How do you define success in life?
Somebody asked me that once on a roof, more or less. Not in those words. A homeowner in Acworth, standing in his driveway while I was coming down the ladder, asked me if I ever wanted to be bigger. More trucks. More crews. A name on a billboard on 575.
I told him no, and I meant it, and I have been turning the question over ever since, because it is the kind of question that sounds simple until you try to answer it without lying.
Here is the honest version. Success is a Tuesday that holds.
A Tuesday where the 4:45 alarm goes off and I actually get up, because the Mr. Coffee was loaded the night before and the Folgers is black and the house is still quiet. Two mugs before the detonating starts. That quiet hour is mine, and I guard it the way I guard a dry attic. Nobody pays me for it. It is still the best part of the day.
Success is a roof that does not leak after I leave. Not a roof that looks good in a photo. A roof that holds water through a Georgia July thunderstorm, the kind that turns a sky over Cobb County black in twenty minutes. If I have to go back, I go back, and I fix it on my own dime, because that is the deal. But a month with no callbacks that were my fault? That is a good month. That is the whole business plan, and it fits on a sticky note.
Run it through Kirk’s drill. Does it last? What does it cost when it doesn’t? A good name lasts, if you don’t spend it. A bad one costs you everything it took twenty years to build, and you cannot buy it back at the pump, or the supply house, or anywhere else. I have watched guys with bigger trucks than mine lose the only thing that mattered, one shortcut at a time. I would rather be the man with one truck that starts.
Success is also smaller than the magazines make it. It is three kids under seven eating breakfast at a table that is still standing, in a house where the doors lock and the pantry is full. It is Giang looking at me over her coffee and deciding, again, that I am a person worth being married to, even before the second mug kicks in. It is the oldest announcing his height against the kitchen doorframe like a foreman reading a tape. Forty-one inches of trouble, and every inch of it mine.
I am not saying money does not matter. It matters. I have a mortgage, a 2013 F-150 with opinions about starting, and a business that eats if I do not feed it. But money was never the definition. It was the fuel. You do not confuse the gas with the destination. Half a tank gets you there. A full tank gets you home. Neither one tells you whether the trip was worth making.
The biggest change in my working life was not a number. It was becoming the man who signs the proposal instead of only the man who carries the shingles. That took a year of terrible math and paperwork that nearly broke me. Nobody clapped. There was no ceremony. Just a Tuesday where I realized the name on the paper was mine, and the roof under it was mine to stand behind, and that was enough.
So if you ask me how I define success, I will not give you a number. I will give you a roof that holds, a truck that starts, a house that is quiet at 4:45 in the morning, and three small people who still think their dad can fix anything.
Most things, I can.
The rest, I live beside, on the right side of the door.
I keep the longer, more personal writing over at andrewgoodrick.org.
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