🤠 How Paying The Price Teaches You Value

Day 50:  You Have to Pay To Play 

by Edward Smith

24 Aug 2020

Military Benefits Come With a Cost

If you read my last article entitled 🤠  How To Return to the Scene of a Crime and Resurrect An Old College Flame, you would have read about how joining up with the military was a good decision for me.  It taught me to value things, because I had to fight for them, and prove I could keep them.

You Get to Learn Once You Earn

Earning is a big part of the military.

It includes everything. 

It even includes the government benefits you get promised when you first show up to a recruiting station to sign up.  In the military, there is no free lunch.

Military benefits are real, but you work hard to earn all of them. That teaches you to respect and appreciate what you get.

The Three Year Plan

I didn't earn my first military benefit until after I was at my first duty station. It took me about three years in to get into my first college classroom. Everything before that was training.

When you serve in the military, the military comes first. Always. When I would try to find ways to start school, I would run into restrictions, or someone would have to give me a signed permission slip.

Those permission slips never got signed until I was able to prove that I could handle my job and balance my free time with my job. School and work were seen as conflicting things, and the job couldn't suffer because of side gigs. 

Before I could get permission, I had to acknowledge that I would leave school at any moment at any time. It could be because of normal work, or it could be because of a deployment. I had to be very flexible.  The mission mattered more then me.

Grades were another thing. I had to keep my grades high, or the benefits would disappear.

People checked. Bad grades.  No benefits.   No exceptions.

This simple rule taught me to work hard for my grades.  My future depended on it.  

Going Back to School

During this time I began attending classes at the local community college. I was a rare creature. Many of my fellow soldiers weren't going. 

Through hard work, I finished off my first year of school, and with my previous college credits I was able to get a military associate's degree.  Not too shabby.  Degrees were usually only possessed by officers.   This was a big deal.   I ended up taking a bunch of remedial classes to make it all happen.  I sucked up my pride, and paid the price to become stronger.  

That made the difference.

Want to Know How Things Changed?   Read my Next Article