018: American Grit

October 12, 2026

Nobody likes wiping his ass. There is no romance in it, no craftsmanship to admire, no reason to take a picture when you are finished. It is a shitty job in the most literal sense of the word, and yet most of us are pretty attached to the result. We love the finished house and forget the months when the driveway looked like a lumberyard after an artillery strike. We love the business once the sign is hanging straight and the phone rings on purpose. We like the old guy who can fix damn near anything, but nobody wants the years when he was the young guy ruining perfectly good material because he didn’t know what the hell he was doing yet. Everybody likes what the work becomes. The work has always been a hard sell.

Starting is usually the hardest and worst part of it. Before you start, every possibility is still alive, including the pleasant possibility that you would have been great at it. Beginning ruins that almost immediately. The board gets cut crooked. Nobody buys the thing. Your brilliant idea lasts eleven minutes in front of another human being before you realize you’ve overlooked something embarrassingly obvious. So we prepare. We research. We read reviews about tools we don’t own for projects we haven’t begun. We wait for work to slow down, the kids to get older, interest rates to behave, our backs to stop hurting, the market to make sense, and whatever planet is apparently responsible for bad decisions this month to move somewhere less inconvenient. Some of that is sensible. Some of it is just being scared with enough paperwork around it to look responsible.

The people who build things usually start before they’re ready. The people waiting to be ready usually get very good at waiting. I’ve spent enough time on both sides of that to know there is no great nobility in the first group. Starting before you’re ready doesn’t always mean you’re brave. Sometimes you just weren’t smart enough to understand how badly things could go. There are things you can’t learn from shore. Eventually the boat has to leave, and all your theories about sailing become less impressive when water starts coming over the side.

I learned to trust my own judgment long before I knew exactly why. Kids can be cruel with an efficiency adults usually need training to achieve. They don’t need to know much about you. They just need to spot the thing you hope nobody noticed. I used to come home thinking about whatever some kid had said that day, pissed off or hurt or both, and my mom would try to straighten me back out. She’d tell me they were wrong. Tell me I was fine. Tell me to ignore them.

The problem was I knew she was my mom. Of course she thought I was worth something. She was understandably biased. I discounted her testimony like any competent jury would.

Summers that once seemed endless disappear almost completely, while one stupid sentence said beside a chain-link fence can stick around for decades. I don’t remember when I stopped dragging all of that home with me. There wasn’t some great revelation. I just got tired of letting people I didn’t even respect decide how I felt about myself. If some kid could make me feel small merely by saying I was small, then I had given him something he hadn’t earned.

My opinion of me had to weigh more than his did. For a while that hardened into a simpler rule, one that felt pretty damn good to a younger man: I don’t give a fuck what anybody thinks. It worked, too. Right up until I met somebody whose opinion I didn’t respect who had the power to destroy something I had spent years trying to build.

There is a difference between somebody being hard on you and somebody hunting you. You know it before you can always prove it. A mistake that would be a correction for somebody else follows you into the next shift. Something you thought had been put to bed shows up again on paper. You start noticing what gets written down, what gets ignored, and how the standard changes depending on who is explaining it.

One afternoon we were walking roofs, going over cuts—inspection cuts, heat holes, smoke indicators. When we got to a center-rafter louver, he changed the numbered sequence we had been taught in the academy. After training, the senior firefighter pulled me aside and told me to ignore the captain’s order. “Don’t ever do that on a real fire. You’ll get people killed.” After that, it got harder to tell myself this was about making me better.

My first instinct was to fight him. That’s what I wanted to do. Square up with the bullshit and put it in the dirt. Except fighting him the way I wanted to would have done his work for him. He had the position. He had the evaluations. He had the pen. His version of me could matter more to my future than the work I was actually doing. I could know he was a piece of shit and still lose to him. Being right about a man does not make him powerless.

You spend your younger years figuring out that nobody gets to tell you who you are, then adulthood occasionally hands a clipboard to somebody who can decide whether you still have the job on Friday. You can hate the arrangement all you want. The bridge is still washed out. Standing there explaining that it shouldn’t be does not get the truck across.

