“Somewhere in the Middle” is Just Fine: Education, Achievement, and Cody Jinks
There is a lot of discussion around education in society today. Does education always come from books? Can you find learning opportunities in unconventional places? Is an academic education better than hands-on learning? With the help of Cody Jinks and “Somewhere in the Middle,” we break it down and share some of the life lessons we’ve learned working on the factory floor.
Mentioned in This Episode:
Show Notes:
- The Dad Life Sound Check starts off the show with Dave talking about how he needs a vacation from the vacation. Then the kids transfer the virus to him and he is out of commission for a few days. Alabama and a date attending the Tyler Childers concert help pull him through the fact that he has to wear Astros gear to support his son’s little league team. Megan Moroney reminds Mick that it is OK for our kids to do things differently than we would.
- 14:35 HARDY Report – “Truck Bed” goes to #1 and Mick thinks HARDY and Beyonce should do a collaboration.
- 19:17 Farm Boy Update – Mick’s garden makes him happy but repotting 60 tomato and pepper plants takes awhile.
- 21:00 The Dads break down why “Somewhere in the Middle” is such a great song to illustrate that you can learn something from everyone and that doctors are not necessarily superior to world champion roller skaters. Is achievement culture really helping us raise our kids? The Dads share what their first jobs were and why everyone needs work in a restaurant or customer service at some point in their life.
Sources:
- Intro Music: “Dark Country Rock” by Moodmode
- HARDY Report Theme Music: “Frantic” by Lemon Music Studio
- Farm Boy Update Theme Music: “The Wheels on the Bus Rockabilly Style (instrumental)” by Mike Cole
- “Way of the Triune God” by Tyler Childers
- “I’m in a Hurry (And Don’t Know Why)” by Alabama
- “Tennessee Orange” by Megan Moroney
- “TRUCK BED” by HARDY
- “Texas Hold ‘Em” by Beyonce
- “Tequila” by Dan + Shay
- “Somewhere in the Middle” by Cody Jinks
Please subscribe to the show, rate it, and leave a review on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon, OverCast, Pandora, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts! Follow us on Instagram @CountryMusicDads and Facebook @CountryMusicDads or visit us on the web at CountryMusicDads.com. And if you want to hear some of these songs in full, check out the Country Music Dads Playlist and the Best Country Songs for Your Parenting Day From Hell Playlist on Spotify.
Transcript
And it was one of those drive-in type places with the car hops, you know, they were roller skate out to you and bring you your ice cream cones.
And the guy’s wife, who is a doctor, said, she’s like, yeah, this place is great, but I just, I think I would just be overqualified to ever work here.
And he looks at her and he says, what are you, a world champion roller skater?
Great line.
They’re not married anymore.
Thank you.
This is Country Music Dads, the parenting podcast with a twang.
We’re bringing you highly subjective, sometimes questionable, but always 100% authentic country music analysis, as only two dads in the trenches of modern parenting could do it.
My name is Dave, and I’m a country music dad.
My name is Mick, and I am also a country music dad, and thank you for joining us.
In this episode, we’re gonna talk about education.
Now, I don’t mean the kind of education you get from going to school.
We’re gonna talk about the kind of education that you get living life, maybe sometimes the harsh realities of living life.
And the song Somewhere in the Middle by Cody Jinks, in our opinion, is just the perfect song that kind of sums up that you can find an education in many different places.
So, before we punch the time clock, Dave, how are you?
How are things going with you?
I would say I’m still kind of recovering from spring break.
If that makes any sense to you.
It makes a lot of sense, because when you think about it, I’m just, well, I know for a fact you went someplace.
But you think about your typical vacation.
Some vacations you go and do, and some vacations you just go and recover.
And the doing vacations, yes, you need the vacation from the vacation because you’re worn out, because you were active.
Yep, yep, absolutely.
So that’s something I’m working on.
Yeah, we took the family to Mammoth Mountain.
It’s a mountain town up in the Sierra Nevada mountains.
One of our favorite places to go.
And I love taking the family places.
I love showing the boys new experiences and we took them skiing and they really enjoyed it.
