Proof that ANYONE Can Be Successful

My youngest daughter is a very successful business owner. As owner and manager of an upscale consignment boutique that looks more like a fancy designer apparel and accessory shop than it does a second-hand clothing store, my daughter has created a beautiful shop that is so stylish and classy nobody walking into her establishment would ever think he or she was looking at anything pre-owned.

My daughter and her business partner, who also happens to be my daughter’s sister-in-law, opened Briella’s Boutique during one of our most economically depressed years and their business proliferated mostly due to word-of-mouth advertising. In the early days, however, shortly after Briella’s grand opening, my daughter would call me and sigh, “We had a big day today – we sold $30 worth of clothing.”

These days Briella’s is bursting at the seams with clothing, purses, jewelry, and customers. My daughter and the women she hired come home exhausted from all the work they have to do to keep up. But being a successful business owner has also afforded my daughter some days off.

Yesterday, she and I sat at The Olive Garden, watching Dan, our waiter, scurry around waiting on us and his other customers. “I think that if I didn’t own my own business,” my daughter reminisced, “I’d probably go back to waiting tables.”

“Yes,” I smiled, “because you were so good at it.”

Like the good mother I am, I brought up her first day at Lone Star over a decade ago when she was a waitress. By chance, my parents happened to be visiting us on her first day, so our restaurant of choice for that particular get-together was Lone Star. We asked to be seated in my daughter’s section.

We placed our orders, and as is usually the case, my minuscule 80-pound mother, who could eat a fountain of ice cream and never gain a pound (unlike her daughter {me} who can look at a breadcrumb and instantly look bloated by a hundred pounds of helium being pumped into her body), pre-ordered her dessert – a Brownie Blast. Several hours after we were first seated, my daughter brought a plate to the table. On the just-out-of-scalding-hot-water plate sat a melted clump of ice cream, which my daughter placed directly in front of my mother.

Puzzled, we all looked at the melted blob and looked up at my daughter after my mom asked, “What is this?”

“It’s your Brownie Blast!” my daughter proudly proclaimed. We all stared at the blob. Have you ever seen an entire table of patrons whose heads lunged forward and whose eyebrows furrowed at exactly the same time?

My mom, trying to remember the photo of the Brownie Blast, was stupefied. “But shouldn’t it include a brownie?”

My daughter has giant eyes. You would think they wouldn’t have been able to open any wider, but they did.

She stood there, horrified, unable to move or speak.

“And shouldn’t it be on a cold plate?”

Her eyes opened even wider. She must have felt as if she was in a horror film, as if blood would pour from over her head, as if her head would then spin off her body, because what soon followed was the final blow: “And shouldn’t it come AFTER we eat our dinner?”

Uproarious wicked laughter erupted. Yes, we were laughing at my daughter’s expense. It’s what we do. It’s what all parents and grandparents do when their kids and grandkids make mistakes, when babies struggle to stand up, but fall down. We don’t tell them, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again!” No. We laugh at them.

As the days went by, my daughter became more proficient at her job and actually excelled so much, she could have managed the place. She met her husband there (he was a waiter at the time) and today both are successful in their own businesses and have managed to find time to bless me with three of my grandchildren.

So the moral of the story is – anyone truly can be successful, even those who hand out hot plates of ice cream.

“Balance, peace, and joy are the fruits of a successful life. It starts with recognizing your talents and finding ways to serve others by using them.” ~ Thomas Kinkade

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