This is just a personal post. It’s not about the Compound, or anything related, but since Amy and I decided to build the new site the goal is to have all the videos, blogs, articles, how-to materials and basically everything here in one place. So, I’m writing it here.
Today is one of those days where I was finally able to pull my head out of my ass and see the world the way it really is, not the way it’s been in my mind these past three weeks or so. Oh, so NOW you’re interested huh? Well, read on. Maybe you’ll find it helpful.
I realized about 15 minutes ago that its mild depression. The problem with depression is that you can rarely see it when you’re in the middle of it. It can lull your senses. It’s like that gentle rocking motion in the back seat of the car when you’re on a long trip. Time just rolls by without your conscious acklowledgement of it. Your head lolls against the window and you drift in and out of awareness. You drove by hundreds of interesting things. You “saw” none of them.
That’s the kind of depression I tend to suffer from. Compared to others it’s fairly mild, so I’m blessed in that regard, but its effect is the same. The problem is its so subtle others that know you don’t recognize it. You don’t recognize it. If you’re not careful you’ll fall asleep and you don’t wake up until the moment the brakes screech and you’re heading straight for a brick wall you can’t avoid.
As has happened more that once in my life, I owe this particular realization to my friend Bill Stovall. It wasn’t an active thing he did, but he deserves the credit nonetheless.
I’m one of six people in the world Bill chose to share his new book “The Ledger Never Lies” with. I’ve known Bill for 25 years now and he respects my input as someone to give feedback, so it’s an honor for me to be able to be part of the process with him.
Out of respect for Bill, his hard work, and his upcoming book, I’m not going to go into the “ah ha! moment” but while sitting here proofreading his book this morning it just clicked in my mind. The gears were starting to rust in place. Small debris was clogging my mind’s mental processes. Some days the desires, the determination, the “chutzpah” would just try to grind just a bit and then hit some tension and just seize back up again and freeze. That’s what my brain has been like this past month. I just didn’t know it until this morning. So thanks Bill for being my mental WD-40 this morning. Or maybe that should be BS-40?
There’s the code name for your series when you decide to write more than one! lol.
Anyway, Bill has a speaking style, a diction, and a delivery that just clicks with people. Reading his words this morning, and considering I’ve known him as a friend for 25 years, I can hear how he says it when I read the words from the page. They sound like Bill in my head when I’m reading. The way he stops on a certain part of a sentence. Its usually a statement that’s really a question. He’s got this thing where he’ll cock one eyebrow, and his head kind of bobs a bit… like he’s waiting for you to make the connection he’s already made. It’s infuriating if you’re trying to argue with him. Don’t ever do that. It’s a miserable experience you won’t ever win.
But today, as I was sitting here in ratty “I just woke up” clothes I remembered I needed to finish proofreading his book. After another chapter or two, my moment of clarity happened and I just leaned back in my chair and thought “Well, shit.”
And then I got up to take a shower.
I remember something Bill taught me when I worked for him at Electrolux over twenty years ago.
“When you look good, you feel good.”
I’ve always found that to be true once it was explained to me. If you’re having one of those days where nothing wants to work, you have no motivation, you don’t want to do any of the things you know you need to do, go take a shower and put on some better clothes. Style your hair. Put on a collared shirt (or whatever your equivalent is). Look at yourself in the mirror for a moment when you’re done. See that person? Yeah, that’s a much better put-together person. That’s a person that can get things done. Now I’m that guy today.
I just need to wake up and be that guy again tomorrow. That’s the challenge.
Learning to analyze yourself
Throughout my life I’ve always considered myself a fairly self-aware person. Maybe I’d go so far as to say empathic, but that word gets overused and rarely in the correct manner, so I tend not to use it. But regardless of the word, the “thing” is still there. I’ve always been good at reading people. I didn’t go to school for it. I didn’t choose to study it. I just have a gift of it and I consider it a great blessing.
That’s partly why I think I make friends faster than other people. Now that I’ve said that, I don’t think I’ve ever put those two thoughts together before, but it really DOES make perfect sense. I can meet someone one time, spend 30 minutes with them, and the next thing you know I’m calling them to take a motorcycle ride, or come over for a drink, or meeting for lunch to hang out. Most people don’t do that from my experience.
