ACKNOWLEDGMENT

I lived it. I wrote about it. And I hope you get something from it.

I've shared this website with quite a few people.

The responses have been interesting.

Some people remember the jobs.

“I remember that one.”

“I was there when we were building those markets.”

Others remember something different. They remember how I worked with them, something I taught them, or something they learned years ago that they still carry with them today.

Those responses mean something to me.

Not because I need somebody to tell me I did a good job, but because that is what a lot of this website is about. I've spent a career learning, making mistakes, solving problems, developing people, and figuring out what works. Hearing that something stayed with somebody long after the job ended tells me some of it mattered.

Then there is another kind of feedback.

“You missed a word here.”

“This should be capitalized.”

“There's a grammar problem.”

That matters too. If something is wrong, I want to fix it.

But sometimes I think we get so focused on what is wrong with something that we miss what went into creating it.

I learned that a long time ago working with crews.

I've watched guys struggle with a task that came easily to somebody else. Maybe another guy could finish it in an hour or two, and this guy spent three hours on it.

And it still wasn't right.

But I had been watching.

He wasn't standing around. He wasn't on his phone. He wasn't avoiding the work.

He was trying.

I could see him stop and look at it. Think about it. Try something. Look again. Keep working.

When I finally walked over, I couldn't just say, “That's wrong.”

It was wrong. We still had to fix it. The standard didn't change because he worked hard.

But I had witnessed the effort.

That deserved to be acknowledged too.

There is a big difference between telling someone, “This is wrong,” and telling them, “I saw what you put into this. Here's where you got off track, let's fix it.”

One tears down the effort with the result.

The other corrects the result without taking away the effort.

That matters when you're developing people. It gives somebody enough confidence to try again.

And then there are the people who say nothing.

I've learned something about that too.

No response is a response.

That doesn't mean I know what the response means.

Maybe they didn't read it. Maybe it didn't interest them. Maybe they don't know what to say. Maybe they disagree with it. Maybe something about it makes them uncomfortable. Maybe it made them think.

I don't know.

And I'm not going to write the explanation for them.

But if I send something that matters to me directly to someone and it isn't acknowledged, I notice that.

Silence communicates too.

Building this website has made me think about all of this differently because now I'm the guy who spent three hours on the task.

Writing all of this might come easily to somebody else.

It hasn't come easily to me.

I've rewritten things. I've remembered something after I thought I was finished and gone back to change it. I've questioned whether I explained something correctly. I've dug through thirty years of memories trying to understand not only what happened, but what I learned from it.

There are probably still words missing.

There will probably be another capitalization mistake.

There will be things I decide six months from now that I could have said better.

That's okay.

Because I know what went into it.

Some people will recognize themselves in these pages.

Some will remember the jobs.

Some will find the mistakes.

Some will say nothing at all.

I appreciate the people who have taken the time to tell me what they see, whatever it is.

But ultimately, their response cannot determine the value of the work for me.

I lived it.

I wrote about it.

I'm proud of what I put here.

And I hope you get something from it.