Everyone has a story. Here’s mine.
My roots are in a small town of about 3,000 people in rural USA. I was raised by hard-working parents who both worked their full-time jobs plus one or two side jobs at any given time to help make ends meet. I was taught how to live off the land, how to camp, hike, hunt, and treat people with respect and dignity.
My humble beginnings trace back to my family’s immigration from Europe in the late 1500s. I was raised in the house that has been in my family since the late 1800s.
My dad worked in a manufacturing plant for over 40 years — no retirement, just go out with your working boots on, and that’s precisely what he did. He was smarter than most of the white-collar people he worked with. But he took on that job at 17 and didn’t leave until his early 60s so he could provide for the family he started at 18.
Right next to my dad, I had a mom who worked just as hard to provide and protect her family. I can distinctly remember her having a job before her primary job — she’d be up early, work the first one, head into her primary job from 7:30 or 8:00 until 3:30 or 4:00, then go to her evening job with my dad. Over the years, she worked so hard that it created physical impairments to her body. She literally did the work of two to three people. When she retired, the company split her role up to make it easier on one person. They hired one person, then parted ways. They hired a second person, who quit within the year. They hired a third, who did the same. They both crushed their roles. They both instilled a work ethic unlike any other.
It didn’t stop there. I had an uncle who believed in my intelligence and intellect and always encouraged me to excel in my academics. From the time I was 12 until I moved away after college, I worked on a beautiful little horse farm with people I look to as an additional set of parents — they instilled other skills and strengths in me, most of which complemented what my parents had already taught me. And I had teachers along the way who gave me the validation and support I desperately needed. They had a major impact on my life and on where I am today, and I’m glad I’ve taken the time to make sure they know that.
From my first paycheck at 12 throwing papers, to my first manual labor job working on a farm, to helping local contractors on the weekends — this grit and grind is what helped push me through college and beyond. In college I was a double major, political science and criminal justice. I worked at the University in the maintenance department and threw kegs and cases of beer on the weekends at a local beer distributor, while still working for local contractors in between shifts and classes. While most humans are about 70% water, in that time frame, mine was probably closer to 70% Mt. Dew, pizza rolls, and cookies to feed the never-ending engine.
Oddly enough, I always managed to find work, but I never managed to find my way to the library until my senior year of college. I still graduated with a decent GPA, and that education landed me in a stone quarry — where I learned to read mudlines on the stones and make sheets of stone pop off flagstone.
Fast forward. My experiences include food insecurity, close calls with housing insecurity, choosing who eats — myself or my dog, Huckleberry Finn (don’t worry, I always prioritized him; in fact he had better healthcare and insurance than I did), times I couldn’t pay my bills on time, electricity getting shut off, student loans going unpaid. After all, when you take out $80,000 in loans for school just to make $6 an hour, you don’t exactly have the means to pay back the banks and afford to live.
While I, along with many of you, struggled in different ways, eventually I caught breaks. Some I manufactured through hard work, but every one of them required someone willing to take a chance on me. And thankfully, that worked out. I learned to take calculated risks that could pay off, and each one of them did. I went from those incredibly difficult times to a point in life where I pay more in taxes than I earned in my first “big kid” job. I went on to get an MBA in analytics, and now I lead strategic projects and programs for various Fortune 100s.
All that to say — I have not lived a life anywhere near as hard as many have or still do. I am just a regular person with the intent to try and help people the way I was helped, time and again.
— Cody