Its a combination of body language, confidence, and “how” they say what they’re saying. I just have a great bullshit detector. So when I meet someone I can usually get a reading on them within 5 minutes and know if this is a person I want to do business with, someone I can trust to do work without a down-payment, someone I want to hire, someone that’s going to look out for me as much as I’d look out for them, or someone I’d just want to hang out with and learn from, or just spend time chatting over coffee.
It’s always played out well in my relationships as well. I can read my wife like a book most of the time. I’ll know she’s depressed before she does. I can tell when she’s hungry, or hangry, and know when to get the hell out of the way if it’s the latter. I can tell when she’s approaching a breaking point mentally or emotionally most of the time. It’s not foolproof, trust me, but it works I’d say about 80% of the time.
It’s the same with other friends. My grandfather would call it reading what’s behind their eyes, not what’s coming out of their mouth. I don’t know if it’s a learned skill or just a thing I’ve got, but it’s a tool I’ve used most of my life on other people without conscious thought.
Its funny how I can be so accurate with other people’s emotions yet be blind as hell to my own though huh?
Learning to analyze myself was something I didn’t start to take seriously until my late 30s. As we get older our minds just get more complex. Experiences we have that younger people don’t build repetitious patterns we learn to recognize in life and we can see them from the viewpoint of past experience and better predict how something will go. It’s why older business people tend to make better business decisions than young entrepreneurs. They’ve got the experience the younger ones don’t. They possess the empirical evidence from experiences that were succesful, as well as the ones that weren’t successful, and they can apply that law of averages to the idea before them and know whether it’s a good idea or not better than a young person can that hasn’t done it twenty times over the years.
The words that describe how my brain works didn’t exist when I was younger. And even if they did, the testing that reveals it didn’t exist.
There’s no doubt in my mind that I’m a bit neurodivergent. I’m not going to go into the deep details of neurodivergence. You can look it up if you’re curious, but the short version is my brain works differently that most “normal” people. My brain is divergent from the norm. Hence, neurodivergent.
It can manifest a hundred ways and it can be incredibly small ways or it can be large obvious ones that anyone can recognize. Autism and it’s spectrum is a good example. Autism is ONE type of neurodivergence.
I think that if I were tested for all the possible ways autism could be determined, I would probably ping in a few minor areas, but not many and not in a way that’s obvious to anyone else. It’s just how my brain works. I’m really good with spatial math, but I need visuals. I can walk into a building and start calculating cabling needs, square footage, wall heights, door spacings, all kinds of things that pertain to my job or to my love of carpentry, but I have to SEE the thing to do that. I can’t do that with blueprints. And I do this kind of thing quietly in my mind all the time. I know, for example, that there are 800 screws exactly in the headers and footers of my walls at the new shop. I know there are 20 ladder studs. I know the way trusses are built and walls are built, and to what codes, and the siding height – all of which tell me the exact interior dimensions of my roof square footage. I did that in my head yesterday with a few glances in about 1 minute because I needed to calculate the interior requirements for insulation. Keep in mind I’m the same guy that will spend 4 hours trying to fix a QuickBooks glitch that someone else could maybe fix in 5 minutes. My mind just works differently.
And look, another rabbit hole…
This article has literally NO pre-defined goal in its writing, so you’re just along for the ride ok? We’ll see where we end up at the end.
In terms of what kind of neurodivergence I have, there are a few I’m aware of. I have slight OCD tendencies, yet my office can be messy as hell for months on end. But.. that drawer of screwdriver bits? They’re completely organized and ordered by size. I know exactly how many USB-C cables I have, yet I have no idea where I left my belt when I took it off last night. (My wife informed me – it was in the laundry room. Apparently I took my clothes off there last night. I have absolutely no memory of doing that or even being in that room, but apparently I was.)
