Chasing the Dragon

I didn’t have any big epiphanies on this trip. No breakthroughs, no big ideas. I went to Italy to eat pizza and pasta and look at old stones. Mission accomplished. But secretly, I hoped time away from work and routine might create space for something to bubble up. Some new insight that might improve my life.

Our days were full. I did my best to be present in them. Walking around the ruins of Pompeii, I wasn't thinking about things I could build with stone when I got home. Staring at the horizon to avoid seasickness on the choppy ferry crossing to Capri, I wasn't thinking about what writing project I'd tackle next. Even though I didn’t spend much time actively thinking about work, part of me thought Maybe when I get home, I’ll have the next idea, the next insight, the next shift in perspective.

Here's a scary thought:

What if I already have what I need?

What if I’ve had the insights and found the clarity - and now it’s time to follow through? Ideas feel good. Epiphanies feel even better. But without taking action on them, what good are they?

Sometimes, chasing the next breakthrough is just another way of avoiding taking action. I know what I need to work on now. It's time to do that work.

———

Turns out, something did bubble up after all: I need to stop waiting for a new epiphany and get to work.

S P A C E

For months, I’d been thinking about writing a children’s book about Sasso. Thinking about it, but not acting on it.

This winter, while waiting at the hospital during Eliza’s surgery, I just... started. I don't know where the impetus came from. But I opened my notebook and started writing. And once I started, to my surprise, I kept going.

In the days that followed, I stayed home to take care of her while she recovered. Well, I did my best. I may have eaten more saltines than I gave her, but her meds only got mixed up once. Maybe twice. Anyways, with no stones to be laid, I kept writing.

When I went back to work, I kept it going.  Working in small chunks of time early in the morning before work or at night before bed made the project feel more manageable. I wasn’t overwhelmed at the notion of spending a full day in front of a blank screen. Working like this, I finished it. 

How many ideas wither before they can take root because we don’t leave enough space for them?


Sasso’s book crept up like a weed through a crack in the concrete. What’s waiting for space to bloom in your life?

Less But Better

Less but better. Every time I read that line, my brain plays a trick on me and sees the word butter. Actually, less but butter would work, too.

Less but better is most famously associated with Dieter Rams, a German industrial designer known for his minimalist and functional approach to design. Less but butter is now not-so-famously associated with me, an American stoneworker trying to design his life.

I love butter. I want the rich stuff you don't need too much of to be full. 

The typical way of doing stonework, and most trades, is to work 8 to 10 hours a day, at least five days a week, for as many years as you can take it, until your back and knees give out and they take you out behind the barn to put you out of your misery.

I'm sorry, but that doesn't work for me. Why can’t I set up my work in a way that works for me? It turn out, I can. And so can you. I don't know why I had that realization so late in life. But butter, sorry, better, late than never. 

One way is to take on fewer projects. The blue-collar part of me recoils from the thought. What a lazy son of a bitch. You should be just as miserable as the rest of us. I don't know where that voice even came from. I didn't grow up with it. I guess it came from wanting to fit in on job sites when I first started out, trying to prove that I was something that I wasn't. 

I don't have to listen to that voice. There’s another voice, one that thinks less might lead to more. More of the good stuff. More energy to bring my best work to the right projects. More connection to clients and collaborators. More money. More space between projects for creativity, for the unexpected to arise.

Less but better. 

More butter. 

Crossroads

I’m at a crossroads. Metaphorically. Physically, I’m sitting on the couch in the long johns I wore under my insulated overalls today while I harvested stones out of the woods for a wall project here in wintry Maine. But it feels like I’m at a crossroads. Maybe that's the way having a business always feels?

I suppose it's healthy to continuously evaluate what you're doing and where you're going. Hence this most recent arrival at the crossroads.  It’s been just over a year since I decided to do stonework with no full-time help and I'm trying to decide if I want to keep moving forward like that. 

It’s been a great year. I’ve worked on some engaging projects and brought in and worked with some talented subcontractors. There were some bumps along the way; aren’t there always? To no one’s surprise but me, it took longer to get things done by myself than with two other people. But almost everything got mostly done. And now it’s almost spring again. Another season starts soon. 

Do I want to do it the same way again?

I think I do.

