When I was 14 years old, growing up in rural Hobe Sound, Florida, I remember my dad asking me, “Hey, Lin, do you want a car when you’re 16?” Of course I responded with an excited “yeah!” I imagined pulling up to school in a bright red Jetta (the “It” car for the cool girls back then, and I was anything but a cool girl), impressing all my classmates as I sped off to Dairy Queen for a Blizzard after the bell rang. But Dad didn’t let me indulge in my fantasy world for long. He looked me dead in the eye and replied, “Okay, great. How are you going to pay for it?” So I went out the next day and got a job as a bagger at our local Winn-Dixie grocery store. I haven’t stopped working since then. Not a day, not a month, not a year have I taken off from work. (Fine, maybe a day here and there. The spa at the Standard Miami is great.)
One of the biggest, and probably most important, values my dad and stepmom instilled in me was to be a hard worker and earn everything you get. My dad told me, “Nothing will ever be given to you for free, and if it is, you need to question it.” Being ambitious became my entire life’s focus from that moment. I spent my childhood with my head buried in books. In high school, I was a nerd in the International Baccalaureate program and a tomboy on the soccer field. After Winn-Dixie, I started as a hostess and to-go girl at Outback Steakhouse, doing my homework in the back while the guests dug into their Bloomin’ Onions. It paid off with a full ride to the University of Florida (go Gators), but it wasn’t just about the money. What I took from my parents is the ambition and drive to provide for myself and my family, manage a household, and maintain a self-confidence that is difficult for almost anyone to penetrate. The thing about me is that I came out of the womb a Leo and an Alpha. When I do something, I don’t know how to do it at anything less than 150 percent.
