The AuthorJoseph C. Kunz, Jr.

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.

My brothers and I were not told that we had to help. We knew we should.

By my middle teenage years, I had already begun learning something that would remain with me for the rest of my life: when something important needed to be handled, waiting for somebody else to solve it was not much of a plan.

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 oil 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 to repair it.

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 remember doing the same kind of thing 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 when I was finally earning enough money to buy my mother a brand-new washer and dryer.

Looking back, these do not seem like heroic events to me. 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 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 normally hope to teach his son. His absence and his choices showed me very clearly the kind of husband and father 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.

I knew I had to keep a closer eye on her.

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, where she could receive around-the-clock attention.

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.
Markets change.
Equipment breaks.
People disappoint us.
Mistakes have consequences.
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 also 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 also recognize a larger instinct behind it:

Avoid single points of failure.
Build alternatives.
Develop skills.
Understand the system.
Keep reserves.
Preserve options.
Do not willingly put yourself in a position where the loss of one person, customer, source of income, or plan can bring the entire 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 readers 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 ultimately 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 Christianity asks responsible people to become passive. I do not believe faith excuses poor preparation, careless decisions, financial irresponsibility, or failure to do the work that belongs to us.

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 problems I should solve.

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?

Why I Write

That question is one reason I write now.

I am not writing because I believe I have reached the point where everything fits neatly together.

I have not.

I write because decades of work, marriage, fatherhood, business, money, mistakes, faith, responsibility, disappointment, gratitude, and ordinary life have given me questions worth examining and lessons worth handing forward.

Some of my convictions have grown stronger with time.

Others have become more complicated.

Some things I once thought were simple no longer seem simple at all.

That does not discourage me.

It makes them worth writing about.

My essays are places where I can examine an idea honestly, test it against lived experience, consider the strongest objection I can find, and see what remains standing afterward.

I am especially interested in the places where good things can become disordered things:

where confidence becomes self-sufficiency;
where wealth becomes identity;
where independence becomes isolation;
where responsibility becomes control;
where conviction loses humility;
and where faith becomes language we repeat instead of truth we struggle to understand and live.

I do not want to write merely to produce clever sentences or display ideas.

I want the work to be useful.

I want to pursue wisdom that helps somebody live.

Sometimes that means offering an answer.

Sometimes it means making an important distinction.

Sometimes it means finding better words for a problem a reader has carried for years.

And sometimes it means admitting that a serious question deserves more than the easy answer we have been giving it.

The Four Pillars

Over time, much of my work has gathered around four enduring questions:

I call them the Four Pillars of a Well-Built Life.

They are not branding categories invented for a website.

They emerged gradually from the subjects I kept returning to because life kept returning me to them.

Together they provide the architecture behind my essays and books.

But they are not final answers.

They are a way of organizing the questions.

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.

I remain deeply interested in work and wealth because they matter.

I remain interested in responsibility because freedom cannot survive without it.

I remain interested in legacy because eventually every serious builder must ask what all the building was for.

And I continue returning to faith because, underneath everything else, there remains the question no amount of competence, money, preparation, or self-reliance can finally answer:

What is strong enough to carry a human life?

This website is where I work on that question in public.

The essays and books are not instructions from a man standing above the problems of ordinary life.

They are field notes from someone still inside them.

I write for ordinary serious people trying to think clearly, carry their responsibilities, build useful things, care for the people entrusted to them, and leave something worthwhile behind.

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.