It snowed a bunch of times up there for us, which is a novelty for us out here in Southern California.
So we drive to the snow on purpose for fun.
But yeah, something I’m working on is that all the preparation and the packing and the planning and then the unpacking, once we get back, it really takes a toll on me.
I need several days at our destination to just kind of settle in and start enjoying myself.
And same thing when I get back, I’m just reminded of all the stuff that I didn’t get done while we were out on our lovely family trip.
So I’m getting a little bit better at that.
I’m taking a little less time to relax once we actually get into our destination and start to enjoy things.
So I actually really enjoyed the drive with the three boys in the back.
How far of a drive is it for you?
It’s like a six hour trip, just about, depending on how many stops we have to make.
They did really well on this one, so not too many stops and it’s a beautiful drive.
It’s a highway 395.
It goes through the Mojave Desert.
You’re in the desert, Joshua Trees everywhere, but then to your west, you can see Mount Whitney.
It’s just really epic scenery.
So I love the drive.
And so I really did enjoy the drive this time, despite the preparations and some of the stress.
But anyway, we got back, had a great trip and I’m already just kind of anticipating, oh man, all this stuff that I didn’t get done while we were gone.
We got to get back into the rhythms of life.
And then late one night, it was actually the night before Easter Sunday.
My middle son wakes me up with the two words that parents hate to hear, especially at the middle of the night.
I puked.
I barfed.
So cleaned him up, middle of the night.
And sure enough, I absorbed it.
Absorbed the virus, whatever he had.
So I spent the next couple of days just laid up.
Couldn’t get anything done.
Well, maybe I’m just wishful thinking here.
But if you’re laid up and you can’t form at your optimum level, wouldn’t conventional thought process think that maybe that would help your mental state because you can put a tangible reason as to maybe why you’re not caught up?
Absolutely.
I think it actually did help.
Because it reminded me that the things that I was having anxiety about, they didn’t need to get done right away.
I think part of the source of anxiety is a sense of urgency.
All the stuff that was stressing me out about, I didn’t get this done last week while we were on break.
It could wait a couple of days because it had to.
Because I could not do anything.
I felt horrible.
Sure enough, the world didn’t fall apart because I took a couple of extra days to recover from my illness.
Yeah, so the song that comes to mind is by Alabama.
I’m in a hurry and don’t know why.
Bye.
And it’s something that I mentioned, it’s something I’m working on, trying to push back on that tendency to get anxious about things because I kind of tend to manufacture urgency, the things that are on my to-do list.
It’s easy to do, and the fact that you recognize it is beneficial.
That does make a lot of difference.
So yeah, I guess the stomach bug was a blessing in disguise, I guess.
We did get a night out, Kim and I went out and saw Tyler Childers, he was in town, went with our friend, Donnie C.
Cutler of the Country Cutler Instagram account.
Go give him a follow.
And the Childers show was awesome.
Just highly satisfying.
The guy is super talented and just amazing to see live.
I don’t need the pills you take Just to fill the spirit of moving Brotherhood That was, I mean, another time, I didn’t get anything done that night, but it was worth it.
No, you got a lot done that night because I saw, you know, I saw all the clips that you took of the show.
So you were working.
That’s right.
Different kind, that was the enjoyable kind of work.
I didn’t.
Hey, but isn’t that what they say?
You know, you should enjoy what you do.
So there you go.
That’s right, man.
So the laundry didn’t get folded that night, but.
Yeah, well.
Always time for that.
What’s happening with you?
Well, we’re just kind of, we wrapped up an era last weekend.
So I think some of you have heard me talk about how my son is a, you know, a budding engineer and enjoys the school robotics team.
Well, last weekend was his last robotics competition.
And it was, it was rough.
It was a hard weekend because the robot was just up and down.
Mechanically, the robot was a good robot.
You know, the high school robotics teacher had said a couple of different times to different people that from us, you know, engineering standpoint, standpoint, this is the best robot that he’s ever put on the field, which, you know, makes us feel really proud because my son basically spent the entire summer teaching himself how to CAD all of the parts that went into the robot.
So, you know, he didn’t design the whole thing.
