I’ve been building things for nearly my entire life.
Ever since “Santa” brought me a pint-sized tool set and my brother and I built a boat in my parents’ basement, I knew that I wanted to be in construction when I grew up. By the way, in case you’re wondering, the “boat” was so big that it wouldn’t fit out the door—and wouldn’t have floated if our lives depended on it!
But hey, we were 9 and 5 years old at the time, and our dad thought there was a lesson to be learned in the project. I’ll get to more on that later.
When it came to my education, I was an excellent student, participating in accelerated and honors programs until the 11th grade.
In elementary school, I was in a program that included me and four other students. The best part of the program was that every Monday, we were given our lessons for the entire week. We had the whole week to complete the lessons, but I usually had mine finished by the end of the day on Tuesday.
Now, we weren’t allowed to mess around or play hooky the rest of the week. Instead, we could go to the library and learn about the things that interested us—and if we wanted to, we could submit reports on what we learned for extra credit.
Well, I submitted a LOT of reports!
Not so much for the extra credit, but because I liked to learn and write about the things that were interesting to me—and the same holds true today.
Unfortunately, I wouldn’t be given the same opportunity in the later years of my education. Even though I was in honors programs, it was a cookie-cutter curriculum, and in the 9th grade, I began to lose interest and get bored.
That summer, I got my first job as a carpenter’s helper with a friend of mine’s dad, who was a general contractor. I didn’t get to do much carpentry that year—mostly cleaning up and hauling lumber—but I loved the atmosphere, the smell of cut wood, and EVERYTHING that I was exposed to was new to me. So I was definitely looking forward to the next summer!
So, it was on to another school year, more cookie-cutter lessons, and more boredom. That was also the year that I began to cut classes and go across the street to Onota Lake for some daytime fishing, Frisbee, and rock ‘n’ roll with a couple of other “honors” students.
School was becoming more and more boring and less and less important to me. I knew that I wanted to be a builder and couldn’t have cared less what a participle phrase was or how it was used.
By the time I was halfway through my senior year, I had had enough. Our school did have a vocational program, but they said that I would have needed to start the program in my junior year—and I wasn’t allowed in.
So I saw no other choice. I dropped out and got my GED. The funny thing was that I went to take the exam the weekend after I dropped out, and they wouldn’t let me! They said that I had to study for it, and I ended up taking the test one month later. Oh—and I passed the test, getting 98% of the questions right, without studying a single minute. Finally, I could go to work as a carpenter full-time!
I spent the next five years working for a few different contractors, learning the trade. Each contractor had their way of doing things, but there was one in particular—Mark Gardner—who I feel taught me the most important lesson.
He taught me to always visualize the finished product and work backward from that image in order to figure out where to begin.
To this day, I can stand at the edge of an empty field and visualize the driveway leading up to a new home. In my mind, I can travel up the steps, through the front door into the foyer—and from there, my mind’s the limit!
I worked with Mark for two years until he decided to retire as a general contractor and build only custom cabinets part-time in his Norm Abram-caliber workshop.
During the time I spent working with him, not only did I discover that I was actually going to make it in this business—but I was really good at it!
Flash forward ten years.
I found myself in Austin, Texas, where—unlike in the Northeast—builders could work year-round in the more-than-moderate climate.
It was 6:30 a.m. on a Saturday morning, and I was on my way to pick up one of my helpers to head to work. The roads, as usual, were fairly empty. I exited Interstate 35 and was driving on the frontage road in the left lane when a woman in a minivan decided to make a U-turn from the center lane!
The next thing I knew, I was swerving to miss hitting her in the driver’s door—which would have surely killed her, since I was going 55 mph in a double-cab, one-ton pickup truck loaded with equipment and 110 gallons of diesel fuel.
My effort to save her life nearly ended up taking my own.
I just caught the end of her bumper, went over the curb, and then hit a 3’ x 5’ concrete column that holds up the expressway—head-on.
The result was: a broken cheekbone and nose, a broken sternum, a dislocated shoulder, and more importantly, a broken hip socket.
This left me out of work and bedridden for over three months. Since I was self-employed and without insurance, it was totally devastating.
A couple of weeks later, after the swelling had gone down and I had gotten sick of watching daytime shows like Montel, Jerry Springer, and Judge Judy, I had my soon-to-be wife go out and pick me up my first “real” computer.
(I say “real” because I had a Commodore 64 from Radio Shack several years earlier, but didn’t really know how to use it.)
Once I got the computer set up and connected to the internet, I began to surf the web blindly, clicking on links at random. Then one day, I came across a bulletin board (now called forums), and little did I know—that visit would change my life.
I was reading a thread that explained: if you right-click on a web page and choose “View Source” from the menu, you could see the code that makes the page “work.”
WOW!! Now that was cool.
As a “builder,” I found that VERY interesting—and the next thing I knew, I was no longer surfing blindly. Instead, I was exploring the internet looking for websites that intrigued me—not so much for how they looked, but how they functioned.