The virtue of work

If there are seven American virtues, I’d guess hard work is either first or second. If I was making the list, it would be first.

Early in Going Rogue, Sarah Palin writes of her team winning the state championship in basketball her senior year:

That victory changed my life. More than anything else to that point, it proved what my parents had been trying to instill in me all along: that hard work and passion matter most of all (41).

Isn’t it nice to hear a public figure extol the virtue of hard work for a change?

The chattering classes have no idea what to think of Gov. Palin or Going Rogue. Way back when, I posited that Going Rogue would be among the most-read best-selling political memoirs, and when comparing Going Rogue to Pres. Obama’s first memoir, Dreams from my Father, one is struck by the authenticity of the former’s voice and the faux-lyrical, periphrastic nattering of the latter’s. In less than a month, HarperCollins has earned a return on the investment it made in Gov. Palin; after being advanced $150,000 for his first memoir, then-Community Organizer Obama couldn’t even come up with a manuscript.

So he got another $40,000 and, without indulging in conspiracy, a whole lotta help.

Of the pieces of her story that drew me to begin following the career of Sarah Palin shortly after she was elected Governor of Alaska, it was for this former gym rat Palin’s team winning a championship in basketball that put the hook in me. The more I learned about Gov. Palin, the more I liked: she earned each of her successes through hard-ass work, catching breaks where they came while walking through doors of opportunity when they opened. The most satisfying of my own successes (probably just like most of yours) have come through the same simple rule, a maxim I made for myself a long time ago: work like you’re not guaranteed a job, and avoid people who avoid working. In a line credited to many a famous coach over the years, Gov. Palin is living proof: the harder you work, the luckier you get.

When I first heard about her being on a championship basketball team, I couldn’t help but chuckle as my formative years were spent in our driveway shooting baskets and playing pick-up ball at the YMCA. Last Sunday on ESPN’s “Outside the Lines,” the topic up for discussion was why there are so few White American Males (WAM) in the ranks of the NBA – the short answer was and remains work ethic.

It’s not that WAMs have a poor work ethic, it’s that the African-American and Eastern European men who dominate the NBA had a hunger to get there that WAMs couldn’t possibly fathom, this middle-class white kid who shot hundreds of free-throws each day included. Many current NBA players grew up surrounded by grinding poverty, and they spent their formative years from sun-up to sundown playing basketball, be it at the gym, at the park or at their home. For WAMs basketball is an activity, or maybe a chance at scholarships – for most of the men in the NBA, it was an escape from circumstances that did not ask for and in which they refused to remain.

This work ethic is currently available for public witness on Gov. Palin’s book tour. As a writer, I would love to learn how difficult it is to sign a thousand books a day for a few weeks on tour while smiling, shaking people’s hands and chatting them up – most writers don’t even dream of such things because they’re about as realistic as the notion that a hockey mom from Alaska with no political experience would vault herself to the forefront of the American political conversation in fewer than two decades. Gov. Palin has star power, sure, but undergirding that photogeneity is an incredible self-confidence buttressed, from the get-go, by the parental lessons of hard work and passion she clearly took to heart. If there is a lesson to take from the latest chapter in Sarah Palin’s life, it is that hard work pays off.

Anyone who’s gone to a stop on Gov. Palin’s book tour has noticed something astonishing, whether they realized it or not: American youth perched on sidewalks waiting on a politician while reading her nonfiction memoir. The book does not contain wizards, werewolves, zombies or vampires, and its “villains,” either go unnamed or aren’t given much time. Its lessons are many, but for the adolescent reader of Going Rogue, I’d offer this: if you take nothing else from Going Rogue or Sarah Palin, let her story serve as a lesson in the benefits of hard work, relying on yourself to achieve what you want while never lowering yourself to get what you desire.

It’s a simple lesson, and perfectly illustrated in Going Rogue.