There was input, but he pretty much created it from a, you know, a CAD engineering standpoint.
Nice.
Good for him.
So, yeah, but the problem is the programming was not up to far.
And every, every match, so he competes in what they call the first robotics competition, and it’s these, the different regional competitions they’ll have, they’ll, it’s either 10 or 12, 3v3 pool matches to get your ranking set.
And like one match, everything would work.
And then the next match, there’d be a programming issue.
Well, then in trying to fit, then in fixing that programming issue, then they created another programming issue.
And just the code was just never working properly.
And that was just so frustrating as a parent to watch because you know, for two reasons, this is Luke’s life and he loves it.
And I know how much time and effort he put into it.
And when it doesn’t work, if you have no fault of your own, that’s frustrating to your child, and that’s frustrating to yourself as a parent.
But the worst part was the robot died, again, through some type of a programming or electrical issue, in the middle of his last match and they were doing well.
And he just couldn’t even finish with his hand on the controls.
I mean, it was just like, it was just ripped out of his hands from, I know that I’m being overdramatic, but it was hard.
It was hard to watch, Dave.
It really was.
Yeah, sorry to hear that, man.
I mean, hopefully, it will give him a story to tell someday, even in the midst of disappointment.
And as a former engineer myself can tell you that it sounds like he’s really preparing himself very well for a career in engineering because a key aspect of working in engineering is blaming other engineering disciplines for the issues that come up.
And I say that jokingly a little bit because, yeah, but that is something that happens a lot.
And as long as you’re not the one responsible for the latest issue, you’re in good shape.
Yeah, and he did pretty well because he realized that there was nothing that he could do.
And he and I had had numerous talks over the years where he would complain about the programmers.
And I was like, well, then you go learn to program.
Don’t be held up by, you know, if it’s that important to you, then you need to learn it.
Yeah, absolutely.
That was one of the things that started to become my pet peeve when I was still working in aerospace, is the people that kind of set up strict barriers, like that’s not my job to do that.
I feel like the people that were willing to kind of bridge the gap between disciplines and do a little bit extra, really helped teams be the most effective.
And hopefully he will have seen that.
And, you know, that’s something that he can address going forward.
As far as My Dad Life sound check song goes, I’m going to switch gears a little bit because as a lot of us are aware, the ACM Award nominations came out recently.
And, you know, for the female artist of the year, Megan Moroney, who is so new to the industry, from a, you know, let’s say like a radio standpoint, you know, she’s obviously all artists have been around for a while.
Nobody just is an overnight success because the amount of work that goes into it, you know, takes time.
But from a radio standpoint, you know, Megan is very, very new to the industry.
And to see her nominated for the, you know, female artist of the year, that was just fantastically awesome.
And that got me thinking about her big hit that, you know, kind of broke it open for her, Tennessee Orange.
And I’ve always just, I’ve liked that song for two reasons.
One, I love Megan Moroney’s voice.
She’s just got that kind of smooth rasp to her.
I don’t know how to describe it any other way, but, you know, she just sounds like a country southern girl.
It sounds a little bit different than most of the artists that are here on the radio.
Yeah.
And, you know, the message in the song I just thought is, I’ve always enjoyed because it just circles back to, you know, as parents, we do the best we can.
And we try to impart our beliefs on our children.
But every once in a while, they’re just gonna, you know, do what works for them.
And that’s okay.
Even if it means, you know, cheering for the other football team.
My middle son, his T-ball team, we get assigned major league teams for our uniforms and everything.
And the team he was assigned is the Astros.
I couldn’t even believe it was available here in LA.
And what’s worse is that I’m the manager of the T-ball team.
So, I’m learning a lot from this experience, the sport in the Astros had around town.
Well, you don’t have to wear it to town.
You can just like wear it to the game.
Exactly.
But still, you know, it feels like a much longer drive to the field when I have that hat on.
And he loves wearing it because he’s proud to be on the Astros.
You know, it’s his team.
So, he’s wearing it around town.
I’m like, just waiting for somebody to confront us so I can.
Well, what you need to, if somebody confronts you, just channel your inner Hardy.
I’m sure there is something that you have learned from him over the years that can help you deal with this situation.
