When I was a kid, my dad made me help him with firewood. He split it, I stacked it. One day, I was a kid and half assed it and the pile looked about like this. He stopped swinging the maul and looked at me and said something that resonated ever since.
“You can tell the pride of a man by the way he stacks his firewood.”
So I stopped what I was doing, fixed my mess and stacked the rest of the wood as perfectly as I could.
It took me nearly 30 years to put that into perspective.
If you know my dad, he was far from perfect, just like many of us, but that lesson was something that I applied to wood stacking ever since. I think a better way of explaining it would have been…
“How you do one thing is how you do everything.”
I now see what he was saying… wise old man who apparently forgot everything when I was a teenager. Haha
But I argued against this for a long time, but after fighting it, I found it to be a bullet I just had to bite.
The wood piles were always perfect, but that was it.
Truck was a mess.
Room was a mess.
Most of my life was a mess.
Because how I did one thing, wasn’t how I did anything else.
So did I flip a switch and make everything perfect?
Fuck no. That’s impossible. Your head would probably explode.
Instated making one more thing a day perfect.
Don’t leave shit in my truck.
Make sure the thing I’m building for the gym is perfect as can be.
Don’t leave dishes in the sink.
Small things, and you can ask my wife, I fuck this up constantly, but I’m working on it.
Don’t expect to flip a switch and make your life 100% overnight. Those expectations set you up for failure, but find one thing and the rest will start falling into place.
You’re gonna fuck up, but when you do, just make a commitment to yourself that you will do your best the next day.
Once you start doing one thing right, the rest fall like dominoes.
How you do one thing is how you do everything. Fight it all you want, but it’s true.
You can tell the pride of a man by how he stacks his woodpile, and his woodpile will look like the rest of his life too.