The OCD is great for what I do for a living. My cabling is always straight. It’s not “kinda” straight. It’s freakin straight. My patch panel layouts are picture-perfect. My labelling schemes are well thought-out and in two decades of doing this I’ve had to correct them maybe twice in all the years. I can “see” things down the road that affect my work that other trades just don’t think about and resolve them even before I get started working… as long as I can SEE the place first. General contractors that I work with for the first time hate me because I tear apart their architect’s horrible designs in a matter of minutes. But, in the end, I’m right about 105% of the time and I saved them money. It’s why in over two decades we’re the only company I know of anywhere that’s never had a punch list. (for those that aren’t aware, a punch list is the list the contractor gives you when you say your work is done and they have someone that goes around looking for your mistakes to have you come back and fix them. That’s literally never happened to us, ever.)
The OCD can also be a big negative thing in life as well. People that are OCD are very habit forming. Smoking was a habit. Drinking coffee is a habit. Vaping is a habit. The way I setup the phone chargers and spare cables in my vehicles is a habit. It’s a GOOD habit, but it’s still a habit. You think I’m kidding? My freakin’ tractors have phone chargers and phone cradles installed and I was really stuck the other day deciding whether I wanted to put one in the side-by-side or not.
I’m aware that I’m VERY prone to forming habits. My morning routine is locked in at home. It’s something I’ve been wanting to change for years but I’m mostly unable because by the time I realize it, I’m already mid-process.
I get up, stumble to the kitchen with no clothes on. I set the coffee cup in the coffee maker the night before so it’s there and ready for me because in my mind I don’t want to “waste time” looking for it. I have to let the dogs out to pee every morning if I’m the first one up, but instead of letting them out first, I step over to the coffee bot, hit the power button, press the coffee button, press the 10 oz button, and press Start – all BEFORE I take the three steps to open the door and usher the three dogs outside. Why do I do that? Because it means the 20 seconds I spend getting all three dogs outside is 20 seconds faster my coffee cup will be ready for me. I’m saving time. That’s literally my mental motivation. Let’s not waste time, no sir!
Then I proceed to sit at my computer, scroll Facebook, scroll the news, and read emails for an hour….
Yeah, so why the mental priority on saving those 20 seconds making the coffee? No reason except it’s how my mind works. It’s my OCD doing it’s thing.
Now that I’m at the computer, my ADHD kicks in. If you really want to mess with a guy with ADHD, give him almost unlimited computer processing power and triple monitors…
I want to to be at the Compound tomorrow morning at 7 AM. I get up at 6, drink coffee, do the dog thing, and… shit… it’s 8:30 before I even go get a shower. Damn it!
Why? Because my ADHD had me scrolling through Facebook videos when I just intended to see what the first few feeds were. Then I clicked on an ad about carpentry. Then I’m off on another website learning why I just HAVE to have this new router table setup. Now I’m thinking about woodworking. I wonder what kind of wood I’d need for so and so. Do I have that at the Compound? I bet I do! I mean I could build a kiln to dry my own pine tree lumber. I wonder how hard it is to built a chainsaw mill. I might need to sharpen my chainsaws. Yeah, they definitely need to be sharpened, ya know, just in case. I need to get on the tractor and run through the woods and see if I can find a…..and damn… my whole morning plan is shot to hell.
Let’s not forget I had a plan to be at the Compound at 7 AM. I’ll be lucky to get there by 10:00.
Fighting Drift
So now you know a little of how my brain works. It’s a mess in there. Be warned. It can also be a deviant dark ass place, but we’re not putting all THAT out here on the internet.
So I’m slightly neurodivergent and I have OCD and some ADHD tendencies. (Notice I didn’t say I “suffer” from OCD or ADHD. I don’t. There ARE people that seriously struggle with severe versions of these conditions and I don’t mean to take away anything regarding what they have to deal with in life. My symptoms are mild and equally as beneficial at times as they are performance-degrading. I just “have” them. I don’t “struggle” or “suffer” from them.)
Again, I wish I could explain to you how Bills’ book put my head in the right space this morning but I can’t. You’re just going to have to wait for it to come out and read it. By the way, the website for it is The Ledger Never Lies.
The “aha” moment.
