What sets apart you from the people who want what you have, is your ability to work hard and work smart. There isn’t a single self-made man out there who hasn’t pulled a series of all-nighters and made countless sacrifices while others slacked off so he could make it to where he is today. Everyone likes hearing these success stories of famous and powerful people, Elon Musk for example, but he didn’t happen overnight.

Hard work pays off, maybe it doesn’t always pay off fast, but in an instant oatmeal society, that hard work is worth more than the microwavable efforts of a rushed and botched job. With everyone going for the gravy but neglecting the biscuits, how you work can make the biggest difference in the world. My family didn’t have everything growing up, but my parents were very hard workers. We started working from a young age; I want to say about 9 years old.

So often we can’t find the effort or humility to look a person in the eye and apologize to them. Whether we wronged them or made a mistake, it takes more humility to than many people have to admit that. If they beat you up for it, so be it, but you did what you needed to do in apologizing to them.

Just because you don’t have everything in the world doesn’t mean you have to dress like you have nothing. There’s little excuse for being disheveled. Taking that extra time to shine your shoes and put on clean clothes can make such a huge difference. You may not feel 100%, but if you put in that extra percent into looking fresh and clean, it’ll lift your spirits and elevate you beyond your internal recessions.

One of the few things in life any human being will ever have control of is their attitude, and patience is a huge part of that. Many a good man has entered a cycle of anxiety that stems from stress and impatience with elements that remain outside of their control. I’m sure many people have also heard the phrase that “haste makes waste.” This phrase becomes a pretty viable mentality to apply to any occupation in life.  If you rush through things, end up doing a sloppy job on it, that’s more time you’ll have to spend going back to fix it or do it right, better to measure twice and cut once than to waste the energy and material.

It seems anywhere you turn these days someone is complaining about “those darn millennials.” I’m getting tired of hearing about it just because regardless of what anyone says, they’re the wave of the future. They’re the largest buying block since the baby boomers (1945-1965). In the span of thirty-five years these kids are seeing so much more and exposed to such a radically different world than the baby-boomers knew. With technology being at the epicenter of their lives, connecting them to anywhere on the globe, comparing the differences in the generation’s childhoods is like comparing apples to oranges.

I was always told growing up that there are three kinds of people: wolves, sheep, and sheepdogs. The monikers should seem fairly obvious, but I’ll explain: your average human being is a sheep. The sheep being inattentive, oblivious, and just following the crowd is prey to the wolf--who wants the sheep or what the sheep can offer. The sheepdogs are the ones who watch out for the wolves, always wary. You can’t be a sheepdog if you’re not paying attention to the world around you. Pay attention when someone opens a door in a convenience store. Pay attention to your finances, your checking account and your cash flow. There’s no excuse for ignorance or obliviousness. You overdraft at a three dollar coffee and ask yourself what happened, well, you weren’t paying attention.

It wasn’t tithing, at that point we began giving what we believed we could spare beyond what it would take to keep the business and ourselves afloat. It wasn’t too long after when we had a meeting with BB&T, our bank at the time. I had great financials, a business plan, so I went in and met with them—they said they’d get back to me in a few days. Their eventual response—“Well Larry, we love your business, it’s doing well, but we can’t loan you any money because your cash flow is so poor.”

My wife has always said I am a very passionate person, the most passionate person she has ever known. She isn’t talking about the thing you may be thinking of, but if you’ve ever seen me eat, you can tell I am very passionate about that. I absolutely love food. I don’t have a real wide pallet, but what I like, I like. This can sometimes have a negative impact on my waistline and what have you, but the takeaway here is that when I focus in on something, I hone in with a passion most humans will never know.

As we explained earlier, with waves water appears to move forward, in reality little water is going anywhere. The thing about life is, we may think we’re going somewhere, we may think we’re going somewhere fast, but so often that is just spent energy. In the open ocean, friction is generated which becomes energy. It’s interesting how that fact is so germane to our life philosophies. This process is called transitions, something we in our own lives are familiar with.