Am I positive about that?

No.

Should I bring in some full-time help? Maybe someone to manage that help? And I can spend my days lining up work to keep them all busy, never touching a stone again?

It’s an option. It certainly has more leverage than what I’m doing now. But it doesn’t feel right.

Should I bring in more subs? Expand my network of professionals I work with and have a steady flow of work to keep an alternating lineup of pro's busy all the time?

Maybe.

A network of professionals that do great work and can do that great work without me present every day sounds like a good option. I love working with other pros. And there’s some leverage in this approach.

Could I take on two or three big jobs a year with an A-team of subs? And in between those jobs do some other fun, engaging, life-affirming, cool shit? Write, travel, build a house, start another business, just live?

That sounds pretty good.

It also sounds like I need more clarity on what I want. 

The best and worst part of this is that it’s up to me. I get to decide. Just like you do with your affairs. All these options and an infinite more are possible. We get to choose how we do this. That’s some awesome responsibility.

What will we do with it?

What Do You Want?

What would you do if you weren’t tied to your 9-to-5? Or whatever your version of that looks like. My 9-to-5 is being self-employed, which has it's perks, but it’s still a job. It still requires me to show up, do the work, and get paid. If you didn’t have to do that anymore, if you had total freedom, what would you do?

Most of us dream about having complete control over our time. No boss, no deadlines, no obligations but those of our own making. But that begs the question: What do we actually want?

I don’t think many of us know.

Years ago, some friends and I were talking about what we’d do if we were rich. One of them, and I don’t mean to pick on him because I think this is completely relatable, said he’d "get in really, really good shape and drink a lot of beer." We don’t have to wait until we’re rich to do that. We can do that now.

I think almost all of us crave the ability to control our lives. But almost none of us know what we would do with that freedom.

Travel? Sure. That sounds great. But is that the whole plan? Just travel… forever?

I don’t know what the right answer is. Maybe the answer is different for everyone. Maybe it’s creating, serving, unplugging, or just being. But I do think it’s a question worth answering. And we might find that we don’t have to be rich or live with absolute freedom to start living the lives we want right now.

But what do I know? I’m not rich and I’m not in great shape. Hell, I don’t even drink beer.

Mailbox Money

Are you collecting money on a regular basis from something you created in the past? Something that keeps earning long after the initial work has been done?

A book you wrote and published years ago about the best walking trails in southern Italy. Proceeds from rental property in Caribou. An app that helps florists track their inventory. Stocks that pay quarterly dividends. A song you wrote for a Taco Bell commercial.

That’s what some people call mailbox money: income that keeps coming in long after the work is done. It frees you from the endless cycle of trading your time for an hourly wage.

Lately, this has been on my mind. Have you ever thought about mailbox money? Have you tired it? What’s worked for you? What hasn’t? What are you working on now?

Leverage

It sounds like a euphemism for exploitation. For gaining an unfair advantage. And sometimes, it is. But it’s also a tool to create more impact.

Working alone, I can only stack so many stones in a day. There’s a limit. Bring in one person, and now twice as much wall gets built. I’m doing the same amount of work, but more gets done. That’s leverage.

What if I bring in a second person? Now we’re getting three times as much done. The project wraps up sooner. The next one starts sooner. I have the potential to make more money than if I worked alone. And if I’m not a jerk, the people working with me are making good money too.

There’s another option. The two people I brought in could build the wall without me. They get paid well, and I still make money on the project. And I’ve freed up my time. I’m no longer trading hours for dollars. That time can now go toward something else, hopefully something productive. Building the business. Finding more work. Designing future projects. Sourcing materials.

There’s a ceiling to how much money you can make when you’re only getting paid by the hour. That’s where leverage comes in. Labor is the oldest form of leverage. It’s also where the exploitation concerns come in. If I bring in more people to build walls, pay them by the hour, and make money off their work, am I just putting them into the same situation I’m trying to escape?

Yes. And I don’t know how to get around that, other than paying people well and not being an asshole.

There are other kinds of leverage I want to explore. Creating something once and selling it over and over, like a book, a film, or some kind of thingamajig. I haven’t figured that part out yet.

What are your thoughts on leverage? Do you use it in your work? How is it working for you?

