Yep. That is a very good lesson for people to learn, and the younger the better.
My first paying job was at age 10. My great aunt paid me $1 to dust all the goods on the shelves and sweep out their general store. It took a long time, and I was required to repeat some of it until I got it right. I can still remember how it felt to have a whole dollar--quite a princely sum for a child in that day--and how rich and how proud I felt. I have been working steadily for wages since age 12 doing everything from dog sitting to baby sitting to feeding chickens to lawn mowing to leaf raking to car washing. Anything I could do for a buck. My first regular paying job was at Age 16 for 75 cents an hour as a copy girl after school at the Santa Fe New Mexican and then I worked some bussing tables for tips at the ski lodge. Working my way through college I did everything from man the front desk at the dorm to working in the college laundry, served as research assistants for professors, and free lanced a bit for the local newspaper. Most for less than $1/hour. (And because the college used so much student labor for just about everything, tuition and fees were kept affordable for all of us.)
None of that hurt me. I was able to gain valuable experience and skills in all of it, developed a work ethic, and acquired some priceless references that almost certainly opened other doors for me later on.
And I think among those of that generation, it never occurred to any of us that we were entitled to ANYTHING other people had worked for. It never occurred to us that we deserved anything we hadn't worked for or that we couldn't achieve whatever we had the skill, ambition, and ability to strive and qualify for. We didn't expect anybody to give it to us.