I was taught this concept years ago, back at Stripling Blake some time in the 80’s. It was introduced to me as a management protocol, suggesting we invest in other people’s EBA’s (emotional bank accounts) by doing nice things, treating them positively, doing what we can to build relationships and morale. Another part of this touched on the subject of making withdrawals, when you had to request something of someone or you needed something from them. I began to apply this process, this concept of an emotional bank account to my life. I began to carefully invest in the people around me, most especially my wife.

I see that with business that loyalty isn’t a guarantee. You can work your nose to the grindstone and you’ll be dropped if you’re just a margin off. Pick up the phone and say, “hey man what’re you doing? I’ve been loyal to you and you’re taking advantage of me.” Take another look and those prices may have changed. I struggle with this because loyalty is deep and complex--it’s one facet of character that people don’t truly appreciate. If someone has demonstrated consistent loyalty to you and you take advantage of them, you’re not being loyal, you’re breaking a trust.

People only seem to remember that last order.  Maybe it’s because people can send an email or leave a nasty voicemail and it’s out of the way, dealt with. Years ago, things were different; you had to look a man in the eye and tell him why you weren’t going to get this next order. It’s the kind of situation that works both ways, in establishing that relationship between provider and customers. Life has become more about the dollar than about the quality for some companies; some people want the first class experience at coach rates. The problem with that is how unrealistic those expectations are.

As we sit and wrestle with ourselves, we have to reflect on what is crucial. So much of our lives get lost in a lack of perspective. We could have a great family, we could have a hard-earned job, but nothing takes away that sense of accomplishment and achievement faster than the cold, creeping grasp of past mistakes. There’s so much to be thankful for, even in the smallest of things.

Let’s make this personal, in a universe so great and vast, you’re going to be the only you that has and will ever exist. To draw even greater perspective, if we take the average of 100,000,000,000 stars per galaxy and the average of 6 planets per solar system, that equals roughly 6,000,000,000,000 planets per solar system, and I won’t bore you with the moons. The fact that your collection of carbon and other elements exists, consciously here on this earth is incredible. Just think about that in the overall scheme of that. It’s so hard for our minds to wrap around that.

There are plenty of times when I don’t care, and then there are times when I do. I begin overthinking things, begin to initiate that process and I realize that it’s my perception of what others think of me that is weighing so heavily. It’s not even known quantities of deprecation from my peers or strangers that cause this self-doubt; it’s worrying what others MAY think. I have to remind myself that I can’t know what they are thinking, and I can’t let myself get engaged with this perpetual circle of anxiety.

Look around at all this stuff, if someone doesn’t care; it shows a lack of engagement with their struggles or their peers. Where are their thoughts or ambitions? Should we care more? Rather than a brusque or discourteous dismissal, imagine if we took the time to pay attention to what’s going on around us and engage with our peers or strangers. Imagine what we might learn or experience.

I came up the stairs one day and see this girl, Kay, she was crying. I asked her what was wrong and she says, “They’re laying everyone off.” I didn’t have any real idea of what she meant. So I start walking through this sea of cubicles, and in a plant of about 125 people—it’s a good-sized lumberyard—that makes for a lot of cubicles. Being the low man on the totem poll, I had my space all the way in the back.

I used to run all the time; I’ve recently started getting back into it. I’d try to beat the younger guy; I’d try to beat the older guy. But you always know you pushed yourself when you got that almost sick feeling of your endorphins dumping into your gut. I’d try to do a hundred more of one activity, I’d try to do a minute faster at this distance—there was always something worth striving to achieve. You didn’t always make it, sometimes you’d go a few days and maybe you made it in ten minutes on a Monday but you were coming in at eleven and twelve on a Tuesday and Thursday. Well, you have to look at it compared to where you were—at thirteen or fourteen minutes the previous week. Life is a lot like that, it has its ups and downs and you can’t always control when they happen.

When I sold this floor truss machine, I made 25,000 dollars, couple years later I would’ve been lucky to pass it off for $5,000. By this time I’ve moved all of my operations to my plant in Warsaw. (By March of 2009 housing starts to plummet to less than 500,000 annually) Then suddenly two years pass and I look like the smartest guy in the room as everything collapses. The market is no longer crushing it and things are getting bleak. No one could have predicted that things would have gone the way that they did and lasted so long.