Everybody makes mistakes. “If you aren’t making mistakes then you aren’t doing anything”. My dad told me this and it’s a quote by some famous person.
I used to work at Winchell’s Donuts, a very popular doughnut shop chain in the Bay Area in the seventies and eighties. It was actually quite funny. I was 19 years old and I had just gotten out of my very first psyche ward after a week and a half stay. My parents arranged for me to move directly into a house for schizophrenics in the big city near downtown.
I was actively psychotic but the first week I was there, but without telling anyone, I put on some nice clothes and went up and down a main street and put in applications for every business nearby. I got two offers: either a Salvation Army store or Winchell’s Doughnut’s. I picked Winchell’s. So I started working. I went there for three days and did a lot of cleaning there but my parents discovered I had the job. The counselors at the house and my parents just laughed when I told them I had a job. They said, “Nick, take it easy. You don’t have to work. Just concentrate on getting better."
So they all told me to quit but they admired my work ethic. Here I was fresh out of a psyche ward and I was working the first week. When I told my bosses I quit, for some reason they didn’t want to pay me for my three days of work. Instead they offered me a box of doughnuts!! 'I said, “Gimme three." They agreed, I took them to the house and the stupid counselors ate most of them. After that I didn’t work again until I was 22 years old.