For most of my working life I have built and renovated houses.  I often joke it is my parents fault that I am in this business.  Growing up we moved several times.  Sometimes the move was to a new house that was not yet finished or to a finished house in need of an addition or renovation.  My parents just could not leave a house alone, particularly my father.  And so, from an early age I was taught how to use tools.

With that backdrop, this is a story of a big picture teacher and me, the third of his four students, although anyone of us could tell a similar story.

In a lifetime of using tools on an almost daily basis, among the very first tools I learned to use was a shovel.  The shovel is what I call The Most Honest of Tools.  If you have ever used one, it quickly becomes apparent you are either getting the job done or you are not.  There is no hiding, no faking, no talking around it.  And it is appropriate the use of this Most Honest of Tools was taught to me by the most honest of men, my father.  Dad always said exactly what he thought, exactly what he meant and exactly what he expected.  You could not hide from him nor talk your way around him.  During my career, I have so appreciated people like Dad.  They save so much time and so much misunderstanding.  But I digress.

Yes, Dad taught me to how to use a shovel.  “Work the blade with your feet…Drive with your legs….Use the leverage of the handle…..Bend at the knees……Keep you back straight”.  Dad was a “generous” teacher. I was given PLENTY of opportunity to practice and, in time, did master the skill of shoveling.  Over the years, quite honestly, guys on the job would compliment me on my skill using a shovel.  My response was always the same, “My father taught me how to shovel.”  I took pride in this seemingly simple task.  I was a good shovel man.  But I gave it little more thought than that.

Years pass, another day, I am keeping my back straight and driving with my legs, moving a pile of I don’t remember what, and a guy on the job says to me, “How do you keep going? That’s too much work”.  Without thinking and almost by reflex, I said, “It takes discipline”.  At that moment it was as if I had just been hit in the head with my own shovel.  The Epiphany:  Dad wasn’t just teaching me how to use a shovel, he was teaching me Discipline!  This was big I thought.  I was a disciplined man with a shovel.  (In hindsight, this hardly seems like much of a conclusion but it felt big at the time.)

More years pass, yet another day, and once again I have grabbed a shovel to make quick work of a pile of who knows what, all the while contemplating my exercise in discipline, how I am making myself do this work and complete this task.  And then, the Second Epiphany:  Dad wasn’t just teaching me discipline, more accurately, he was teaching me SELF-Discipline.  I knew this was bigger.

And I thought about this quite a bit because, quite frankly, the years were adding up and I really needed to start making things happen.  Slowly, The Big Picture:  I realized there is no more universally useful and applicable quality than Self-Discipline.  Anything I wanted to do or achieve in my life, any success, would require Self-Discipline.  And in that moment I recognized, Dad really did teach me everything.  Certainly, everything I needed to know.

A few years ago we had a major snowstorm; a full three feet by the time it was over.  And during the storm, periodically I would go out and shovel the driveway; because it is easier to shovel a few inches of snow several times than 36” of snow all at once (or more broadly, as Dad had taught, a small task now can prevent a big job later).  The storm had ended and I was putting the finishing touches on yet another masterful job of shoveling, and when I looked up I saw a neighbor standing more than knee deep in the street.  He was looking at my driveway.  With an obvious sense of hope and anticipation he asked, “You have a snowblower??”

“No” I said, “I’ve got Art Heslin for a Dad”.