Читать книгу Raising Able - Susan Tordella - Страница 22

Kevin Sorbo links his success to the work ethic cultivated while growing up in Mound, Minn. Born in 1962 the fourth of five children, he learned early on about teamwork in the family’s modest home.

“One brother would be washing the dishes, another would dry the dishes, another put them away in an assembly line formula,” Sorbo said. Other chores included vacuuming, shoveling snow (“It’s long winter in Minnesota,” he said) and mowing the lawn. “Yard work is something I enjoy doing anyway. It’s kind of a Zen moment,” Sorbo said.

He appreciates the benefits of home jobs. “Family chores are a wonderful way to prepare for what’s going to happen out in the real world. You learn how to be part of a cohesive team. If you learn how to get along with your brothers and sisters, you can learn to get along with anybody,” he said.

Sorbo had a paper route. “From 8 years old until about age 16, I got up at 4:30 a.m. and delivered seventy-five papers on a bike in 20-degrees below in the winter. I put my money away and learned responsibility very early. I bought my own car with the money – a 1967 powder blue Mustang.”

That work ethic has stayed with him. As an actor who constantly sells himself for the next role, he said, “I can’t give up when things don’t go my way. You’ve got to use every time you get rejected as a learning experience, otherwise you go crazy.”

A junior high school biology teacher, his father used encouragement to motivate his family. “My father held the family together with soft thunder,” Sorbo said. The children received a monthly allowance of 50 cents.

His parents expected the children to volunteer to regularly, without being asked to help, to do things like carry in groceries from the car.

Sorbo is instilling the same work ethic with his children, 7, 4, and 3 years old. “It’s very important these guys learn responsibility,” he said. The children put their dishes in the sink after a meal, take out the trash, help set the table, clean up their rooms and pick up their toys.

Sorbo has created a family environment in which his children want to pitch in without being reminded.

“I came home one afternoon and found my 7 year old son raking leaves by himself. He said, ‘Dad, I’m just helping out without being asked.’”

Kevin Sorbo rose to stardom in the hit TV series, “Hercules the Legendary Journeys,” and has been cast in a score of TV and movie roles since then.