So I stopped trying to beat him in an argument I couldn’t win. If there was something in my performance that could be better, I made it better. If there was a hole, I closed it. If he moved the target, I had to get good enough to hit the new one too. He could write whatever he wanted. I wanted enough daylight between what he wrote and what everybody else saw that eventually the paper started looking ridiculous.

I couldn’t make the man stop trying to fail me. I could make myself harder to fail.

That old I don’t give a fuck what anybody thinks survived, but it came out dented. Some people’s opinions deserve your attention because they’ve done the job, paid for their mistakes, and can see something you’re missing. Other people’s opinions matter because somebody gave them a title. A man can deserve your attention without deserving your respect. A man can also deserve your respect and not have any authority over you. Life gets expensive when you can’t tell the difference.

Something else changed while I was busy trying not to get eaten alive. I stopped treating confidence like something I could simply summon when I needed it.

You can tell yourself you’re good enough until the mirror starts getting embarrassed for you.  Eventually you need something more than your own testimony. Every weakness I fixed gave me another reason to trust myself. Every time I performed while somebody was waiting for me not to, I had one more thing to point to when doubt showed up. I wasn’t building confidence by talking nicer to myself. If anything, that was counterproductive.

“Believe in yourself” is a great bumper sticker if you’re driving around the California coast. But it’s only half the equation. Believing in yourself without putting anything underneath it is like buying an expensive dually and not having enough money for diesel. Looks good in the driveway. Isn’t taking you anywhere. If you don’t believe in yourself, I don’t know why you expect anybody else to volunteer for the job. But believing you can become something and actually becoming it are separated by a whole lot of days nobody puts on Instagram.

You need enough arrogance to believe you can become something you aren’t yet—and enough humility not to call yourself that until you’ve put in the work.

A guy with six customers and a folding table can believe he’s building a company. He may have to, because there isn’t much else in the room making the case for him. The invoices are small. The equipment is whatever he could afford. Half the people buying from him might know his mother. Still, he gets up the next morning and keeps building because he believes in something that isn’t there yet.

Another guy can put “CEO” in his bio before payroll has ever ruined a night’s sleep.

Give them a few years.

A new father wants to believe he’s a good father before his children are old enough to offer much evidence. A man likes the word leader before he discovers that leadership is mostly being responsible for problems everybody else gets to go home from. Titles are easy. You can have one by lunch. Growing into it may take the rest of your life.

I had another version of that with my legs. I was told there were things I probably wasn’t going to do with them. Sports. Running. The kind of physical life I eventually chose wasn’t exactly the forecast. I played sports, became a beach lifeguard, then a firefighter, which is a fairly ridiculous career choice if your plan is to keep your legs decorative.

All these years later, my legs have held up better than my back. The body apparently enjoys irony; it just prefers a long setup.

I didn’t hear those predictions as instructions. That doesn’t mean every warning is wrong. Sometimes the wall is really a wall. But somebody telling you where he thinks your limit is and you spending the rest of your life making sure he was right are two different things.

Tell me something can’t be done and, after I’m done being irritated about it, I usually start looking around. No office? What’s wrong with the kitchen table? Can’t afford the equipment? Who has one? Can I borrow it? Rent it? Buy the ugly used one from a guy whose garage smells like gasoline and bad decisions? Nobody will give me the job? What would make them reconsider? I don’t know how? Fine. Somebody does.

Most of the time it isn’t impressive. You keep the old truck another year because the money belongs somewhere else. You call somebody who knows more than you and admit you don’t know. Sometimes you get told no and hang around long enough to learn whether it means never or just not this way. The first version comes out bad enough that you hope nobody saved a picture. You make another one anyway.

Years ago I heard somebody say America was built on the backs of men who smoked cigarettes, drove without seatbelts, and ate bacon for breakfast. I have no idea who said it. I’m also not proposing lung cancer, windshield dentistry, or cured pork as national policy. I just understand why the line sticks. Those men weren’t optimized. Their sleep scores were probably terrible. They had never heard of a morning routine, and half of them would’ve thought a cold plunge meant the well pump went out in January. Somehow things still got built.

