My foot is still on the gas

THE PROSPEROUS CONSULTANT

Turn your decades of expertise into a premium consulting practice built around the life you want.

Issue #34

My dad spent close to forty years standing at a sander in a hickory handle factory in Indiana.

He made handles for hammers. Axes. Mauls. Post-hole diggers. Even wheelbarrows.

They came to him rough off the lathe. His job was the finishing... working each one smooth until it felt right in the hand and fit the tool perfectly. From there they went off to be dipped in lacquer, dried, inspected one last time, and shipped to somebody who'd swing that tool for years.

He did that work for nearly four decades.

Here's what that sander has to do with you.

In this issue:

• The two big decisions you've already made... and the third one you're about to make (whether you're aware of it or not)
• Why "slow down or speed up" is the wrong question
• What finishing strong means (and why nobody else gets a vote)

Saturday morning I read an email from Justin Welsh that's been on my mind since the weekend. He wrote about what he calls your first choosing and your second choosing.

Your first choosing happens when you're young. Sixteen, twenty-two, somewhere in there. You pick a major, a field, a city, and a definition of success you mostly inherited from your parents and your friends. You make the biggest decisions of your life with the worst information you'll ever have. Justin put it well: "You're basically a kid. How the hell should you know?"

The second choosing comes around forty. By then you've lived through thousands of workdays. You know what sixty-hour weeks do to your mood, your health, and your marriage. You know how much money is enough. You finally have the information to choose well... and changing course feels off the table. There's a mortgage, a title, people counting on you. Saying "I don't want this anymore" sounds ungrateful when you're sitting in a seat somebody else would kill for. So most people never choose again. They wait for a layoff or a health scare to hand them permission.

Justin's right about both. But I think he stopped one decision short.

For you and me, there's a third decision.

You're late in the third quarter of your working life. Maybe into the fourth. The first time you chose, you were short on self-knowledge. The second time, you were short on permission. You're short on neither one now. Nobody tells you what you're allowed to want anymore. What you're short on is runway.

And that flips the question. The first choosing asked, what will I do? The second asked, what do I want? The third one asks, what has all of it been for? A lifetime of lived experience and learned skill... what does the final contribution look like?

I hear this decision on my calls every single week. A man past seventy told me, "It's coming home to roost. We don't have some huge nest egg set aside." Another one said, "It's now or never." A third, sixty years old: "I've stagnated... I want to continue to grow, continue to bloom."

Different words. Same decision.

And maybe you've got your own version. You'll figure out the last chapter later. After this contract wraps up. After things settle down. (Things are not going to settle down. We covered that a few weeks back.) I don't know about you, but I can hear "later" talking in my own head some days, and it sounds awfully reasonable. That's the danger. Later is doing the deciding for you.

But here's what I've started to realize. Everybody frames the third decision as a speed question. You're entering the final turn, maybe the home stretch. Do you take your foot off the accelerator, or push it down?

Coming from a man who coaches consultants for a living, this next part might surprise you:

I don't think there's a right answer. Foot down is an honorable finish. So is easing off... more days with the grandkids, the boat finally in the water. I've watched people do both well, and neither one owed anybody an explanation.

The third decision isn't gas or brake. It's whether you decide at all.

Because if you don't, the default decides for you. The calendar fills the way it always has. The years run at the speed they've been running. And you cross the line without once picking your pace on purpose. Like I wrote after the Kentucky Derby a while back: the first half-mile is for the crowd, and the stretch is for keeps. The stretch is the last place you want the race run on autopilot.

I'll tell you where my foot is. I'm sixty-one, and it's pushed down. But probably not for the reason you'd guess.

It isn't the money. The material scoreboard means less to me every year. Here's what I mean.

Finishing strong, to me, is being at peace with how I lived.

We can't do everything. We can't meet everyone or help everyone. But we can make the very best of the moments we're given. I believe life is a gift, and that we're here to live and, most of all, to love. Did I lift people up, or did I tear them down? That's the question I want a good answer to when the racing's done.

Now, I want to be careful here, because the most important lifting I've ever done had nothing to do with business. We raised two sons. Nothing on any resume comes close. And some people make the lifting itself their life's work... Timber, the man from the Walmart parking lot a couple of issues back, does humanitarian work full-time. That still impresses me every time I think about it.

Most of us took the longer road. We figured we'd need forty years of earning before we could afford to give like that. But the lifting never required a permission slip or a payday. It's been available the whole time... at your kitchen table, in your community, with people who have less than you have. And it's available at work too, which is where a lot of us spend most of our daylight.

Which brings me back to my dad and the sander.

He turned rough handles into finished ones for close to forty years. I couldn't tell you how many passed through his hands. Nobody counted, and not one of them had his signature on it.

But handles weren't what the men at that factory remembered him for.

Here's the part of his story I've never told anyone while he was alive, because I think he was ashamed of it.

My dad didn't finish high school. It never mattered. Everybody in that building respected him, and the young guys most of all. A lot of them looked to him as a mentor... less about sanding, more about life. More than a few stayed off drugs and away from bad roads because of him. I watched it growing up. He's been my inspiration ever since, not because of what he made, but because of who he was while he made it.

He stood at that sander every day and did his work. The handles turned out to be the smaller part of it.

That's the third decision, made well.

And the same work is waiting for you. Your first two choosings were the lathe. Rough shape, real progress, most of the material removed. The third decision is the finishing... deciding what the thing in your hands is for, and working it until it fits.

P.S. There's an axe in my shop with one of Dad's handles on it. It rides along on the ATV whenever I head back into the woods. I own plenty of newer tools. That's the one I reach for. It still fits the hand just right, and I suppose that was always the point.

"Success is peace of mind, which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing
you made the effort to do your best to become the best that you are capable of
becoming." ... John Wooden

Want to dive deeper? Check out these related articles:

👉 The Prosperous Consultant | Issue #33
👉 The Prosperous Consultant | Issue #32

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