On July 26, 2024, the Beautiful Stories Facebook page posted a quote meme claiming actor Tom Hardy once said, “I was raised to treat the janitor with the same respect as the CEO.”
The meme displays a photo of Hardy wearing a suit and tie and holding a beverage. In the picture, he appears to be walking to a car in New York City. Hardy extends his hand, seemingly to shake hands with a bearded man – possibly homeless – wearing a hat and a heavy coat.
As of July 31, the Beautiful Stories post displayed 269,000 likes, 2,200 comments and 14,000 shares. In other words, the post proved quite popular with users who saw it in their Facebook feeds.
X user @SoCoolAl also shared the same quote, though without Hardy’s name, on July 24 – just two days before Beautiful Stories published its post. That post on X received over 900 reposts and 1,200 likes.
As with many inspiring quotes, while it’s entirely possible Hardy would say he agreed with the sentiment in the message, I found no evidence he or any other famous person coined the phrase about respecting a janitor more than a CEO.
In this story, I documented all of my research, including the oldest available online post displaying the exact quote.
‘I Was Raised to Treat the Janitor …’
To begin my research, I searched Google for the words, “I was raised to treat the janitor with the same respect as the CEO.” I surrounded the sentence with quotation marks to ensure Google only displayed results for an exact match.
The first result displayed a match for a post on the All About Cinema Facebook page. A page manager posted the same photo on Nov. 29, 2022. The text caption simply read, “‘I was raised to treat the janitor with the same respect as the CEO’ – Tom Hardy.”
The post received 417,000 likes, 4,500 comments and 18,000 shares – an even more impressive count than the recent post from the Beautiful Stories Facebook page.
Earliest Post Displaying the Quote With Hardy’s Name
Further research delved several years into the past.
For example, on Aug. 1, 2021, X user @askaledavis posted, “I was raised to treat the janitor with the same respect as the CEO. #RHOP” The hashtag “#RHOP” apparently referenced the TV show, “The Real Housewives of Potomac.”
On Dec. 3, 2020, Instagram user @onlyclassy posted the photo of Hardy with the quote, ‘I was raised to treat the janitor with the same respect as the CEO.’ – Tom Hardy.” That post displayed over 95,000 likes.
On Reddit, an unknown user whose name displayed as “deleted” posted the quote with Hardy’s name on Feb. 10, 2019. Also, on Nov. 17, 2018, a user on X shared the quote meme showing Hardy with the quote also displayed both in the post’s text caption.
The Origins of the Quote About Respect
The Coffee and Quotes Facebook page posted on April 3, 2017, “I was raised to treat the janitor with the same respect as the CEO.” The post did not mention Hardy’s name.
On the day after Thanksgiving in 2016, a LinkedIn user named Trevor Brookes – whose bio described him as a senior investment analyst – posted an essay beginning as follows:
I was raised to treat the janitor with the same respect as the CEO. My parents impressed upon me at a very early age that it was important to treat others how you want to be treated. If you want to be treated with respect, then you must give respect. Any kindness you send out to the world will make its way back to you. You reap what you sow.
Months before Brookes published his essay, X user Peter Vermeulen (@pvermeul_peter) posted on May 6, 2016, “I was raised to treat the janitor with the same respect as the CEO #leadership #wisewords.” The post featured a meme from the Lessons Learned In Life Facebook page.
The Lessons Learned In Life Facebook page originally posted the same meme on March 15, 2016.
According to a search of X narrowed down to a specific date range, the apparent first available posting of the exact words in the quote occurred on or just before Aug. 20, 2015. According to several posts on the platform – then known as Twitter – the user’s handle was @____cay. As of 2024, the user’s account displayed a status of “suspended.”
People both online and offline have expressed the same sentiment about janitors and CEOs for quite a long time. For example, the Lessons Learned In Life Facebook page posted in 2011, “It is so important to show respect for everyone who works for a living, regardless of their job. From CEO to Janitor, everyone is Important. Smile to make someone’s day.”
Anyone with a good bit of time on their hands will likely find similar quotes published in newspaper archives on Newspapers.com.
The Context of the Hardy Photo
A reverse-image search of the Hardy photo on the TinEye.com reverse-image search website displayed a result for a December 2014 BuzzFeed article. That article showed the photo’s credit as “Michael Stewart/GC Images.”
GettyImages.com hosts nine photos from the same moments shown in the quote meme’s picture featuring Hardy. The caption for the photo appearing in the quote meme reads, “Radioman (L) and actor Tom Hardy seen on the streets of Manhattan on April 22, 2014 in New York City. (Photo by Michael Stewart/GC Images).”
According to TheTimes.com, Craig “Radioman” Castaldo reportedly is a homeless man, not a janitor, who famously wears a radio around his neck. The reporting and Castaldo’s IMDb.com page documented numerous cameos he made in famous films, including for example 1998’s “Godzilla,” 2003’s “Elf” and 2019’s “The Irishman.”
For further reading, I previously reported about a rumor claiming actor Keanu Reeves said, “Be humble and never think you are better than anyone else. We all leave this world with nothing.”