Nobody Builds the Tenth Floor First
I have spent nineteen years on construction sites, and in all that time I have never once seen a crew start at the top. Nobody argues about it. Nobody tries it. The ground gets cleared, the footings get dug, the foundation gets poured and cured, and only then does the first floor go up, and the second, and the rest. The tenth floor is not a plan. It is a result.
I wish I had understood that about my own life as early as I understood it about buildings. When my business collapsed in 2007 I wanted the tenth floor back immediately: the income, the standing, the sense of being a man with things under control. What I had was a hotel room, work clothes from Goodwill, and a chance to stand on a job site and write down who showed up. That was the ground. I did not want to be on it. It was the only place anything could be built from.
Nothing is finished. If you drove past us that morning you’d have seen dirt, stakes, orange fencing, and plywood forms waiting for concrete. The rebar had dew on it. You would have had no reason in the world to picture a kitchen where a family does homework around the table. But every one of us inside that fence had to see those rooms before they existed, or we had no business being there.
What the rule asks of you
It asks you to do today’s work at today’s level. If you are starting over, the foundation is not glamorous: a job you are overqualified for, a budget that fits the money you actually have, one honest conversation you have been avoiding, a morning routine you can keep on a bad day. None of that looks like the life you want. All of it is what the life you want sits on.
It also asks you to stop measuring the day by the tenth floor. A man who looks at a cleared lot and sees only how far it is from the finished building will quit, or start cutting corners to get there faster. The crews that finish are the ones that pour a good footing, check it, and pour the next one. Progress on a site is a sequence, not a mood.
Where to start
Pick the one thing that has to be true before anything else can be. For me, after the collapse, it was showing up at six in the morning and being useful enough that somebody would teach me. That was the whole foundation for the first year. Nineteen years later I am a vice president of construction, and I can still tell you the exact piece of ground it started on.
That is the book in one sentence, and the rest of it is me telling you how.
Keep Climbing Now: Nobody Builds the Tenth Floor First. Thirty-nine short chapters. Every one ends on the ground with something to do about it.