“Shallow men believe in luck and circumstances. Strong men believe in cause and effect.”
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
After finally slaying the Calculus dragon, I got to celebrate the victory, and I got to enjoy all the positive feelings that come from accomplishing something difficult.
It was great to feel like I had proved, to myself most of all, that I wasn’t too stupid to do it. It felt like I was making serious progress towards my goals at last.
I kept a piece of paper from that time. It is a list of all the classes I had to complete, and upon which I wrote down the marks I achieved on each class. There were mostly A’s and B’s on there, but even if I didn’t excel at each and every class, the fact is, I was getting
somewhere.
What was even better than getting good marks, was finding out that I actually had more free time to go out and enjoy my life for a change. It started to happen that where I had blocked out an hour or more for homework, I was getting it done sooner. Because I was up to date with the work, and because I was doing a little bit of work every single day, it got easier. I would end up having an unexpected hour or two to spare to go out and do whatever I felt like doing – with a clear conscience.
127 It’s one of the greatest positive spin-offs that come from organizing your priorities, and organizing your life. Using proper time
management, together with the strategy of cutting those huge goals into manageable chunks was starting to really pay off. I was now able to spend time going out with my friends, or whatever I felt like doing, without the heavy cloud of guilt hanging over me. Before I got organized, I would have to miss all of those
opportunities, because I was always ‘cramming for an exam.’ In reality, most of the time I was simply finding ways to avoid the work. By adopting a new mindset, and a new way of doing things, I was getting the work out of the way, steadily and consistently.
The momentum started to build up in my life, and I started accomplishing a lot more. I still had the same amount of time available as everyone else, and the same resources I had before, but the results were changing. One of my favorite quotes from Dr. Wayne Dyer fits the situation perfectly:
“When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.”
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Miami
The contractor I was working for down in Miami was completing a number of the projects that we had been working on all this time. After that, a lot of new work came in for renovating old buildings. In South Beach there were a lot of buildings which had been built in the 1920’s and 1930’s. Quite a few of those buildings were
interesting, from a design point of view, but they were falling apart, mainly because of the materials that were used to build with in those years.
Building specifications at the time of their construction weren’t what they are today. Back in those years, they used to take beach sand and mix it with Portland cement and water, rock and different aggregates to make concrete. They also used square steel rods as rebar, to reinforce the concrete, which are very different to the circular,
grooved reinforcement rebar we use today. Concrete is very strong in terms of compressive strength, but quite weak in tensile strength. The salt in the beach sand eventually starts corroding and expanding the steel. That means that sooner or later a building’s columns, beams and supporting walls start falling apart. The foundations and basic structure needed to be repaired, and as contractors, we had to make sure the buildings were structurally sound and fit to be occupied again.
The old art-deco buildings in South Beach were going through something of a renaissance, back in the late 1980’s to early1990’s. Developers were fixing up some of those buildings and turning them into businesses, homes, or condo complexes. A lot of people were moving down there, and as a result the property market was healthy. It was a constant source of new business for us.
We had a lot of work that consisted of doing gunite structural repairs on those old buildings. We first chipped out the disintegrating
129 concrete, then reinforced the steel properly, and finally sprayed gunite into place. If you’ve ever seen a swimming pool being built, you might have seen this kind of concrete. A thick, sticky mixture is shot into place, and then troweled. Once it hardens, it restores the strength of the beam or column, or the wall that’s being repaired. There were old hotels in the area that had become structurally unsound, and were all boarded up. Developers would pick them up for a song, then renovate them, and sell them off as units – it’s called a ‘condo conversion’ in the industry.
The foundations needed to be pressure-grouted. That meant injecting fluid material under pressure into fractures and cavities in the ground. We had to basically lift the building up and level it off again because it had settled over the decades. We would fix all the columns and structural supports, and then add a second or third floor, and turn those old dilapidated apartment buildings and hotels into brand new condos to sell.
It was valuable experience for me. As the projects came in, I got to see many of the inner workings of the construction business, and some of the finer points of financing, and came to understand many of the technicalities involved.
Unfortunately the commute to work was killing me.
I lived in Fort Lauderdale, and even 25 years ago, before they widened the road, the traffic on the I-95 Interstate was horrendous. I hated driving down to Miami because of that. It felt like I was wasting so much of my valuable time. If you add up all those hours spent on the road, it’s insane how much of your life is basically wasted.
The company I was working for was quite small, which is both a good and a bad thing. I had quite a lot of responsibility, but we didn’t get to bid on the really big jobs. Besides that, the owners were
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Although I was enjoying the experience of working there, and earning the kind of money I needed, I was already looking towards the future.
By now, the way that I was thinking about everything in my life had changed, on a fundamental level, so everything in my life was beginning to change as a result.
It’s amazing that a change in attitude will start to invite completely new circumstances into your life. You will find yourself becoming dissatisfied with the same old routine – one that isn’t actually
working for you anymore – and naturally you will start finding ways to change it. If you go along with the process, it’s as if the universe stops fighting you, and starts helping you.
I was dreaming of potentially getting into property development work on my own, but I knew there were a few stepping stones along the way to get there. My eventual goal was to get into developing single-family home communities, commercial projects or building condominiums – but in the meantime, it would be great to land a job closer to home, and to work somewhere with the right kind of company culture.
So I realized that I needed to find out everything there was to know about how to land the perfect job to explore doing bigger projects and being a developer because I was starting to become bored and no longer challenged working for the Contractor in Miami.
Building on the confidence from my success at college, and on the set of new skills I was picking up, I knew I would successfully overcome this new challenge too.
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