My greatest mentor
Is it possible to know a person without ever meeting them in person? Without a doubt, yes. My family now live in my wife´s grandparents old house since 2019. I never got the honor to meet them because they both died before I met my future wife. The person I am referring to here is Kurt, her grandfather. By walking in his footsteps and observing his sometimes very creative and especially fast solutions to technical problems on the premises, I think I now know him very well. And the reason is that his approach to problem solving is as antithetical to my own that is humanly possible. The contrast couldn’t be larger even if I tried. And that is an invaluable lesson to a guy like me.
I have lost count on how many times in the past 3 years that I have thought out loud “Oh… so you can actually solve that problem this way…”. If I should list all the examples, this blog post would become a book. But let’s go through a couple of my favorites. We have had an electrician on-site for a couple of days re-installing the wiring in our houses. And the rabbit hole goes deep indeed. The cable colors were mismatched. All our external lights (and there is a LOT of them) were connected to a single circuit. The electrician just shook his head with a smile and concluded that it was beyond salvation and much cheaper to just tear it out and start from scratch again. We have shifted the ungrounded wall outlets to modern grounded ones, and to my surprise, many of them already had ground wires ready – but the outlet was still not grounded! Why on Earth would you do that? Well, it was probably faster. Our garden lights could only work when the kitchen table lamp was turned on. We found a couple of live wires in a closet. When we moved old furniture, we found open (live) outlets so that the cupboard could be placed closer to the wall. It must have taken too long to attach a plastic cover.
In the other building, we couldn’t find one of the crucial electrical junction points when we were grounding the wall outlets. The electrician looked for several hours, and finally we could find it when he was jerking around with his long cable thing in the pipes, while I was listening were the sound came from. Luckily, I am an exceptional listener and could pinpoint the sound source with adequate accuracy. Consequently, we found the junction in the ceiling. Or more accurately, behind the ceiling. Kurt had added a wooden ceiling, and probably thought that the electrical installations were ready and done, and that he wouldn’t need to change anything. So, he just installed the ceiling and never bothered to saw a hole where the junction was… This is another one of the biggest WTF? moments for me. The ceiling had been painted with white color. Above my wardrobes the original color is visible because the paint brush could only reach so far. But it was faster, and you can’t really see it unless you look straight at it. The same goes for some of the lamps. He never bothered to take them down when painting the ceiling. My absolute favorite is a wall outlet in the storage room. It is a regular 220V wall outlet, but when I followed the cable for about 1,5 meters it ends in a regular 220V plug, that is connected to the next wall outlet, effectively blocking 50% of the available ports. It would have taken too long to install a proper junction in the outlet.
When my son was playing some weeks ago, he managed to rip one of the radiators from the wall. They are mounted on a steel frame with four screws, two at the top and two at the bottom. Only the bottom ones were attached (on all the radiator in the house, by the way). That creates a pretty good torque for a three-year-old. But the top ones that would have given a much stronger and rigid wall mount, should you choose to only attach half of the screws, were a bit more difficult to reach when mounting the radiator frame. And that would have taken more time. We also found an ungrounded external wall outlet that was connected to 16 A.
The list goes on and on, but I think you get the point by now. Kurt was the living epitome of the saying “Done is better than perfect”. He was by no means a stupid and sloppy man. On the contrary, he ran a very successful business venture for many years and made a lot of money. And you must give him credit. His solutions did work (for as long as he were alive at least). He also had a lot of projects around the premises. He built a private Tennis court, a little boat harbor, a double garage, and a lot more and upgraded this place to what now is our little piece of Heaven. All this while running a successful business with several employees. As I mentioned in the beginning, I am the literal opposite of this personality trait. I am not sure I could pull some of Kurt’s technical solutions off even if I tried. I know it works, but it is not correct. And that fact truly disturbs me, and it is a defining part of my personality. I also know that it is probably my greatest weakness. I have been working hard the past years to get rid of that destructive perfectionist approach of mine. It has been invaluable for me to get to know Kurt, and to incorporate some of his mentality in my own life. It has given my productivity a significant boost. If you are going to run a business, you must move fast. There is no other way around it. Thank you Kurt, you have been the greatest mentor I could ever wish for. Maybe it is the best thing that could ever happen to this place that I have moved here. With my perfectionist attitude, I will now finish Kurt’s projects, but I will make it correct this time. And the combination of us two will bring the place exactly to the point of diminishing returns with regards to invested time vs results. An interesting form of teamwork, this! If my past self had been the project leader, this place would never have existed. We would still be measuring the radiator screws with a laser or a micro-meter or something similar so that it would be perfect. The point of diminishing returns would have been so far behind us that it wouldn’t even be visible in the rearview mirror.
I can only imagine the friction we would have had, should we have met in person. We could probably have learned a lot from each other. This little story is a good example of how valuable intellectual diversity is.