This morning it was cold when I got up. I turned up the thermostat and nothing happened, so I got a hammer and climbed up into our attic. Using my phone’s light to see, I stepped over HVAC ductwork and under beams to get to the furnace’s panel. I turned off the power and then I hit the furnace a couple times with the hammer. I flipped it back on and waited, crouching in the freezing dark. It cycled up, the pilot flame lit, and then after a moment the gas fired and the furnace started to heat our house.

This morning started the same as four of my last seven days.

I installed the furnace a couple of years ago. I read a Mr. Money Mustache blog where he replaced a furnace in around a day. It took me around three and a half months working weekends to learn HVAC and put it in.

A friend of mine is going through some hard times in his business. Within six weeks, a key manager that he invested in left for another company. Seven clients in a declining industry cancelled their plans and dropped his monthly revenue by more than a hundred thousand dollars.

It sucks.

We’ve all experienced some form of this. Either through our choices, misfortune, or a combination of the two we experience challenge as a result of losing.

Winning is great. Winners are rewarded. People love winners and winning tends to accumulate advantages.

Losing is great too. Losing is the beginning of opportunity, learning, and growth. While winning’s rewards are visible and immediate, losing’s rewards are internal and hidden by time.

While in Thailand these last two weeks, I completed training on Nitrox and advanced wreck diving on a WW2 wreck.

In a wreck, you simultaneously have to monitor normal dive constraints along with the added challenges of low visibility in a constrained environment. I was managing my air, depth, no decompression time, my buoyancy, a dive light, and a spool of nylon line. The nylon line is for you to follow blindly out of the ship if someone accidentally “silts up” the dust in the wreck by kicking it with a fin. While you dive, you have to play it out and tie it off at regular intervals with specific techniques to avoid it creating other problems.

It’s like navigating a multi-level labyrinth in the dark, with a time limit, where you risk death if you lose track of what’s happening or don’t complete tasks correctly.

It’s really fun.

A couple of years ago, I took a month off and followed the changing autumn leaves along the length of Japan. I started in Sapporo and slowly made way to Fukuoka by train. It was an epic trip. Afterwards, I had an incredibly productive finish to the year.

When it comes to getting things done, I think we place too much of an emphasis on “time management” and not enough on “energy management.” A big piece of the energy puzzle is simply time off.

Which is what I’m going to be doing for the next couple of weeks. I’m heading to DCBKK in Bangkok and then to an island in the Gulf of Thailand for some diving and, if the weather cooperates, sailing and climbing.

If you’re at DCBKK, give me a holler. Otherwise, enjoy the wonderful autumn and I’ll be back at the desk in November.

Featured image is Religious melancholia and convalescence used under public domain.

“If you want advice, ask for money. If you want money, ask for advice.”

I like this adage, not because it’s a hard and fast rule, but because it speaks to the sideways nature of things.

There’s a difference between our intent and our effect.

The founder of Patagonia didn’t have an aim to build an outdoor clothing empire, but rather to improve the tools he used for rock climbing. He realized that solving his own and others problems provided a way to make a living.

Concerning growth, there are different perspectives to see the work you do.