Fore

How do you define work?

Sounds like a simple question. It’s what you do for money, right?

For years, my definition of work has meant building things with stone. Hard, physical labor. If I wasn’t exhausted at the end of the day, it didn’t feel like real work. If I wasn’t getting paid as a direct result of that labor, it didn’t count.

That’s a narrow way of thinking, but I’m trying to expand it.

When I was young, once in a while my grandfather, great uncle, and their friend Oscar would take me golfing. Sort of. I’d walk the nine-hole course with them, twice, while they played. I loved it. I didn’t learn much about golf. I was too busy hunting for golf balls.

As we moved from hole to hole, I’d walk along the edges of the course, where the grass met the woods. I learned all the best spots where people lost their balls. By the time the round was over, I’d have a stash that I’d sell back to the clubhouse. I don’t remember how much they’d give me, but it was enough to make my sister jealous. I felt rich.

Somehow, I lost that way of thinking.

How did I come to believe the right way to work was trading labor for an hourly wage?

How do I find those golf balls again?

By The Hour

For as long as I can remember, I thought the goal was simple: work for myself, make a living doing something I love, and have control over my time. And I’ve done that. No boss. No office. No punching of the clock.

But the more I do this, the more I see the trap I’ve built. I make most of my money as an hourly wage based on the hours I move stones around. There’s no leverage in that. I haven’t built a business, I’ve built a job. If I don’t move those stones around, I don’t get paid. I can decide when and where I work, but I’m still locked into the same equation: an hour of labor for a fixed dollar amount.

I love stonework. I don’t just want to keep doing it, I want to keep learning and getting better at it. And I want to do it on my terms.

Maybe that means taking a break from stonework during the long cold winters and working on other types of creative projects.

Maybe that means having weeks or months away from stonework between large projects to focus on other creative endeavors.

Maybe it means laying stones 3 or 4 days a week and exercising other creative muscles with that newfound time.

I don’t know how this is going to play out yet. Or even what, exactly, I want to do with that “other” time. Work? Yes. Definitely. But on what?

Something that doesn’t pay by the hour.

On A Thursday?

It didn’t look like work, at least not the way I’m used to defining it. I sat on the couch, drank coffee, and plucked the keyboard of my laptop. On a Thursday.

I won’t be getting paid for this morning’s work. There’s no one to bill for that time. There’s not much that’s tangible to show for the effort: a blog post not many will read, a few pages of a book in progress, failed negotiations for a piece of used equipment, and a search for granite. But I believe this work will pay off. Not in an exchange of time for money, but in a shift in mindset. Because I now believe that this is work. 

I was raised with the idea that real work happens with your hands. That if you’re not doing something physical, it’s not really work at all. This thinking wasn't forced on me.  It’s what I saw my dad do every day. He's a lobsterman. At 82, he’s still hauling traps. His work doesn’t pay an hourly wage, but it requires him to go out on the water to earn his living. There’s a kind of freedom in that—you don’t have to go hauling if you don’t want to. But if you don’t, you make no money.

That’s the kind of freedom I’ve built for myself. I mostly own my time, but I only get paid if I show up and move stone. Today, I’ll leave in an hour to go to a job site. No one is making me. But if I don’t go, I don’t make any money.

That feels like a trap. A trap I built for myself. A trap I want to get out of.

It starts with changing how I define work.

Job Posting

In Unemployable, I cheekily said I don’t like the term self-employed because I don’t want to be employed at all. What I meant was this: I don’t want a life where I trade forty hours a week for an hourly wage, fifty-two weeks a year. That structure never appealed to me. That’s why I started working for myself early on.

But I made a mistake.

Instead of laying the tracks to freedom, I built a job. One that I love. One that gives me freedoms I don’t take for granted. But also one where I’m still trading an hour of my labor—often hard, physical labor—for a predetermined unit of money.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

I’ve known this for years, but recently, it hit me differently. With new clarity, I realized I am fully responsible for designing my life in a way that works for me. I don’t have to follow the path society insists on. It was never the path I wanted to take.

So, how do I get off it?

I don’t know exactly what that will look like. But I aim to find out.

Ten Minutes

Sometimes, ten minutes is all you get.