So, Hardy Report time.
What are we going to learn about or from or in conjunction with Hardy today?
What I want to talk about in the Hardy verse this week is that he had yet another one of his songs go to number one on the Country Airplay charts.
So, his song Truck Bed went number one.
And I have a lot to say about that.
For one, Truck Bed is not my favorite Hardy song.
And I want to celebrate his success because I am a Hardy fan.
I like him, his brand.
Truck Bed is just not one of my favorites.
It’s kind of similar.
The last episode I talked about quit.
Truck Bed is very similar to quit in my mind.
At the beginning, I’m just not a fan.
I cringe a little bit when I hear the opening sequence.
And then by the end, I can kind of appreciate it.
It’s a high-energy song.
It’s going to play really well at a big venue.
And people go crazy for it when it’s live.
It’s very catchy.
And at the end, he gets into his hard rock screaming voice, which I think is the best use of his voice when he’s doing the screaming, head banging kind of thing.
What makes me kind of shake my head is that Truck Bed is not a country song at all.
Other than, I guess it’s the truck reference that makes it qualify as a country song.
But I don’t even think Hardy would call it a country song.
It’s radio country.
It’s pop country.
And you can make that art.
It’s not just Hardy.
You can say that about a lot of people.
You know how I feel about Dan and Shea.
It’s just love them, but they’re great people.
It’s just not my type of music.
And Dan and Shea, they’re a guilty pleasure for me.
I’ll admit.
I’m not afraid to admit that.
But you’re right.
They’re kind of like soft rock.
And Hardy, the truck bed came off of his Mockingbird and the Crow album.
And that album, he billed that as like the first half.
The A side was the country half and the B side was the rock half.
And Truck Bed is on the rock half.
It’s a rock song.
So I just think it’s funny that it goes to number one on country radio.
And the other day I was listening to country radio.
I don’t listen to a lot of country radio.
I’m kind of a Spotify through and through person.
But my Apple CarPlay wasn’t working.
So I fired up country radio.
And sure enough, I heard Truck Bed because it’s a number one song.
People want to hear it or they want people to hear it.
And right after Truck Bed played Beyonce’s song, Texas Hold’em came on right after.
And the same week that Hardy’s Truck Bed went number one on Country Airplay, Beyonce’s song, Texas Hold’em, was number one on the Hot Country chart.
So they’re both number one songs that week.
I think Beyonce’s song is still the number one Hot Country song.
And I know Country Radio kind of they resisted playing Beyonce’s first single.
And it is way more country than Truck Bed.
I’m sorry.
There’s a banjo.
There’s more country tropes in it.
And it’s also catchy.
It’s a catchy pop country song.
And just like there’s no resistance to put in Truck Bed on Country Radio.
And even as like a diehard Hardy fan, it’s just weird.
It’s weird.
It’s funny.
I don’t know.
I still like Truck Bed.
Although I will mention the last thing I’ll say about Truck Bed.
The last part of the song when he starts to go all hard rock and screaming, that’s my favorite part.
When they played it on the radio, they changed that part.
They actually didn’t go all hard rock on it.
So there’s a version that at least in my area, they play on Country Radio that is not true to the original art form that Hardy intended.
And that also bothered me.
You know, you can’t…
I can see.
I can see why.
That’s the Hardy slash Beyonce report for this week.
Maybe those two should do a collaboration.
Then, you know…
I would love that.
So what’s happening on the farm?
You Yesterday, I transplanted about 60 different green pepper and tomato plants.
That takes a long time.
So we’re just starting to, you know, the weather’s, again, last couple episodes has been the same.
The weather’s getting a little warmer, so I’m spending more time in my garden, and that makes me happy.
That’s it, pure and simple.
Anything new you’re growing?
No, pretty much just the standard stuff.
Peppers, tomatoes, potatoes, beets, green beans, I’ve got strawberries and blackberries, cherry trees, lettuce.
I told you about the spinach I planted last time.
I have a very basic garden.
I used to get all crazy and do all kinds of purple radishes or purple carrots and things just when the kids were younger to try to make it fun.
