A Saw only Works if it’s Moving Forward.

Fail Forward
Like other things in life, you do not wake up and just excel at woodworking. Each skill and properly executed technique has a thousand failed attempts hiding behind it. I think about this a lot in growing my small business, raising a family, nurturing my love for endurance sports, and working on my continuing sobriety. If there is anything I have learned from all this, it is when you fail, fail forward because, much like a saw, it only works if you are moving forward. Learn to accept failure, extract worthy lessons from it, and keep moving forward.

The Learning Process
A big part of how I learn is from trial and error. Sometimes, I think if it weren’t for learning things the hard way, I may have never learned anything at all. I used to think of this as a curse. Now, I’m beginning to learn that this university of hard knocks that was my life in active addiction is what made me who I am. It has slowly chiseled me into who I would later become in my sober life. Adversity teaches us what we are capable of it helps give us the grit to keep pushing. When we fall, we pick ourselves up, keep moving, and learn from it. This is what molds us. Success, whatever that may look like, isn’t about how many times you fall. It’s about how many times we get back up.

Redesign Your Process
I always like to take a moment to feel the failure, process, learn, and understand where things went wrong, and then give a voice that whatever I did wasn’t working. This has been a crucial tool in sobriety, woodworking, and ultra-distance running, as well as learning to identify when your way isn’t just simply cutting it and pivoting. It’s incredible how little it stings when you simply set something that wasn’t working for you free; it opens you up to much personal growth.

I have always learned more from rejection and failure than from acceptance and success.”

Henry Rollins