Do you ever feel like life is happening around you, and you’re just drifting through it? Like you should be doing something—something more, something better—but you’re not sure what?

My name is Andrew, and I’ve been there. Like so many in America, I found myself aimless, uncertain, and stuck in the cycle of service industry jobs. Until one day I found the courage to write post on simple thing online. “I’m still trying to answer the question of whether or not I can be happy working in a restaurant.”

Join me on this journey as I explore what it all means—how we got here, what we can do about it, and how to turn struggle into progress with hard work and clear goals.

This episode is just the beginning. 

Today I be musing on St. John’s College, friendship, booze, and a whole lot more. See you on the way!

Books Mentioned by me:

The Miracle Morning: The Not-So-Obvious Secret Guaranteed to Transform Your Life (Before 8AM) by Hal Elrod.

The Millionaire Fastlane by MJ DeMarco.

If this is the kind of content you love, please like, subscribe, and share with someone this could be of interest to.

You can find my writing at my blog if you want to find some of my crazier thoughts.

This is Andrew and welcome to Serves You Right.

Alright, welcome to podcast number one. My name is Andrew Roy and yeah, here we go. I’m thinking about calling this episode Background Fluff, Surviving on Booze and 2.13 an hour. So we’ll see.

So to give you some of my background, as a child in Texas, I was a very enthusiastic and inspired child. I had some difficulty learning how to read. When I eventually cracked it, I became a voracious reader. I was extremely into playing chess. I will date myself a little bit.

When I was 10 years old in the year 2000, I was actually playing a game of chess when the millennium turned over.

A little bit more about me. I was raised extremely religious, Southern Baptist. Didn’t stick, as you’ll find out later.

In the middle of nowhere, Texas, where I grew up, I met a really good friend named Dafydd, a Welsh name. He was a different guy, kind of like how I was different. We became friends and it was good to have another source of human contact, someone who was interested in learning beyond just the back roads, middle nowhere, Texas that we were living in.

A little bit about my psyche and my spirit. I’ve begun to think that my problem, and you’ll get to see and I’ll explain some of the problems I had in my life as we go throughout this podcast, I believe part of my problem was that I was lacking something others had.

I had a hole inside myself. I had this obsession, this dream that I wanted to be someone intellectual. I wanted to understand things. I wanted to grow, change. I wanted to do interesting things. I couldn’t even put it in words. I don’t know if it was something I caught from reading all the time, but I was drawn to this idea of an intellectual, of a thinker.

In all the professions that I looked at, I thought perhaps I’d be a lawyer. I didn’t really think beyond that, maybe a teacher, but I didn’t quite know. I got a pamphlet in the mail for a school called St. John’s College in Santa Fe. If all the great books program, I thought, oh, this is perfect for me. Four years of reading the classics of Western literature, so I signed up, went, and there you go. Yeah, so I went there. I threw myself in. I got obsessed with working with reading. I really had this belief that I could understand things. I could figure it out.

I was working through the whole time as well at a little bar called Secreto in the Hotel St. Francis. It was a fresh fruit bar. There’s a lot of stories there. Like any good college student, I was drinking a fair amount. Drinking also will be a prominent figure in these podcasts and the future. And yeah, I was trying to figure out who I was. I was growing up. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. Working in the restaurant industry was an easy path. The money’s easy. There are no qualifications except for the higher positions.

I kept drinking and drinking and something that I didn’t even realize until 10 years later I was beginning to feel and experience anger. I did not state my anger. I did not investigate it. And so I would not have even called it at the time.

I was frustrated with my life and how it was going. I had more sensitivity than I realized or could admit to. I mean, you’re from the middle of nowhere, Texas. You don’t see a lot of men state that they feel uncomfortable, that they hoped for more, that they haven’t explored their emotional sense, blah, blah, blah.

So I was numbing out my sensitive and emotional nature with booze and it was working. Can’t work forever though. Eventually I was drinking to numb the shame of having not accomplished as much as I would have liked because I was drinking. And I was falling down a rabbit hole that a lot of addicts and people problems are very familiar with.

I don’t know if I was an addict. It’s something that I haven’t answered. I don’t think that the issue was ever booze. I think if I never had a drink I would have found a way to repress and suppress the parts of me I didn’t want to deal with with something else.

I know there are always tons of options. There are people that get addicted to work, food, online porn, actual hard drugs. So I would have found probably something to suppress these emotional thoughts and feelings that were bubbling up inside me. And yeah, that brings us to the part where I’m out of college and I’m working most weeks and I’m working barely three or four days a week. I don’t really have money. I’m falling behind on my student loan repayments. I don’t really have a lot of self-control or autonomy and I wasn’t very happy.

That’s one way that I’ve come to understand my back story. There is another tale I think equally as valid. I, yes, joined the restaurant industry because the money was good. Not great but good. It was easy. I had within me some spark that was not a full flame but just a little ember.