But over the years, I figured out what my kids will eat and or what my friends like because honestly, I give a lot away.
I love seeing the joy on people’s face when I say, hey, would you like some homegrown tomatoes?
They’re just like, yes, thank you so much and it just really makes me happy to see smiles on people’s faces.
I’ve just changed my garden over the years.
I don’t grow all the crazy things anymore.
I just grow what works for us.
You call it a basic garden, but those are staples.
You’re definitely going to eat all that stuff.
Exactly.
The staples in life are important.
Just for the exact same reason that an education in life is important.
Just like you can grow anything in your garden, you can find an education anywhere.
You just have to open your mind to what an education is.
And that is why Cody Jinks and Somewhere in the Middle is such an awesome song.
Now, I will be honest, this is also my favorite Cody Jinks song as well.
So full disclosure, I love it.
I think it’s probably the first song I’ve ever heard from him, through the Pandora universe and I was just immediately drawn to it.
And every time it comes on my Pandora feed, I just stop what I’m doing and I think back to the life lessons that I’ve learned over the years that are just not easily quantifiable.
You have to live it, you have to learn it a different way.
And that’s what I wanted to talk about today.
How you can find an education anywhere.
If you just open your mind, not everybody has something to share, everybody has knowledge.
Albert Einstein has this famous quote that says, everybody’s a genius, but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.
If you think about that for a minute, that is just so true.
Yeah, I’ve never heard that quote.
The first time I saw it was at my kid’s school, one of the math teachers had it on a poster in his room.
You got to find what you’re good at, and it’s going to look differently for everybody.
And kids get a lot of pressure to make that decision about what they’re going to be doing with their life really early.
It’s probably about where your kids are at right now, applying to colleges.
There’s some pressure like, hey, what are you going to be when you grow up?
It’s actually worse than that.
It’s not just one of my oldest ones.
A lot of our listeners know I got Luke, senior in high school.
It’s actually gotten to where they’re starting earlier.
A lot of school districts are starting to institute what they call these education tracks, where in eighth grade, they say, okay, either take this placement test or think about what you want to do, and you will take this set of courses, making kids choose what their career path is when they’re in eighth grade, signing up for their freshman year.
So it’s not just, oh, I’m going to graduate from high school, I got to figure out my life.
It’s a, I’m going into high school, and I have to make the right choices at that time.
And I feel like achievement culture just starts to creep in pretty early.
Like even for my kids, my oldest is six, and I’m already seeing, it’s more in sports, but also reading.
So in kindergarten, a lot of the kids can read, and my son’s a really good reader.
It’s not anything that we did to, we read to him like you’re supposed to, and he’s just taken an interest in it, and as happens to have an aptitude for it.
But I know he has classmates that can’t read yet, or that are struggling to read, or are resistant to the hard work it takes to sound out the words and figure it out.
And it causes some anxiety for the parents.
It causes anxiety for the kids because they all know already, like who can read and who can’t read.
And I think parents play a big role in how they can, like are you going to kind of add to some of that pressure that might naturally, that kids might feel naturally through just being in the environment?
Can you create a safe space for them to kind of figure things out on their own and figure things out at their own speed?
The temptation to, as a parent, to compare your kids to other kids or compare your family to other families and their abilities or their achievements, I think to me it seems like a natural thing that I always have to try to resist personally so that I can give my kids the space to figure out what they like and to not add to that kind of innate anxiety that I’m already seeing with my oldest one.
Yeah, it’s really so variable when it comes to the kids.
Because some kids are driven themselves.
They want to, they’re the overachiever.
But sometimes it’s the parents that are pushing the kids to be the head of the, you know, top of the class, head of the line, whichever.
And the balance is so difficult to find, especially if you as parents were maybe high achieving parents yourselves, high achieving adults, high achieving individuals, because that’s the world you know.
And the world is so different now than the world we grew up in.
And you and I even have a, you know, the world, but my world is 10 years plus or minus different between your world.
And there’s just a lot of changes that have gone on.
And where we really, really as parents struggle, I think, is when we judge our children by the standards that we have through our learned behavior.
Because it’s not an apples to apples comparison anymore.
It’s just not the world.
