If You Got Exactly What You Wanted Tomorrow, What Would Break? The other morning I was sitting at Alana’s Café, listening to two regulars talk baseball. The Dodgers were in the playoffs, and these guys were deep in it — pitchers, the bullpen, hitting, strategy, details I could barely follow anymore. Here’s the funny thing. There was a time I probably could have kept up. I used to follow sports. I enjoyed it. But somewhere along the way I made a decision and stopped paying it so much...
about 8 hours ago • 11 min read
You Think You Can Handle It.But Where’s the Evidence? Back in the 1980s, when I was working as an fire alarm electrician, we used to do some pretty dangerous shit. One job in particular scared the hell out of me. Copper bus bars We had to drill into an energized copper bus bar to make a connection for a fire-alarm circuit. If you’re not an electrician, imagine a thick piece of copper carrying power through a distribution system. Those copper bars could carry something on the order of a...
1 day ago • 10 min read
I Knew the Blueprint. But I Kept Changing It. I spent 35 years working as a union electrician. Typical blueprint for building a home One thing you learn pretty quickly in construction is that you work from the blueprint. You don’t just show up with a truck full of tools, start bending conduit, and hope it all works out. You need to know what you’re building. Where things go. What has to happen first. How your work affects the other trades. And one of the most frustrating things on any jobsite...
2 days ago • 10 min read
Your First Answer Is Usually Just Your Habit Over my 35 years as a union electrician, I worked with a lot of different people. Some were incredibly talented. Some were experienced, hardworking, and eager to learn. And some were just plain stubborn. I remember journeymen who’d get offended if you tried to show them anything. “Don’t treat me like an apprentice.” “I’m not a kid.” “You don’t need to teach me anything.” Okay. But here’s something I learned over the years. Having experience doesn’t...
3 days ago • 9 min read
Three Questions I Keep Coming Back To I’ve been journaling for more than forty years, and I have a confession to make. I was not a "journalist" when I started. I was a freshman in high school, maybe fourteen or fifteen, and one of my classes required us to keep a journal for the entire year. Like most teenagers, I wasn’t excited about homework that didn’t have to be turned in every single day. So when I knew the teacher was about to check our journals, I’d scramble to fill in a bunch of...
4 days ago • 9 min read
They Didn’t Tap Me Once Saturday.Here’s Why. Something interesting happened on the Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu mat this past Saturday. I rolled with somebody I hadn’t trained with in a little while. This person has been at Meraki for about four and a half or five years — roughly a two-year head start on me. And when we used to roll, they destroyed me. Three submissions. Four. Sometimes five in a single five-minute round. Tap, tap, tap, tap. I don’t mean they were cruel. They weren’t. They were just...
5 days ago • 9 min read
The Words Were the Same.The Conversation Wasn’t. Why learning the script is often the first step toward finding your own voice. Back in 2001, early in my relationship with Amy, she moved in with me. We’d been dating for about six months when she moved in with me in Culver City. At the time, she was studying acting at the Meisner Studio in North Hollywood. Every week she’d make the long drive through LA rush-hour traffic to get to class. Sometimes, on days when I wasn’t training hapkido, I’d...
6 days ago • 11 min read
I’m 5’2”, 120 Pounds—and That Isn’t My Only a Disadvantage I can’t be the only person who did this. Especially when I was younger, I’d look in the mirror and see everything that was wrong. Everything I wished was different. Everything I thought needed fixing. And I don’t just mean physically. I did it with school too. If I brought home a report card with a couple of A’s and a C, guess which grade got all my attention? Not the A. The C. How do I turn that C into a B? How do I get rid of the...
7 days ago • 6 min read
What Construction Taught Me About Problems That Look Like People Problems In 2019, I landed what should have been one of my dream assignments. The First Stage of the LAX MSC Project I was working on the Midfield Satellite Concourse project at LAX, and Mike brought me onto his crew to handle the big AHUs and their Building Management Systems. The pitch was basically: Give Chuck a bunch of big pieces of equipment and leave him alone. Perfect. Each unit had devices to install, conduit to run,...
8 days ago • 7 min read
Your Strength Can Become the Thing That Traps You Last week I met an old friend for coffee. And when I say old, I mean us, not him. We first met in 1992, when I returned to hapkido after taking time away during my electrical apprenticeship. Our birthdays fall in the same week, and about a decade ago—after years of only seeing each other intermittently following Grandmaster Han’s passing in 2007—we decided to make an annual birthday coffee a tradition. Nothing elaborate. We catch up and...
9 days ago • 7 min read