My brother and I were hired to cover the mums at a local greenhouse every evening. Two years older and much bigger, my brother had little patience, and turned an easy two-man job into 
two difficult one-man jobs. Rather than rolling the heavy, dirty tarps as a team, each of us on one side, he would do his own and I tried to do the rest. I was neither tall enough nor strong enough to run the tarp down the center, so most of my time was spent running clear around the long rows of flowers to adjust one side then the other.
Hard Lesson 1 - teamwork is better. I understood that principle from baseball, but this was a new application. Two people together can outwork two people working alone. If my brother was in a hurry, we would tug the tarps together and they practically rolled themselves out.
Hard Lesson 2 - being the boss is better than being cheap labor. When I didn’t do exactly as he said, or if I took too long, he would hit me. I often walked home with tear tracks and blood staining my face. “I’m telling mom,” really isn’t much of a defense against a determined older brother.
Hard Lesson 3 – there is no job security. Not even if you work hard. Six weeks into the job, a tornado destroyed the greenhouses. All our work was for naught.
Hard Lesson 4 – if you don’t get paid, get another job. Every day for six weeks the guy kept saying he would pay next week. The only thing that made that time bearable was the prospect of seven dollars at the end of the week. That’s $42 I’ll never see again. The same thing happened years later working for a startup software company, an $8,000 mistake. Which isn’t nearly as bad as the time I worked for another startup that only paid us for five of the twelve months we worked. If I haven’t finally learned that lesson, I deserve whatever I don’t get.