The world is too different.
And as kids are coming up, you’re seeing kids that are realizing the, you know, maybe college isn’t for me.
And that as hard as for some parents, because for so long, society has just drilled into us that you got to go to college to make something of yourself.
Now, there’s always the Bill Gates outlying example, but everyone always just dismiss that as luck.
Yeah, and I think Jinks has a really good line in that song, and Somewhere in the Middle where he’s talking about grad school, no school, I call them all my friends.
To a certain degree, like, you’re going to, as a person, I think you’re going to gravitate towards people that are kind of similar to you, that have the same educational background and the same socioeconomic background.
But for me, like, some of my most memorable jobs were when there was more diverse background, jobs like on the manufacturing floor at the aerospace company where there were people from lots of different backgrounds that all had their own expertise.
And a lot of them, I was in there as a, they probably saw me as the college boy engineering nerd on the floor trying to make sense of what was going on.
And a lot of them knew way more than I did about building stuff and about our company.
And I learned a ton from them, and I loved working in that environment.
And I think there’s a lot of value to having just a lot of different exposure, a lot of different types of experiences, and a lot of different interactions with people from different backgrounds.
It’s funny how you mention your employment experiences and how those have kind of shaped the way you look at some of your jobs.
I got a couple good stories for you in that department.
My second job, not counting something like baling hay or working for another farmer, my second job, the first one was McDonald’s for six weeks.
But I stopped that job because I got, essentially was able to double my pay by going to work for the local turkey slaughterhouse on the second shift.
So I’m in there on the sanitation crew cleaning up the plant where they slaughtered 22,000 turkeys every day.
My first job was to start in the, what they called the feather picking room.
They’ve had all these machines with all these rubberized fingers that after you run the bird through the scalder to get it all to soften the feathers, then these machines would go through, spin at high revolutions and essentially pick all the feathers off the bird.
You have no idea how many feathers are generated by 22,000 birds.
A lot!
And it was my job, along with a couple other guys, to clean that room.
Now, the crew I was working with was a motley sort.
About a third of the guys did not speak English as a first language.
They were immigrants from Mexico.
The town we lived in, and to this day, still is a very, very Hispanic town.
It was the first school district in Iowa actually to offer bilingual education to everybody starting in kindergarten.
That was over 20 years ago.
Very, very multicultural town that I grew up in, as evidenced by this summer job.
Like I said, about a third of the guys did not speak English as a first language.
The other third of the guys, you could tell they were just the kind of guys that bounced around from job to job, just for whatever reason.
And the other third were just, what I would call like the blue collar lifer.
They were there at the same factory, but not necessarily doing the same job at the same factory, but they just rotated around the factory to kind of change it up.
They had no desire to go to another factory, but they needed to kind of change their job within the factory from time to time.
But anyway, some of the stories these guys would tell about their life and their experiences were to an 18-year-old kid going off to college was just eye-opening.
And at first, there was, you know, oh, you’re the college kid, you’re this, you’re that.
And, you know, they would give me a hard time, but I also earned their respect because, one, I gave it right back to them.
Two, they also saw that I was there doing the same job as they were, wasn’t complaining about it.
I was, you know, putting in the time, I was working hard, and I was treating them as what they were to me at the time.
They were an equal.
I was an 18-year-old kid who was cleaning up turkey feathers.
You know, that didn’t make me better than them.
It made me the same as them.
And that is part of the thing, and I’m drawn to this song so much, is I think we as individuals just think that because what we do makes us superior in every other part of our lives, and that’s just not the case.
I remember when I first started working in the manufacturing areas, the way that management would talk about the blue collar workers was different than the engineers, because blue collar workers were more, they were hourly, and the engineers earned a salary.
And I would ask about the career development for blue collar workers.
They’d say, you know what, you’ll learn this, you’ll see, they just punch in the clock.
And I refused to accept that because I thought, this is their job, just like it’s my job.
I’m sure they have aspirations and they want to spend their career here.
There’s ways that they want to develop themselves and grow also, and so I would always, I always made a point to treat them just like, I don’t want to treat them differently because they were hourly workers, they were blue collar workers.