Not enough time to write a book, or a page. But enough to write a paragraph. Enough time to put one thought out into the world.

The wall we’re building now is taking longer than I want it to. After moving snow, unfolding an intricate layer of tarps off the wall, harvesting more stone to build with, it feels like there isn’t enough time to build, to get anything done. Is it even worth working on the wall for a couple hours?

Yes, it is.A few hours are enough to add some stones to the wall.

Ten minutes isn’t enough to write a book. But it’s enough for a blog post. Those posts add up, like the stones in the wall.

Momentary Weakness

I'm having trouble saying no.

Maybe I'm just tired. The driving, the relentless snow, the shoveling, the stone harvesting, the wall building—it all adds up. And as we inch toward spring, maybe I’ve lost some nerve about the white space in my calendar that I claim to love.

It takes strength to say no to a project that’s almost a good fit. When I’m not at my best, I fall back on the 3 P’s—and Eliza’s sage counsel—to keep me from saying yes for the wrong reasons.

Memory Hole

A friend gave me a compliment yesterday. He said my work has improved a lot in the short time he’s known me. And I think he’s right.

I’m not bragging. Far from it.

It started when he sent me a picture of a wall I built four years ago, asking if I could search my memory hole for the type of stone I used. I surprised us both by remembering exactly. Then I joked that, in my memory hole, that wall looked a lot better than it did in the picture. He agreed.

Four years ago, when I finished that wall, I thought it was a masterpiece. Because it was better than most of the walls I’d built before, I assumed that meant it was great. At the time, it was the peak of my skill level. But now, four years later, I see it more clearly. It’s fine. Good, even. But it’s far from a masterpiece.

I’ve had this experience countless times. Isn’t it unavoidable in any creative field?

Twelve or so years ago, I built a wall for my friend’s mom. I was obsessed with it. I’d take pictures at the end of the day and stare at them in bed at night, mesmerized. In the history of stone walls, was this the best wall anyone had ever built?

I just took a break from writing this post to find a picture of it. Needless to say, it’s cringe.

Here’s the bad news: Compared to your current work, your old work is shit. And if you extrapolate that out, compared to what you’ll make someday, your current work is shit too. So really, you’re only ever doing shit work.

Now what do you do with that?

It sounds bleak, but I’m being overly nihilistic. There should be a natural evolution in our work. I should be better at my craft now than I was twelve years ago, or four years ago. I should be better today than I was yesterday.

I’m grateful for that. I’m grateful I’m growing. And I’m grateful I’m not paralyzed by the fear that someday, I might look back on what I’m doing now and cringe.

There Will Be Signs

The signs are all there.

I’m debating whether to say yes or no.
I’m putting off setting up a site visit.
If the project started tomorrow, I wouldn’t be excited.
I feel more obligated than eager.
I’m writing a blog post about it.

From a detached perspective, through the 3P framework, it’s obvious. I need to say no.

So why is it so hard?

It’s a friend of a friend.
The money would be good.
It’s in a neighborhood I’d love to work in.
That neighborhood is close to home, and I’m tired of driving an hour and a half both directions every day.

But it’s not the kind of work I want to be doing. From a detached perspective, it should be a simple no.

It’s not so simple.

Easy to Find, Hard to Reach

I spent a good part of yesterday’s snow day working on my other website, nortonstoneworks.com. Yes, I’m forty-six and still have snow days. It is one of the magical parts of childhood I have managed to hold on to all these years. Except yesterday morning, I wasn’t glued to Channel 6 news, watching the ticker-tape of closures scroll across the screen, hoping Boothbay would pay out like a winning lotto number. Now, for better or worse, I’m the grown up that gets to declare a snow day.

Instead of making snow forts and drinking hot cocoa, I drank a glorious amount of coffee and worked on SEO. I am actively trying to improve my website so I can be more easily discovered by potential clients. Sometimes this feels counterintuitive. When those opportunities come rolling in, I am going to say no to most of them.

What a strange game, spending time and money making yourself visible, only to turn most people away. Why not just close the laptop and go make those snow forts?

Because the goal isn’t to be everything to everyone.

You want to be easy to find and hard to reach.

You want to send out a clear signal that leaves no doubt about who you are and what you do so the right people can find you. The more specific the signal, the more opportunities it attracts. Part of the deal is having to say no more often.

