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Phrase: Pay your dues
Very few people get a quick and comfortable ride to the top.
If you want to be successful, you will have to pay your dues like everyone else and wait for your number to come up.
To pay your dues means to suffer through difficulties and hardship before becoming successful and having what others have.
It would be wonderful if we could all graduate from high school and begin earning a decent salary immediately.
Unfortunately, life doesn’t work that way.
We must go through the school of hard knocks before Lady Luck decides to smile upon us.
To understand the idiom pay your dues, you first need to know what dues are.
Dues are the payments you make to be a member of an official organization.
So, if you are a lawyer and join the Lawyers Association, you’ll have to pay them a membership fee yearly.
With that in mind, we can look at any measure of success as a sort of organization, association or club.
The only difference is that to join the Association of Success, you have to do the heavy lifting just like everyone else did.
A few weeks ago, I met a young Mexican woman teaching English in Japan as an assistant language teacher.
She said she envied me because I work from home, don’t have to dress formally and never have to fill hours of boredom when students are on vacation, but the teachers are still at work.
I tried to explain to her that I’d paid my dues. I’ve worked in many teaching situations and put up with the conditions she’s going through now.
Knowledge and know-how don’t come cheap. I’m still paying my dues today as I simultaneously learn how to run a business and a website.
We always look at others with envy, but before achieving what they have, we need to pay our dues down here in the trenches.
Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test
This post is understandable by someone with at least a 7th-grade education (age 12).
On the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease test, this post scores 71.
The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.