Keep Your Chin Up When Bad Things Happen

I got my first contractor's license in about 1979 probably I had a whole year and a half experience working for other builders and I moved home from Washington where Kelly was finishing college and uh thought well I'm going to be a builder and I got a license and I started in and I was not qualified for anything any tougher than a deck but gradually I took a couple of projects mostly for friends and family and learned a lot at their expense and then came the first real job Kelly and I were asleep it was the middle of the night and the phone rang and it was the Glide volunteer fire department telling us that Sam and Mickey ball's house that Sam had built about 1950 out of lumber that emailed himself had been struck by lightning and was burning now Sam and Mickey were in their mid 70s they were 10 years older than I am now and it was a shock it was struck at the peak and it burned here's how much Lumber Sam had in that house it burned for an hour and a half before they put it out and it only got down through the top it got down to the second floor floor in the middle he had double sheeted inside and outside of every partition with three-quarter inch ship lap and there were cords of wood that had to be burned before it got down to the main floor well Sam and Mickey were all right and they waited while I at the tender age of what 21 22 maybe tore the top off that story in a half house and built it back it was a learning experience and it was in response to what is termed in Insurance an act of God the thing that I remember most about that job besides my intimidation was how resilient and how how appreciative Sam and Mickey were of what was going on with no self-pity they were not victims they had never lived a day in their life with a victim mentality and it didn't change just because at that late date in fact they were victims of a lightning strike so with the story of salmon Mickey and their lightning strike as the backdrop for what I'm going to talk about next I want you to think about the fact that whatever happens whether it's an act of God or something more human that constitutes really profound bad luck or an impact in a negative way on your life the outcome of that for you is going to depend almost 100 percent on the attitude that you approach the problem with if you resolve from the start that the main goal is to get past this to fix what is broken to mend what needs mending and not to affixed blame you're going to end up in a better place much faster than if you start pointing fingers and playing the pity party most recently the example of this has come across my bowel is of Grant and Nicole Espinosa picture this you've changed careers you've retired actually and you've moved to Sandpoint Idaho to start a whole new chapter in your life and you're optimistic you've been dreaming of building on the site that you found and you've talked to contractors and you've you know you've done the groundwork that you thought you needed to do and you hire somebody and they flake out they take money and disappear now that's a setback but you find another another young Builder and you feel like this is your guy and he digs in and the Lumber's going up and the house is taking shape and the roof is on and you go to Salt Lake on a vacation and while you're there the phone rings and this is what you're confronted with over the phone and you think they're kidding until you get back to Idaho and get a look at what could easily have been a bomb going off right in the middle of your brand new house so what you're looking at right now is an unseasonable what it could be termed freak snowstorm it was a heavy snow and then rain and then freezing and then heavy snow and then rain and then freezing and the upshot is as near as I can calculate it there was almost 36 inches of snow on a 512 pitch roof that didn't have the metal on it yet by the way if my math is anywhere near right three feet of snow on a roof that size weighs almost 200 000 pounds and so it would be no surprise in hindsight in the rear view mirror that that system would fail because the house hadn't received any of the inspections yet it was just going up and a house that is partially built is not a house it's not a system the structure is has no Integrity regardless of what the Builder did or didn't do it's not ready for a load like that until it is completely put together and I might add a tin roof is put on there so at least a couple shovelfuls would have slid off to the ground but in this case it took the direct route to the ground so I've talked to Grant and from the outset from the first time he brought pictures of his project to our shop talk Zoom meeting there was not a trace of self-pity he would just describe what happened and primarily he would drill down on what he could have should have would have done differently to head off whatever disaster he was dealing with whether it was with the first fellow who just flaked out or the second Builder who was right in the middle of uh you know 200 000 pounds of snow coming from the sky before the house was entirely put together but Grant has set himself up to be able to recover from this because of his attitude I'm going to learn from that Grant I'm going to take that as an example that I will not soon forget and as a result of Grant's determination by the way he's got a YouTube channel we've got you check out the notes anchor down Homestead I think something like that he and Nicole are doing the whole deal but because they have taken this approach of forget the blame game solve the problem they're going to get out on the other side of this and be much smarter much more qualified and not have a knot of bitterness right in the middle of their heart that's going to canker the rest of their days Grant and Nicole are adopting a philosophy that was as far as I know exposed and written down for the first time by Marcus Aurelius you've heard me talk about it before and it goes like this never let the future disturb you you will meet it if you have to with the same weapons of reason with which you confront the challenges you face today now that is something we all could live by and as far as I can tell Grant Nicole are living by it I can't talk about natural disasters without talking about flooding because water's everywhere and water is the enemy of buildings and the example that I have to show you now is all the more remarkable to me because Josh bernicke had done all of his due diligence to control the water that would come onto his site and onto his road and be drained away responsibly into the areas where it needed to go in Massachusetts he had dotted every eye crossed every T and yet when the unsustainable event happened and the Culvert and the drainage structure washed out even though it had been carefully engineered and beautifully installed he rolled with it he's spending no time assigning blame and all of the time he needs to fixing the problem and moving forward the unifying principle here is that stuff is going to happen to all of us most often it's nature run amok occasionally it's those around us who are unwise or untrained or unscrupulous but whatever the source of the pain whatever disaster it is that you know comes and knocks on our door the way that we recover quickest is by assigning blame the least and uh letting go everything we can let go and fixing everything we can fix thank you for watching essential Craftsman and keep up the good work [Music]

Channel: Essential Craftsman

Views: 105,791

Keywords: anvil, forge, blacksmith, forging, craftsman, mentor, trades, tradesman, career, smith, carpetner, builder, wisdom, workbench, fabricate, tools, tool, tips, trick, hacks, protip, house fires, flooding, snow damage, framing fails, weather accidents, property flooding

Id: OfQTO-U2034

Length: 8min 12sec (492 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 12 2023