What a Foster Child Learns About Gratitude
Life doesn't always give you what you want. It gives you what you need to grow.
I grew up as a foster child, and I learned early that life does not always give you what you want, but it always gives you what you need to grow. That is not a comfortable lesson to learn as a kid. It is a valuable one to carry as a man.
I started working young, and I never really stopped. Not because anyone made me, in the end, but because work was the one thing that was always mine. Nobody could take the effort out of my hands. That work ethic, that drive, that stubborn belief in something greater. Looking back, that was the beginning of the American Dream for me, long before I had a name for it.
“I didn't grow up with much. That's exactly how I learned that gratitude isn't about what you have.”
People sometimes assume gratitude comes easiest to people who have the most. In my experience it is the other way around. When you start with little, you learn to be thankful for the things that cannot be bought: a chance, a kindness, a country that lets you try again. You learn that gratitude is not about what you have. It is about what you choose to do with it.
That is the lesson under every song I write and every story I tell. I did not have much. I had enough to be grateful, and grateful turned out to be enough.
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