Back to the depression. I didn’t realize it was depression until about 30 minutes ago. I’ve been in this cycle for about 3 weeks now. Money is slow coming in. Some of my larger customers that depend on us have been really slow and we’ve grown comfortable with the repeatable pattern we’ve had with them over the years. They have tons of work that needs to be done. We are unmatched at what we do. We’re the absolute best team out there, bar none. So we’ve stayed busy. Well, between the fact that they’ve been slow as hell paying their bills and the fact that their work is going through a slow phase due to some industry issues with AI, chip manufacturing, and global supply chain problems exacerbated by US politics, well… my work has slowed to a crawl.
Other larger customers have the same issues, so it’s affecting us on more than one customer.
I’m sitting at home working at the Compound because “there’s nothing else to do.”
Meanwhile quote requests start coming in from other customers. I schedule a phone call and learn about the project and then the next thing you know I’m reminding myself day after day that I need to work on that quote. I need to work on that quote.
But am I working on that quote?
No. I’m at the Compound installing electrical cabling and conduit boxes and designing airhose supply systems for the new shop.
Why am I doing that? Well, because it has to get done. Because If I don’t, the shop can’t proceed. Because if…
WRONG. STOP IT. PULL YOUR HEAD OUT OF YOUR ASS, TOMMY, AND DO IT RIGHT F*%$ING NOW.
As Bill so correctly pointed out to me without knowing it, I’m confusing “activity” with “progress.”
I mean it really irks me…. how freakin often he does this shit to me without even knowing he did it. He’s affected my life (always in positive ways) HUNDREDS of times he’ll never know about.
In reality, I’m sitting here lulled into the habit of going to the Compound every morning because it allows me to confuse activity and forward progress on one front with REAL work that could be changing my situation and the situation of my team.
They’re wanting to work and I’m struggling to find it, but I’m “busy” as hell.
I’m well aware that busy and productive aren’t even related to each other and “busy” often gets mislabeled as productive.
When I’m in “go mode” I don’t have this problem. But when I start to fall into those mild depressed states of being it’s like I’m mentally drugged. I can’t see what’s right in front of my face.
I can’t afford to do XYZ because these damned clients’ haven’t paid the 140K in collective invoices they should have paid by now.
I can’t do this or that because someone didn’t get back to me.
It’s bullshit.
This is MY life. This is MY business. This is MY income.
I built the life I share with my wife on my own. Yes, I need clients, but I don’t need SPECIFIC clients. If a client sucks and is starting to be more pain than they are benefit, there’s a simple solution.
It’s not sending endless emails to accounts payable reminding them their in stupid amounts of debt and need to pay their damned bill.
I can just go find new customers.
I found that one. They’re not the only one out there. Find customers that value and respect the relationship. Don’t just sit and keep taking excuses week after week.
I’m letting OTHER PEOPLE make decisions about MY success, MY happiness, and MY wealth. Screw that. They don’t have that power. It’s not THEIR choice. It’s MY choice.
The things I’ve been lulled into by depression and habits and complacency are absolutely ridiculous. I’ll go find customers that DO value the benefit they receive from our team, or that DO have the ability to pay their bills on time. Just because I’ve been doing something for five years doesn’t mean I have to keep doing it when it stops working.
I’ve been guilty of making bad decisions within my own team as well. There’s a process out there for companies like mine in the structured cabling industry to search through all the large projects going on in a certain geographical area. I’ve “been busy” with other stuff so I passed off the responsibility of looking through those projects to find good jobs to a team member. Nothing ever happened. Not ONE single email ever got sent. Not one single job ever got discussed. I’m paying 5K a year for a service no one is using.
So I passed it off to another team member the other week. It’s been two weeks. Any progress? Nope.
I love my team. I respect the hell out of my team for what their skill sets are. But if I’m being honest with myself, they’re not me. If they had the ability to do the job I do, they wouldn’t be working for me.
It’s just one more passive way of letting myself blame someone else for ME not taking responsibility for my own situation. Well, I left it in their lap. They had nothing else to do. Why isn’t at least something done?
It doesn’t matter why. It wasn’t. Why did I expect someone else was going to be the one to step forward and help me do my job? Building this company is MY job. If they were as good as it as I was, I’d be working for them instead.
Vendor customers have excuses for why their project are delayed. So rather than going to the Compound and working on something to distract myself from the depression of not having any work this week, maybe I should drop everything else and go find the work that’s going to pay the bills next month.
