Regular habits mean Everything - In response to Partha

byTheCatherine

13.9K followers

Updated 3 years ago

LOL habits are CATHCHING

I found myself today reading Partha's blog

https://my.wealthyaffiliate.com/parthab/blog/on-no-it-has-ha...

and writing a reply almost as long as his post. As he is a man of very few words I know that's not difficult, but I didn't want to out stretch his original post. Ironically, his post was in reply to another member's post, Mels. I haven't read that yet so heaven knows how long it will take me to reply to that one.

In the meantime to get back to the point before I meander off to the Maldives (it's cold here today as always in the UK so bear with me I may wander off there anyway just to get warm!) I so agree with his post and one of the reasons that I can so relate to it is that from the age of 21 until 40 I spent 19 years working in the kitchens of two restaurants.

Before you start feeling sorry for me, and thinking I was working for five dollars an hour or the equivalent wage minimum wage in India, I owned both restaurants. To be fair I co-owned with my husband, but what was his was mine!
On average, I worked 17 hours a day, for seven days a week, in a temperature which hovered between 59 °C- 60 °C. That may be why I am always freezing these days. Apparently, I only once complained about the heat. I almost gave my husband a heart attack because apparently one day in that 19 years I said "phew, it's hot today!" His flabber, had never been so gasted. He came back a few minutes later to ask if I was okay, because he thought I was ill.

The point is in that time in the whole of those 19 years I was never ill and never went to a doctor. Until the day I collapsed in the kitchen with the temperature 106 °F. I had acute appendicitis. He took me kicking and screaming to the doctors. At the time, I didn't like doctors. I like them even less now as it involved taking my appendix out. They burst on the operating table and left me with 19 stitches. I have never been to a doctor since!

The stage was set, every day of our lives the eight months of the year for 19 years we work those hours. Every single day, for at least 15 hours I sent out a meal from the kitchen every 10 seconds. That is six meals a minute and 360 meals in every hour. On average, in summer I cooked nearly 4000 meals a day.

The mental pressure of holding all those meals in my head, usually between 50 and 60 was horrendous. Occasionally there were more meals waiting to be done, and those orders I would insist that my husband kept them back and never gave me more than 50 at any one time. If I did have more than that to do and knew about it I had a minute where I felt overwhelm and panic. Whilst that could have been understood I lost the time to send out six meals. Things got behind in the mental pressure got worse.

Why did I do all this?

To be fair, the primary reason was money. I met my husband on a bus to Tibet in 1976. Whilst that may be perfectly normal today, in those days it was a wee bit wacky. A journey that was supposed to take two months actually took seven months. If you knew anything about my lack of navigational skills you would perhaps understand why it took so long. In fact, it had nothing to do with me, we just took time out and went wherever we wanted to go.

At the end of that journey we ended up in Kolkata not for the first or the last time, any excuse to stay my favourite city in the world. I love the sea and I'm not really a city girl but that is one city I could live in for the rest of my days.

Anyway we were spending Christmas chilling in Kolkata when he dropped upon me that he wanted to go West and go back to Delhi and take the West Coast down to the bottom of India, up the right-hand side and take a ferry from Tamil Nadu across to India. That's ferry stopped running in 1984 because of the civil war but at the time it was still running.

I pointed out to Leo who was then only my travelling companion that I haven't got any money. I had only taken £480 with me and basically in a week I would have been in his words brassick ( Brassic lint, in Cockney rhyming slang is skint!). I wasn't a Cockney, but my husband was born in the sound of Bow Bells and I started to learn the lingo. This reinforces my initial point that habit and creating habits builds up. I was starting to understand the lingo after seven months.

He happened to point out to me that before he came away he accidentally won £1300 on a Greyhound bet. How that came about by accident is another long story which is outside the scope of the paradigms of this article. Anyway, to cut a long story short he wanted to go down to Sri Lanka because he worked with some friends whose family came from Colombo and Kandy in Sri Lanka.

So off we set to travel down the west coast of India. That journey took about two months and then we had about 3 1/2 months in Sri Lanka until the money did finally run out. The problem was that by this time we had both got the travel bug.

We had both fallen irrevocably in love with India. Ironically in the 41 years that we had together it was the only thing that we have agreed on. That again is another story for another time. We spent the next eighteen months being self-employed and travelling. However we weren't getting the traction we needed.