It is a filter, not a net.

And if you do it right, the ones who make it through are the ones worth saying yes to.

Make Do

The long, rectangular pieces of granite likely came from the foundation of the old barn. You can tell they were hewn by hand; there are no saw marks, only the telltale signs of feathers and wedges. There is a lot of granite here on this old farm. These old stones were probably quarried right here on the property during the 1800s.

The fieldstone, with its beautiful camouflage of lichen and moss and its odd shapes that fit snugly together when stacked, is all coming from the woods behind the barn. It was likely set aside during the farming era of this property, or maybe later, when access roads were built during its logging days.

I don’t know many details about the history of this property, but there is something deeply satisfying about using materials that come directly from the site. It feels connected to the past, even if that connection is a little hazy.

There’s an enjoyable creative challenge in working with what’s available. Here is a pile of stones, make something happen. It can be frustrating, too. On most projects, if you need more stone, you go to the stone yard, pick what you want from a tidy display, and have it loaded onto your truck while you wait inside and joke with the sales reps. But that frustration is part of the process. Working through it, making do with what you have, is part of what makes the work so enjoyable.

Here, if we need a stone, we go out into the woods and find it. It’s a different process, one that’s closer to the way the barn’s foundation was built a couple hundred years ago. It’s more engaging this way. Constraints often sharpen creativity. Instead of making something from “anything,” you have to make something from “this.”

What Would You Say You Do?

What do you do?”

It’s a simple question. But I still don’t have a good answer.

“Stonework,” I usually say, though that tends to need clarification. “You know, building stone walls and patios, and stuff like that.” If I’m feeling daring , I might add, “I like the creative side of it.” But what does that even mean?

I think we assume people are privy to our private thoughts, our hopes, and our dreams. That when I say I do stonework, it’s obvious that I don’t just mean walls and patios. That I want to create amazing things with stone. That I want to take the techniques of an ancient craft passed down through millennia and push them forward with a creative twist. That I aspire to create pieces that are timeless and awe-inspiring, aiming to transcend from craftsman to artist.

But in reality, no one knows the secret longings in our hearts unless we show them.

That starts with describing what we do.

It’s scary to show the world who you are and what you want, so we wait. Until we’re more established. Until it feels safe. But you don’t have to win an Academy Award to call yourself an actor. You don’t have to have your work hanging at the Met to call yourself an artist. You don’t need permission to be what you already are.

I’m still working on how to describe what I do, my elevator pitch, if you like. I’d love to hear how you describe your own work. Share your ‘elevator pitch’ in the comments below!

How the Sausage is Made

We're pulling stones out of the woods. These woods used to be farms. Treeless. Before that, they were primordial forests. When the trees were cut and the land cleared, the rocks were in the way. So they dug them up and piled them into walls. They've been sitting here for hundreds of years. Quietly. I feel bad harvesting them, like I’m disrupting an old dog from a long nap.

All stones find their way to the wall through violent means. At least here, we're doing our own dirty work.

This is the End

I went to a retirement party last night. It was the real deal: drink tickets, wood-fired pizza, and a good band playing a little too loud for the space. When you're self-employed, you have to throw this kind of party for yourself. There’s no company to gift you an engraved watch and thank you for your time. Amy was the company. Her retirement party was also a wake for Pretty Flowers.

I’m in the same boat. I am Norton Stoneworks. I’m building things with stone, not a company that will live on after me. It’s a deliberate choice, one that I’m okay with. Still, I can’t help but wonder: What will I leave behind?

Legacy is a funny thing to worry about. By definition, we’ll never get to experience our own. But I think, deep down, we all want to live on forever in the hearts and minds of humanity. We want tangible evidence that we lived good lives. We paint our hands on cave walls. We carve our names into trees and the bottoms of desks. We try to leave proof that we were here, that it all mattered.

When Amy gave her speech last night, she didn’t dwell on her favorite clients or projects. Instead, she thanked all the people she’d worked with over the years—the ones she’d laughed and cried with, gotten mad at and been grateful for, and dug in the dirt with. In the end, that’s what matters most. The people.

There’s a lesson here we need to pay attention to.