I want to sit down and have a nice evening watching TV with my wife. My brain tricks me by saying well, you’ve worked 25 years to get to this point. You deserve the chance to sit at home and watch TV with Amy for a couple hours each night. The work can wait until business hours tomorrow.
You know who thinks like that? Employees think like that. People who rely on other people for their income, for their direction think like that. I’m not an employee. I’m not a team member. I’m the founder of this business. I’m the one that is responsible for making sure my wife always has the things she wants and needs in life. I’m the one that’s responsible for being sure my mother can afford to enjoy life in her 70s when social security is a joke and doesn’t even begin to cover the basics to live life happily.
I’ve been sitting around waiting for everyone else to fix “their” problems, or get off “their” butts, and pretending it’s “their” fault that my bank account is dwindling faster than it’s filling up this past quarter.
I spent an hour last night playing Xbox with some friends. It’s nice to be able to sit back and joke with friends playing Call of Duty while we’re unaliving the avatars of some 15 year old that’s spending mom and dad’s money and we’re smoking them with just old fashioned skill and tactics. It’s fun to take a break and relax a bit now and then. I’ve served my time in the trenches. I’ve earned this time, right?
Well, who the hell else is going to get off their ass and do it if it’s not me?
Rather than sitting on the couch watching NCIS with Amy, or sitting in the shop playing Xbox with Frank, Grizz, and Hayley, maybe I need to be poring over the projects in my area and getting back into my old-school habits of getting things done that actually move the needle.
Yeah, I DO think I deserve some down time. My wife wants me to have some down time, to spend quality time with her. And I sincerely want to. I also want to ride my motorcycle, work on my shop, build my wife her guest house, mow the grass, 3D print some cool stuff I’ve been wanting to work on… but none of that provides for my wife’s future. None of it puts money in the bank in case my son gets sick, or my Mom’s car breaks, or my daughter calls and need something.
I got comfortable with the regular cycle of things I had successfully set-up over the last year and a half. I had worked out a pretty nice routine of work flow that allows my company to grow, to profit, and allowed me to have some much-needed free time to try to enjoy the fruits of over twenty years of struggle. I got very comfortable enjoying the extra free time and the freedom that finally came from not having to check the bank account to be sure everything was going to clear ok. I thought I had created something that was self-sustaining in my relationships with both these project companies and with my own team.
When that cycle broke due to other people’s problems, I let it ride. I told myself it will be short term. It’ll pass in a week or two. After three weeks I said it’ll pass in a month or so. Two and a half months later I open my eyes and realize it’s not passed and I can either sit here and keep doing the same thing, or I can change direction and apply the correct pressure to the areas that CAN improve my life and my mental health and my bank account.
Maybe try shifting it into Drive
I’m stomping the gas pedal all day every day of the week, and on the weekends too… but the damned car is in Neutral.
THAT needs to change.
So I take a shower. I put on my “gettin ‘er done” clothes, my work boots, brush my hair, pour a fresh cup of coffee, and pull my head out of my ass and get to work.
There are a dozen packages sitting on my front porch from Amazon. They contain all the new air hoses for the shop’s airline system. I’ve got a new garden bed for my wife to build and install at the Compound.
I had to ask myself the question: Do either of those tasks directly drive my success? Not in any serious way I can think of.
Then let them sit there until the damned cardboard rots off the boxes if need be. If it’s not making money, it’s not paying the bills. If it’s not paying the bills, it’s going to add to my stress. If it’s adding to my stress, it’s one more thing that can quietly push me into a mild depression that I don’t see coming until it’s too late.
You know what would DECREASE my stress? Putting another 100K in the bank.
So, focus on that instead Tommy.
Now, if you’ll go excuse me, since my head has been removed from my ass this morning, I’m going to go get some “productive” things done… not busy work, not things I want to do.
So maybe I can’t watch TV much this coming few weeks. I might miss out on some fun Xbox gaming. My bike might sit there another week collecting pollen instead of making road memories.
But sorry kids, Daddy’s got work to do.
If you’re going through the same thing in life – sit back and look hard at what you’re doing to change it. If it’s not working, stop doing it. And seriously, when it comes out, read the damned book “The Ledger Never Lies.”
