Member-only story
You’re Doing Everything Right. You’ve Just Got Your Location Wrong
Don’t underestimate the importance of “where”
I pulled into the gardening center expecting to be greeted with champagne but it never came.
It was my big day. My first solo assignment of loading and delivering a truck-bed full of mulch to a client. For the weeks prior, I’d spent countless hours learning how to operate what’s known in certain circles as an “earth moving” tractor to effectively move big things.
The boss’s right-hand man called me delicate pretty regularly.
I didn’t really fight that. He drank a lot. But he wasn’t far off. At the age of 16, I wasn’t exactly the handiest of young men. I’d put at least a half-dozen dents in the side of the company truck while practicing learning how to effectively move big things.
“I’m gonna show them!” I said to myself. “I’m gonna prove them wrong!” And to my surprise, that fateful morning, I’d actually gotten things right. I handled the gear shifts with ease. My once bumpy technique fell into a smooth rhythm. Even with prying eyes burning into me, I moved a pile of mulch from tractor to truck 19 times without making a single mistake. The delivery went equally well. The ton of mulch I’d dumped landed perfectly in the center of the client’s driveway.
