Ramtin Naimi

But then half a summer and half a school year, I actually opted to go to the stock room because I was able to get more work done in the stock room because you're on the floor all day long.

That's when I got an appreciation for hard labor, because as I mentioned, West Elm was one of those stores that stocks everything.

They had to deal with UPS.

Every morning, UPS would pull up a truck and the stock guys would unload it and put it in there.

And that's just how they made the inventory.

And I remember this is probably like the single hardest day of physical work I had in my life where our manager said, tomorrow we have four trucks.

so we staffed six stock guys to unload these four trucks it's going to take half the day and we're going to call it a day and the guys at ups they didn't actually unload the deal was just to drop the trucks off and then they would pick it up when they were empty and everybody showed up that next day and everybody called in sick except for me and i had to single-handedly unload four ups trucks worth of furniture

And I started at 7.30 in the morning, and I think I was there until 7.30 at night.

For whatever reason, I ended the day very proud of myself.

I don't know if I should have, but I really appreciated what hard work was.

While I do think there's a concept of working hard and smart, I do think you have to do both.

Hard work is just something that was always instilled in me in early age, and I think

Founders work hard.

I think you have to build hard to build anything of value or anything of success.

And there are certain people who are willing to work that hard and certain people who aren't.

I would argue that the five people who called in sick that day aren't willing to work that hard and they probably haven't really gone much further in life than that West Elm Stockroom.

But then my side hustle business, which is where I actually made most of my money in high school, was I grew up in Marin County, which is a relatively affluent neighborhood.

There are some people that are a lot more affluent than others.

There were certain girls whose parents would throw them very extravagant sweet 16s.

And there were other girls whose parents wouldn't.