The Campbell Academy Blog | Colin Campbell (91)

Work ethic

I was never supposed to be in this world; this came to me very late (relatively speaking).

I was never considered 'university material' at school, whatever that might mean. So, I was destined for a vocational career in electronics, woodwork, or something similar.

It was only through some sort of last-gasp mental exam resulting that the world opened up in a slightly wider fashion, and by some ridiculous chance, I ended up in dentistry.

Before those times and while at school, I played basketball full-time (that's a ridiculous story).

I also worked as a paper boy from when I was pretty young, but on a proper paper round delivering to about 75 houses on the side of a mountain and on a Sunday, having to take two bags of Sunday papers halfway up the hill and dropping one off before I went back to start delivering the lower half of the hill and then collecting the second bag for the upper half of the hill.

After I finished up in the paper round, I worked in a cafe serving ice cream and sweets for a really grumpy Italian guy who taught me masses about customer service (but only about how not to do it).

During that time, I also served drinks in a hotel as a function waiter. I also did breakfast at the hotel (that's a catastrophically early start).

When I got to 17, I was about to go to university, I scrapped all that and took a job at Tesco, and I worked there for 4.5 years.

I started off the first 2.5 years stacking the shelves (mostly the soup aisle), but I also did the bread (another catastrophically early start) and regularly worked night shifts during the holidays and particularly around Christmas time to earn more money.

I did that while I was going to university, while I was studying, and dentistry is a challenging degree; therefore, when I hit the ground and qualified and people started to pay me to be a dentist, it didn't really seem like that much hard work at all.

I think back to my Dad and to the job that he had as a motor mechanic.

He worked 70 or 80 hours a week, leaving early in the morning, returning late at night. He had a Wednesday evening off work, so he would work at home in the garage, fixing other people's cars.

He did the same on Saturday and Sunday mornings.

Generally, my Dad had Friday nights and Sunday afternoons off.

His work was hard, not like dentistry but proper, hard, hard on the knees, hard on the back, hard on the hands.

My Dad was tired in the evenings and would fall asleep trying to read the local paper.

I wonder now how we pass on that sense of work ethic to our children, how we encourage them into the vision that living a normal life is actually quite abnormal and embracing a normal life of hard work and reward over the years is something noble and something honourable and something that we should show our children is worth striving for and worth living for.

As I look now down the generations (and this is a mass generalization which is obviously wrong), I'm not sure I see an awful lot of people who are happy to put themselves through the mill to get to a better place.

My Mum and Dad did that for my Brother and I, and I tried to do it for my children, but I think now, it may be hard to keep that spiral going.

The joy of work and working for work's sake is a really special thing and something we need to find a way to instil back into our younger people who think the definition of success is Netflix and delivery food.