And it was true, like a lot of them, they did aspire for management jobs and aspire for different things.
And I think taking an interest in what they wanted and not just assuming that they were a certain way because of their background or because of their lack of a college degree I think made a big difference with the relationships I’d build with them.
You see a lot more common ground when you just treat people as your equals, regardless of what your background is.
I don’t know if I would have had that kind of experience if I didn’t get the chance to spend time on the floor in that environment.
Got a funny story for you kind of along that line as well.
Years and years ago, one of our local dads group, weekly playgroups, Guy was telling the story about how he and his wife and kids went out for ice cream a couple days before.
It was one of those drive-in type places with the car hops.
They would roller skate out to you and bring you your ice cream cones.
The guy’s wife who is a doctor said, she’s like, yeah, this place is great, but I think I would just be overqualified to ever work here.
He looks at her and he says, what are you, a world champion roller skater?
Great line.
They’re not married anymore.
But the point is, it just goes back to that Albert Einstein quote.
Just because you know something about something doesn’t make you an expert or superior to somebody about everything, you know, anything else, everything else.
There’s always something to be learned.
I look, you know, like Cody says.
I’ve worked those overnight shifts and you learn a lot.
It might not be things you can, you know, learn in a book, but man, you learn a lot.
What do you think is a good example of a great first job for a kid?
Okay, so I need a little bit more of your parameters here.
Are you thinking like first job for somebody that’s not related to you or a neighbor?
I mean, you’re not talking like mowing lawns.
Yeah, anything like that, like your first job.
So like my first job that I had when I was kid at like 15, I was an umpire, a little league umpire.
And one of the reasons I thought that was a great first job is that it really challenges your emotional resilience.
Umpires take a lot of abuse.
And even though I was umpiring, they’re probably like six or seven year olds, the parents and the coaches.
You still had those crazy sports parents who were just yelling at you.
They were brutal.
And thinking back, man, I was just a kid.
I was 15.
I’m sure they could tell.
And it was a rough environment, but it taught me about how to deal with people, how to keep my cool.
Like I said, you get an education in everything that you do.
And then I just, as a teenager, just learned a little bit of responsibility.
I got to show up on time.
I have to prepare.
I have to buy the stuff, the gear, and I get some money to figure out what to do with.
I think all those things are good lessons just in general.
I hope that I can find chances for my kids to get some kind of work before they go off to college and into the real world just to get a taste of what it’s like.
So growing up on a farm, my first jobs were, you know, agriculture related.
Things like baling hay, detasling corn, things of that nature, which is for extra pocket money from time to time.
But as I mentioned earlier in the episode, my first job was working at McDonald’s.
I did that kind of like my senior year in high school.
The last month and a half of school, I kind of started just working on the weekends and everything.
I’m a firm believer that everybody should do two things in their life from a work experience standpoint.
Everybody should work in a restaurant.
Doesn’t matter if it’s fast food or table service, but everybody needs to see what goes on in a restaurant and see how you can relate to people in a restaurant and or how people can relate to you.
Firm believer in that.
And then to follow up that very similar, I think everybody needs to work in some type of a detail position in their life, whether it be a big box store like Target or a smaller type.
I don’t know what mom, mom grocery store.
I don’t know.
But I think retail experience is so valuable to people because it shows you how, again, how to relate to people because when it comes to a monetary transaction for something as simple as a gallon of milk, you’re all on the same page there.
You’re either buying the milk or you’re selling the milk.
But it’s how you interact with the people that are buying or selling the milk can really teach you a lot about life because you’ll have jerks that will come in and then you’ll have the people who are coming in and paying for the milk on food stamps.
Both deserve your respect as the person selling the milk and that’s just a lesson that some people never get.
Yeah, I’ve heard that same insight about how important it is to work in customer service somehow because it…
Retail, customer service, yeah.
The premise is the same premise.
Yeah, I think that having that experience helps you treat other people better even when you’re the customer.
When you’re the customer at the restaurant, having worked in customer service, you’re going to treat the wait staff and the kitchen staff and the people there a little bit better because you know what it was like.
I mean, even Jinks has lines about that too, about him like tending bar and treating saints and sinners right.