We worked for three years straight without a day off. We had a newsagents so they were long days we started at 7 AM and finished at 10 PM at night. At the end of that time I asked him to compute how many lunch hours I'd missed, how many bank holidays how many holidays et cetera et cetera and also take into account that we both worked hundred and 20 hours a week. In my head, I had just worked nine years without a holiday as I did three weeks of work every week.

Anyway he worked out that it was three years and 10 months. So I said I am going travelling for at least that time and I don't want to hear the word work once! So off we set and we did indeed travel for four years.

Well if we had the travel bug before it was even worse now. I was not yet 30 but I had spent five years wandering around the world. I decided that I was going to create the lifestyle so that we could work, invest and also travel. By that time, 28 years of age I had bought my first house with cash.

We sold everything up and after the four years we went back to Spain to see my parents who had settled there in the early 70s. I did go back to England and I did have a row with the Customs man (that again is a story for another time!) The upshot was we got straight on a plane and went to Spain and I wasn't to set foot in England again until 2014.

Working in the restaurant gave us the opportunity to buy two properties which is going to be our retirement fund. It also gave us the opportunity to travel every winter wherever we wish to go. We stopped work on 7th January every year. It might seem in our data stop but 6 January was the Spanish Christmas Day and we weren't missing that profit! We then travelled sometimes on three continents until round about mid April. Then we returned spent two weeks deep cleaning and renovating restaurants and then we started all over again.

Those habits kept me in good stead and they still keep me in good stead today. Like Partha, I write every day no matter what I feel like.

There were many days in the restaurant when I felt I was either too tired or occasionally too hung over to get it together to work. However, I also knew that our house was 200 m away from where we worked. At least one of our Spanish neighbours would have come round and hammered on the door.

Whether I wanted to work or not wasn't really a choice. It was something I was committed to do. I had a big plasticized poster of the Maldives on my fridge. It wasn't that I particularly like the Maldives, it is a beautiful place but it is also boring after a fortnight. You can only snorkel and dive and there is only so much you can do both in a single day.

That photograph spurned me on. Many times between 3-4 am when I have been working since 9 AM I was absolutely knackered. Often, Leo would come in to the kitchen and asked could I just cook a...................... it was often a hamburger and I desperately wanted to say no because I was tired. The chances are I hadn't eaten all day and needed to clean down everything, sit down, eat and drink. To be absolutely fair, although I never said no, not once, the first reaction was a mouthful of expletives.

They always said that my language after a hard day could put an Irish navvy to shame. I always remarked he had never done 19 hours in the heat I was working. That was unfair because he worked behind the bar with about seven coolers and fridges blasting out hot air as well. However after a hard days work I was often grumpy and opinionated even if only because I was desperate for something to eat.

When the happened I used to look at the fridge and imagine what I could do with the money for the four months of the year we travelled wherever we wish to go. I am somewhat abashed to say we didn't really pay any attention to our carbon footprint. We would think nothing of flying from Southeast Asia to Africa and back again a month later.

Now unlike ParthaI have never run a marathon, I will never run a marathon. But I do know the dedication it takes to get where you want to go. I have spent 50 years carving out exactly the life and businesses that I wanted. You don't get in that position by getting derailed at every speed bump.

Every time you hit some sort of problem, it is only a speed bump. You can allow it to knock you off your path or you can work through it. I write the same way I used to cook. I did it anyway irrespective of whether I wanted to or not. Every morning I write at least one article, even though I know that I have spare articles I can use if I don't want to write.


THIS IS A QUOTE FROM PARTHA

You weren’t really “feeling it” one day, so you decided not to open your doors.

You then do this again later in the week, and then you decide not to open the restaurant for a whole week.

Would you ever do that?

NO

It’s your business, so you would make sure that you open those restaurant doors every single day. "

It is absolutely true there is no way you would do that because you can't do that. It doesn't matter whether you are too tired to stand up. Occasionally I finished work at seven in the morning and I had to be back at work at eight and we both went and sat on the river and watch the sunrise rather than feel crap after an hour's sleep.

The point is you have to create your future. You are in charge of your own reality create it and make it happen it doesn't happen by accident. You have to push through the pain and I have to say it's not always easy but if you don't do it you come to a grinding halt. I know what he means when he contradicts that it is a marathon. Taking the attitude that it is a marathon and you can take days off is a slippery slope. If you want to get anywhere then you have to push through it. I totally agree with Partha ATOMIC HABITS by James clear there's a fantastic book. If you made it to the end of this give yourself a pat on the back and go and have a stiff drink, before you write a comment below.

Catherine