Back when I was probably 17 or 18, my brother’s wife said something about how wine was infinitely interesting because it was so complex. That stuck with me for some reason. And so when I was 21, 22, 23, I was reading about and studying wine. Not in a really systematic way. Not in a really intelligent way even. I was investigating with enough seriousness that I began to start passing Court of Master Somms certifications. I began to get a reputation as someone in the food service industry who actually knew what they were talking about.

Actually won some bartending competitions. So there is a version of the story where maybe I would have found my way out and maybe this was just the road that I had to take. And maybe I was always going to succeed in getting out, getting my self-autonomy back, getting the control of my life back.

I just had to take the time and really think through it. I don’t know if that’s true. There are probably actually other versions and other ways of thinking through this.

But yeah. So this is what this podcast is going to be about. All of that was about 10, 12 years ago. I am now 34. I live in Omaha, Nebraska. And I am in a much better place.

I’m a lot happier. And I’m on the journey to figure out if I can live an incredible and fulfilling life and be happy and stay in the restaurant industry and possibly help other people do it.

I; in all honesty, got lucky in a couple of key moments. I got a couple of really life-changing books’ advice.

And I was stubborn enough to start and stick to a couple of things that have really changed everything for me. So I will be talking about some of that too. I will of course go back through. There are tons of things that weigh heavy on my mind, tons of things that I am happy to admit to and investigate and hopefully help others who might struggle with them.

So some of the things that I know I could have done better, probably from the age of 19 to 29: I didn’t really take care of myself.

I drank too much consistently.

I didn’t really eat right.

I lived on hamburgers and chicken strips.

I treated my mental and spiritual life like we were dumping grounds. I didn’t take it seriously at all. I think kind of like most people. I didn’t guard my sleep. Ah, now that’s the nicest way of saying it. I just treated sleep like it was an afterthought.

But there are also good things and things that I think might help those who are in similar situations who are hoping to improve their lives. Starting to study wine was probably the best thing I’ve ever done.

Finding one small thing, even if it isn’t that glamorous that I was good at, like bartending, and really sticking with that, that changed everything.

Um, yeah. So there was this innate love for this difficulty complexity. I don’t think if I had that, I don’t think I would have survived. I think I would have ended up another statistic of someone overweight, unhappy, uh, or possibly cirrhosis of the liver. You know, there’s a lot of different endings to the story that I could have had.

But that love of difficulty, that love of complexity, there was that something inside me that desired to do more, to be more, and to admit that to myself. And that saved me.

You know, and I buried that dream and that desire with booze and easy quick money and desire for an easy life.

And it took until I was about 30, 31. And I read a book about meditation and actually sat down and stuck with it enough to start thinking about my life that I got out of it. But yeah.

So it’s going to be a wild ride. And to be honest, I kind of stumbled ass backward into a relationship that ended up in a marriage. And that worked.

Don’t get me wrong, we’re different people and we don’t see eye to eye on everything we fought before. There have been conflict and misunderstandings. I might be shocking to everyone there, but she is great for me.

And I do think I’m great for her.

I think it works and it shows. I will at some point talk about two of the books that I read that really changed my life. One that I kind of referenced earlier, Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod. I think it’s Hal Elrod. I’ll have to look that up. That’ll be in the show notes. So that one actually got me to start meditating. I didn’t take any of his other advice. I did start waking up early meditating and planning my day.

And that changed everything.

Millionaire Fastlane, funny enough, was the other one by MJ DeMarco. Just convincing me that there were other options that I did not have to live the traditional life. Even if things don’t work out, I can try and make my own way.

So yeah, I read those books and I started paying attention. I started meditating. I started asking, is there more? I started wondering and thinking, can I be happy? That’s not really the exact right question, but it’s close to that. Can I be happy? Can I be fulfilled?

Fast forward about a year. And I, by luck, heard Tony Robbins say something to the effect of, “I made a deal with myself that for nine months I would exercise every day and then I decided whether or not I want to keep doing it or quit forever.” So I tried that.

I signed up for a marathon and I had not really ever run more than a mile. And it was about a year out. I trained for the year and I completed it.

I started looking at the things inside myself, what some people call the shadow, the good and the bad. I still am doing that and you’ll get to see me on that journey.

I managed to get a new job and a better job still in the food industry just in management. We will probably talk about that a lot.

That’s where I am now. Where am I going now?

So my goals, I want to help people that are like me, but 10 years ago, I don’t want people to suffer the way I suffered.

I think that I could have learned all the things I learned in a year. Tops.

Yeah, the lessons stuck real well because when you experience struggle and frustration for a decade, you remember. But I don’t think you need that. I don’t think I needed to spend all that time choking on my anger and regret. I want to see that other people do not do that.

My goal eventually is to have a community of people that work in the service industry that I can help take ownership and control their lives. I believe that you can live a deep and fulfilling life working in a restaurant.

I believe that working in a restaurant is not condemning yourself to over-indulgence to servitude to low income. I don’t think you have to be stuck. So that’s what I’m thinking.

Well, that’s a doozy for episode one. My name is Andrew and thanks for listening. If you like this sort of thing and you want to see where it goes, like, subscribe, and share. I appreciate it. Thank you.