Saturday 20 June 2015

Why Hello Mr. Portillo.

So life has a funny way of surprising you. The day seems like an ordinary day and then something happens that will never leave your memories.

Today was one of those days. I was eating lunch with a friend at a new Portillo's restaurant. It is a Chicago based restaurant that specializes in hot dogs, burgers, chicken. (They started out of a trailer and made dogs.) Anyway. Since it is new there are so many people there, or actually I hear they are always crazy busy, but it is a well oiled machine for sure. But also there was nowhere for us to sit, so we had to sit at the bar kind of thing, for usually people that are eating alone. Well there was one seat left by us. This older gentlemen comes and sits by us. He is wearing a maroon button up and dress pants.He comes over with a bottle of water, cottage cheese and papaya. My friend and I look at each other with the face of, seriously coming in here with your own food. But we just thought he is an older gentlemen, let him be. Little did we know who just sat by us.

Well he then dribbles some of his cottage cheese onto his hand and leans over to us and says, "I swear when I eat I become a 4 year old." We kindly give him some napkins and we began talking. He introduces himself as Dick Portillo (the founder), but we at first are like really? But then he starts to give stories that only he could know. We end up chatting with him for like a half an hour. He is so down to earth and easy to talk to. We chatted about our jobs, and he mentioned that he goes to Florida a lot. We asked how many people work here at any given point and he said 72, can you imagine, that is crazy.

One thing that really stuck out to me was when he talked about the hard years, in that trailer. He said that there were three years that were really hard and scary. Where he was wondering what he got himself into. He talked about fear, the fight or flight response. He was saying that fear does something to your mind. Either you stay and continue on, hoping it will get better, or you quit. Well he stayed and fought and look at him now.

It just goes to show you that everyone who starts something where there is some fear involved has to make a choice everyday when things are hard, keep going or quit. If you choose to keep going you have no idea what could be around the next corner. It had an impact on me. Because I feel as though right now, with Arbonne, I am going through a rough time. It has not been as easy as it was in the beginning and I am having to choose everyday, to either keep going or quit. Well I choose to keep going, because you never know what could happen.

It was such a surreal experience. We were like giddy school girls when he left. And then he came back with cookies. We got a photo with him and then others came over and were asking for photos.


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