Drive through enough old towns and you’ll see what they left behind. A newer sign bolted over the faded outline of somebody else’s name. A house where the back addition doesn’t quite match the front because one was built thirty years after the other. A barn leaning toward a field, still standing long after the man who decided where to put it is gone. Some were built by people who knew exactly what they were doing. Some were built by people learning while the walls went up. Usually you can tell if you look long enough.

There are storefronts with paper over the windows and old lettering bleeding through newer paint. Businesses closed. Farms went under. Men borrowed money and guessed wrong. Families loaded everything up, went somewhere with an idea of what might be waiting, then loaded it all up again when it wasn’t.

Somebody once unlocked every one of those doors in the morning thinking it might work. Some mornings it did. Then one morning it didn’t.

The cleaned-up American Dream has always looked a little suspicious to me. It usually has a nice house, some acreage, more money than your parents made, and somebody smiling with a set of keys. Nothing wrong with that. But I don’t think the house was ever the important part.

The American part was movement. You didn’t necessarily have to stay what you were born into. A farm kid could learn a trade. A laborer could open the shop. Somebody could come here with an accent, a suitcase, and nobody waiting for him and still decide his children were going to grow up differently. A man could screw up at twenty-five and take another run at forty. None of that guaranteed anything. Plenty of those storefronts ended with paper over the windows.

It was the pursuit of happiness. It was never a guarantee.

Some people spent their whole lives chasing something they never reached. Some died trying. But that didn’t always mean the effort disappeared with them. The next man knew a little more. The next family started a little farther down the road. Somebody figured out what didn’t work, what broke, what needed changing, and somebody else took another run at it.

What you inherited wasn’t necessarily what you had to hand back.

A man could be born into one life and spend the rest of his years making another. He could leave a town, learn a trade, start again at forty, build a business nobody in his family knew how to build, buy the piece of land that needs work because the good one costs more than he has, or become a different kind of father than the one who raised him. He might spend twenty years headed somewhere and still wake up occasionally wondering whether he picked the right road. Getting older doesn’t clear up as much as you think it will. Mostly it shortens the amount of time you’re willing to bullshit yourself.

It seems unreasonable to think you can still change where your life is headed. You don’t know how it ends. That’s the trouble. Proof has lousy timing. Nobody can show the scared kid walking home from school what kind of man he’ll become. Nobody could’ve handed me a piece of paper on probation proving the bastard trying to run me out wasn’t going to get the final word.  But at some point, the choice got pretty simple: adapt and overcome or quit.

You move with what you’ve got. Sometimes that’s experience. Sometimes it’s something somebody taught you. Maybeit’s faith. In my case it was a fairly irresponsible amount of stubbornness and borderline stupidity that never allowed me to see another option.

Then you start paying for what you don’t know.

You ruin material, lose money, make the wrong call, get corrected, and do it again. You spend an uncomfortable amount of time being the guy in the room who needs things explained. You either pay for the lesson or stay exactly where you are.

The business owner looks like a business owner because we weren’t there when invoices covered the kitchen table after everyone else had gone to bed. The craftsman makes the cut look easy because the bad boards are long gone. The old firefighter moves through a problem without wasting much motion because nobody filmed the years when somebody stood behind him correcting damn near everything he did.

We do the same thing with people. You see him at fifty or sixty and forget there was ever a twenty-year-old version standing somewhere without much of a clue. He forgets parts of that younger man too. The decision that scared him becomes a story told casually over coffee. The failure that felt like the end of the world gets reduced to three sentences. The old truck he couldn’t wait to get rid of becomes the truck he wishes he’d kept. The years buff the panic out of things.

We are all the FNG at some point. Everybody who knows what he’s doing had a day when he didn’t. Something is standing because he built it. People call when things go sideways because they’ve seen what he does when that happens. His children know whether his word holds up. The people who worked beside him know whether he gets smaller when the day gets hard. He may still carry some of the same doubts he had when he was young. Men are good at dragging old doubts into new lives.

He still hears them.  They’re just not as loud.

By then, nobody has to take his word for it.

TOUCHSTONE
BELIEF IN YOURSELF
IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN ABILITY.

- Sea of Mud Apparel Co.
Talk less. Say more.