Because you never know who’s watching.
You never know who you’re serving or who’s in front of you.
And I think the same goes when you’re the customer.
You never know who you’re dealing with, what they’re dealing with in their lives.
So it’s a life lesson to put yourself out there.
Yeah, how many times do you hear the story of the disgruntled customer who starts raising a stake and they’re like, let me speak to the manager.
I am the manager.
Let me speak to the owner.
I am the owner.
You just don’t know.
You just don’t know what’s going on.
So as far as your kids go, how do you balance and find the middle ground that Jinks is talking about when it comes to achievement and making sure that your kids are challenging themselves versus creating crushing anxiety?
Excellent question that I don’t have a good answer for.
Because it is a constant battle to do that for a lot of the reasons that we mentioned.
The world is different.
My wife and I are different personalities than our kids.
And just because what we want might not be what they want.
Just because what we think is best for them might not be what they think is best for them.
And we can justify that by saying, well, we’re the parents, we know better.
And there might be some truth to that.
But what good does that do just to constantly harp on that to your kids?
Probably not much.
Is that going to put them in therapy when they’re 40?
Hope not.
But that doesn’t mean it’s easy not to.
I can say that it’s easy to do that because I can look back in retrospect and say, I try not to do it, but do I still do it?
Yeah.
Still mess it up.
I think what you said there, acknowledging that what you want for them won’t necessarily match with what they want for themselves, I think is a healthy way to think about it because it’s a check against your own, whether you’re trying to live vicariously through your kids or you have this expectation or a picture in your mind of what their life will look like.
And acknowledging just like anybody that you come across in your former positions at work and in your work life, treating your kids like people, they’re individuals, they have their own wants and desires, even if it’s kind of hard for you to acknowledge that.
And just being okay if they disagree with you on things, I think is a healthy place to come from.
But it’s hard because you can’t just turn around then and say, okay, you don’t want to do this, that’s fine.
Because it’s not fine.
You still have to take care of your responsibilities and you still have to set yourself up.
You have to set yourself up so that you can get to a point where you can have the freedom or the flexibility or the capability to say, I don’t want to do that.
But that’s not necessarily going to happen at 16, 17, 18 years of age.
And I know that sounds like I’m kind of talking out of both sides of my mouth, but that goes back to the balance thing.
I am, and I fully am aware of it and admit it.
But sometimes you have to do it because otherwise, the child won’t come out of the basement.
They won’t put the Xbox down.
They won’t go get a job to try to contribute something.
If we don’t push them sometimes, but some kids will.
And again, balance, everything is about balance.
But achieving it and realizing it, it’s hard, man.
Since you have kids that are knocking on the door of adulthood right now, what I hear from people like yourself in that situation, it’s a part of parenting that is so far away from me right now.
It’s kind of hard to put myself in that position, but I know that it’s coming.
And what I’m hoping to do is just, I got to make sure that I have, that I’m instilling some values in them that I think is important and kind of demonstrating that to them so that there’s a baseline for having a good strong work ethic, being responsible, having integrity.
And then I’ll know which levers to push on when they get to that point where they need a kick in the pants to put the Nintendo Switch down.
Yeah, and it’s, I’m just going to go back to that Megan Moroney song, you do the best you can as parents and you hope that you’ve established, to your words, enough of a baseline that they have the tools to accomplish what eventually they want to accomplish.
Not necessarily what you think they can accomplish or you want for them.
That might be the same thing, but it’s okay if it’s not.
And the best you can hope for is that you’ve given your kids the baseline and the tools so that they can land somewhere in the middle.
We unpacked a lot in this one.
I hope you guys got something out of it as well.
Some of our ideas and thoughts on balance, balancing your outlook on life and from an educational standpoint, I keep circling back around to that.
So we hope you enjoyed it.
We hope you got something out of it.
Thank you for joining us as we talked about parenting through Country Music.
So next episode, in a couple of weeks, we hope you come back and join us as we kind of do a little ACM theme show, talk a little bit about some of the nominees and share some of our likes and dislikes and how was this person left off commentary.
But until then, the website is countrymusictads.com.
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