Learning to Build
My father left our family when I was twelve and did not return. My mother worked long hours for little money while raising my brothers and me.
We were not told that we had to help. We knew we should.
I remember the winters when we could not afford to have heating oil delivered.
There was a gas station near our home that sold diesel fuel at the pump. I would fill two five-gallon containers, bring them home, pour the fuel into our oil tank, and get the heating system running again.
Whenever the tank ran dry, the burner nozzle tended to clog. So I taught myself how the burner worked, how to clean the nozzle, and how to keep the system operating.
The heat was off. Somebody had to get it running. I learned how.
It saved us the cost of calling someone. And, just as important to me at the time, nobody outside the family had to know that we could not afford an oil delivery.
I did the same with an old washing machine. Washing machines were simpler then, and I learned enough about ours to keep repairing it for years.
I also remember the day I was finally earning enough to buy my mother a brand-new washer and dryer.
Looking back, these do not seem like heroic events. They were ordinary problems inside an ordinary family trying to get by.
But I can see something in them now that I could not see then.
Long before I knew the word self-reliance, I was learning what it felt like to be useful.
Something breaks.
Understand it.
Learn what you need to know.
Fix what can be fixed.
Find another way when the obvious way is unavailable.
And do not leave the people you love waiting for somebody else to show up.
Responsibility Before Philosophy
My father taught me something important, although not in the way a father would hope to teach his son. His absence and his choices showed me very clearly the kind of husband, father, and man I never wanted to become.
By the time I was a young man, I had a remarkably simple idea of what a responsible man should be:
Be there.
Work.
Provide.
Carry what belongs to you.
Do not abandon people who depend upon you.
My mother taught me the other half—not by explaining responsibility, but by living it. I watched resilience rather than hearing lectures about it. She worked, endured, adapted, and kept the family moving.
When I was about twenty, another responsibility began to emerge. My mother's dementia was becoming noticeable. At first she could still work and live a mostly normal life, but there were episodes, and over the years they became more frequent and more serious.
Eventually her illness progressed beyond anything I could manage myself. I could not fix what was happening to her. What I could do was watch over her, make decisions when necessary, and eventually help place her in a retirement community with specialized memory care.
That experience taught me something the oil burner never could.
Not everything entrusted to our care can be repaired.
Sometimes responsibility means fixing the problem.
Sometimes it means remaining faithful to a person when the problem cannot be fixed.
That distinction has stayed with me.
The Self-Reliant Life
As I grew older, the habits of self-reliance followed me into business, marriage, fatherhood, money, and nearly everything else I built.
I never expected circumstances to cooperate simply because I had made a good plan. Plans fail. Customers leave. Equipment breaks. People disappoint us. Unexpected things happen.
I learned that I did not need certainty about what would happen next. I needed confidence that when something did happen, I could probably find a way to deal with it.
That became one of my deepest assumptions about life.
It shaped the way I built businesses. I never wanted a company whose survival depended upon one enormous customer. From the beginning I preferred a broad mixture of clients—large, medium, small, and thousands of very small customers who returned again and again.
Diversification was good business. But looking backward, I can recognize a larger instinct behind it: avoid single points of failure. Build alternatives. Develop skills. Keep reserves. Do not willingly put yourself in a position where the loss of one person, customer, or plan can bring the whole structure down.
That philosophy has served me remarkably well.
It has also raised some of the hardest questions of my Christian life.
What Holds the Builder?
I am a Christian. I believe in God.
But I would be dishonest if I told you that faith has always come easily to me.
My struggle was never that I believed I could control everything. Life cured me of that illusion long ago.
The harder problem was different. Experience kept teaching me:
Whatever happens, I can probably find a way to handle it.
That is a valuable lesson in business and family life. It becomes more complicated when the subject turns to faith.
Christianity asks us to trust God, to receive grace, to recognize our dependence, and to accept that human competence—however useful—does not make us sufficient unto ourselves.
For someone who has spent a lifetime learning how not to be helpless, those are not small ideas.
I am still examining them.
I do not believe faith asks responsible people to become passive, or excuses poor preparation and careless decisions. I believe something more demanding:
Faith does not abolish self-reliance. It puts self-reliance in its proper place.
There is work that is mine to do. There are people I should protect. There are responsibilities I should carry.
But there are also things I cannot control, repair, earn, guarantee, or finally understand.
Learning the difference may be one of the hardest forms of wisdom.
I have spent much of my life learning how to build things that can hold.
Increasingly, I find myself asking a different question:
What holds the builder?
Still Building
Today I am a husband, father, grandfather, businessman, investor, publisher, author, and Christian.
Each of those roles has taught me something. Each has also exposed things I still need to understand.
That is why I write now.
Not because everything fits neatly together. It does not. I write because decades of work, marriage, fatherhood, business, money, mistakes, faith, disappointment, and gratitude have given me questions worth examining and lessons worth handing forward.
The essays and books on this site are not instructions from a man standing above the problems of ordinary life.
They are field notes from someone still inside them.
I am still building too.
I have simply reached the point in life where some of what I am building is meant to be handed forward.
Remain a builder. Just do not mistake yourself for the foundation.— Joseph C. Kunz, Jr.