it with you...