Building up or Tearing down.
I ask myself that question every morning when I consider whether or not to do my morning workout. I have a chronic illness that makes it hard to move in the morning. Joint pain and abdominal vagueness. It is especially bad during cold weather and my doctors tell me that I am in the midst of a flare up. So…Some mornings I give in, and after starting the coffee pot (the timer function died months ago and I haven’t gotten a new one because that would mean learning how to make a pot of coffee all over again.) and then pad back to sit in bed watching youtube videos for the next hour and a half while sipping coffee.
When I do that it takes much longer for my body to come to grips with the idea that yes in fact we have to get out of bed and actually go to work, and the pain lasts a lot longer than it does if I just rip the bandaid off and suffer through the first 3 or 4 minutes on the stairmaster.
I almost always feel better after my morning routine. The aches and pains leave, and I am able to move like the tin man after Dorothy slides him some oil. On days when I don’t do my morning routine the pain takes much longer to go away, and doesn’t go away completely. Today for example I can still feel stiffness in my back
The question comes from a Stephen King Story that I read as a child. (my dad was really into Stephen King and really into having kids that looked smart because they were always reading.) In the story “Dolan’s Cadillac”, A widower joins a road construction crew in order to learn and plot revenge against a crime boss. When he is getting hired, the person doing the hiring says something along the lines of, “This work builds some men up. Makes them stronger. Other men, it just tears them down. “ The person doing the hiring thinks the widower falls into the second camp given how scrawny he is. Not sure what profession he left when his wife died, but it didn’t require much physical labor.
Now the real kicker is, we mentors don’t set the best “work/life balance” examples. Bob Steele once said that he was the first one there and the last to leave, and that probably sums up pretty much all of us. If the kids are there, we are there. Which makes the question even more pertinent when it comes to us. Am I building myself up, or am I tearing myself down?
When my alarm goes off at 430 so I can get my morning routine done in time to leave for work, and I don’t leave work until 6:30 at night am I building myself up, or tearing myself down?
And when I get home at 7 or 7:30 and do work for school and then spend a few hours trying to calm down after all of that and finally kick off to sleep at 11 or 12 only to try to do it again am I building myself up, or tearing myself down.
When my watch says that I got in 14k steps and 46 heart healthy points every day…
What about what we expect from our kids? My team meets 30 hours a week during build season. I understand that more time =/= more productivity, but less time seems to mean much less productivity. So, there is a diminishing return for sure, but there is also a minimum that must be met, and which only increases along with expectations.
Am I building them up or am I tearing them down?
Today I sort of jokingly yelled at one of my kids. Yesterday I luckily discovered that he had left 2 irons (belt making) plugged in. One of them smoldering away at the napkin that had been carelessly dropped on it, the other hanging off the side of the table eating its way through the enamel on a chair leg.
Now due to the aforementioned health issues I still wear an n95 from when I leave my car to go into work until I am back in my car to go home. So the fact that I could actually smell the smoke should tell you a lot.
So I added "yell at _______ really loud so that everyone can hear me and is scared so the thing never happens again” to the agenda for today, and when I saw _______ I let lose. (Well…not totally. I didn’t let any jersey out and I didn’t tell him where I would shove the iron if he ever left it plugged in again…Honestly I was pretty tame. Really didn’t even yell that loud.
Was I building him up or tearing him down?
Today when the kids spent 2 + hours taking pictures of the robot for a reveal poster instead of building the robot which still has several major unknowns…I didn’t yell. I didn’t even complain. I just kept plugging away.
I was tempted to say something about how I never want to hear them complain about “mentor built robots” again, but I didn’t. I wasn’t alone in working though. One kid was plugging away alongside me and a couple others were working on awards and community outreach stuff…
On our team we have “thinkers” and tinkers” Thinkers are our more experienced members. They generally have some experience in all aspects of building robots. CADD, fabrication skills…electronics and programming…The whole shebang.
This morning one of the thinkers looked at one of the unknowns (how we are going to get the arm to go in and out.) He thought about solving/working on the problem while I worked on the intake with 3 other kids. Instead he decided to go wander the halls with his girlfriend.
The thing is, we have a couple of tinkers who think they are thinkers, and they just do stuff. They prefer the guess and check method of doing things.
So, when they start installing things on the robot without consulting the CADD model then in some cases they have to tear it out because they don’t have enough room, but in other cases the CADD model is forced to change in order to accommodate them and the things that they have done.
Not solving the big giant unknown in the robot today because it is easier to hang out with your girlfriend in the hallway and take pictures of the robot means the tinkers have had plenty of time and leeway to take up space inside the robot that you might need in order to solve your unknown problems. So now things will have to change in ways that they might otherwise have not had people been more on the ball.
I am not going to ask the tinkers to change anything because that would be tearing them down instead of building them up.
They were actually working on the robot.
I definitely don’t have all the answers.
I wish I did.
Ok…Enough for now.
Edoga
