Okay, folks, it’s time to get serious and get moving with this… change the world stuff. I’m going to create a timeline of transition with quantifiable markers. Otherwise, fear is going to win, and I, and all the people I hope to bless in my efforts, will lose, and I’ll just keep fixing cars and being unhappy with myself and what I’m doing with my life.
Get up. Get moving. No excuses.
So… quantifiable goal step #1. By 2 p.m. tomorrow, I will publish a post with a detailed, quantifiable timeline and strategy for exiting my auto mechanic business and transitioning to my change-the-world as best I can for the rest of my life.
If you don’t get a notification by 2 p.m. central time that links you to a post that lays out a quantifiable strategy, complete with timetable, for transitioning out of auto mechanics and into my change-the-world efforts, please feel free to blow up my various inboxes, chats, text messages, whatever, until I publish said plan.
I’m feeling a bit motivated today to get going because of a long conversation I had with one of my long-time customers today.
I’ll get to that in a moment.
Slept a good… 12 hours last night? (and here I am at 2:36 in the morning still awake again. 🤦♂️). Ate breakfast… I think? Yes, ate breakfast. Then I headed out to work. First car was a 2005 Ford F150 with a driver’s window that hand gone crashing down inside the door, so I pulled apart the door, found that it was the window regulator that had busted, and installed the new regulator/motor assembly that I’d brought with me because I’d guessed that such would be the problem.
Second job was diagnosing a coolant leak in a 2000 Chevrolet Silverado 1500 4.3 V6. Turned out to be the water pump that was leaking, but there wasn’t one in stock in the nearby store, so I ordered it in, unsure if I’d end up doing the repair today or not, as I had other cars on the schedule.
The third car, was… a no show. We’d arranged yesterday for me to go by today, but then when I was getting ready to head over there, he hadn’t answered all day, so I didn’t want to drive all the way out there (20 minutes the opposite direction from my next jobs). He finally replied saying he’d forgotten it was memorial day weekend and had gone out of town.
Odd, as we’d just confirmed everything yesterday, but… ok. So that one was a bust. In the meantime, though, waiting for a reply from that guy, the water pump came in from another city, so I was all set to do the water pump job. I didn’t really want to do it because it was already about 3 p.m., and those water pump jobs can be a big… pain in the tail, and I had another car after that one still to do all the way down in Springdale (I’d been in Rogers and Bentonville all day, but I decided to do it anyway.
Just as I was getting ready to head over to that one, I got a call from someone who’d just been in an accident and was concerned that the damage might blow a tire while they were trying to drive back to Missouri, so I went over there, pulled the wheel off, and used my 2 1/2 pound sledge hammer to pound the mashed metal back into a… safe place for the tire.
I took that job, despite it being an additional job on a long, tired day because it was going to be simple and quick money, not to mention it was helping someone in a bind trying to get home and wanting peace of mind on the drive.
Anyway, that job was easy as expected, so I headed over to do the water pump job. A job that should have probably taken me maybe 2 1/2 hours or so but ended up taking like 4ish, I think. Why? Not because it went badly (it actually went decently well), but because I got to talking with my customer about my nonprofit hopes. We talked for a good while, and she was super interested in what I wanted to do and wants to be kept in the loop. She also mentioned that she attends a baptist church with a very large congregation that happens to include our state’s governor as one of the attendees, and she said she thought her pastor would be super excited to have me to a presentation/fireside/thingy talking about coming together on common values and celebrating and admiring one another the good hearts we share, despite our differences in how we apply the beautiful values we hold in common.
So… that conversation with her is probably a huge catalyst to why I opened this post the way I did today. I get super passionate talking about this stuff, and I’m able to connect and inspire the people I’m conversing with, and I love it!
…I just have to get rid of this financial fear garbage. So what if I lose all my money in the effort and have to start all over again! Not like I haven’t done it before. And it’s not like I’ve ever actually used the money that I have to “live large”, so to speak. I rarely spend my money on myself just for something I want. I just… save it. If I buy something, it almost always has to either make me money or not lose me money.
So what has my money done for me other than grow? (which is nice, I grant you). The answer is not really much. It’s given me some opportunities, for sure, but I haven’t taken advantage of what I was trying to save all that money up for because I felt like I didn’t have enough money yet to stop the earning and saving, but our governments’ responses to Covid (for good or ill or both) sort of ruined all that–for me, at least. Inflation has skyrocketed. Everything I saved my money for has only kept pace with what I was saving it for in the first place, effectively making as though I hadn’t made almost anything (housing prices have gone up by about exactly as much as the money I’d saved up to buy a modest home).
So… once again, I’m, in a sense, starting over? I know it’s not that simple, as I have a decent amount of money saved up, and that’s a blessing. I’m just not really any closer to what I was saving my money up for, and though part of me wants prices to drop to where they were two years ago, that would mean millions of people being upside down in their mortgages like 2009, and I don’t want that for people, so… I’m left to either go bust my butt and earn more money as I am, or finally just say, whatever, I’m gonna go do my best to change the world, and if I lose everything and have to work random jobs here and there to feed myself while I live in my car (again), but I’m able to make the kind of difference I want to make in the world, then so be it.
Lift the World.
Right?
So I finished up that water pump and great-conversation visit, and I headed to my last job in Springdale to a van that the shifter wasn’t working properly on. I went out there, and the issue was with the shift cable bushing being busted out.
None of the several sizes of shift cable bushings I had were the correct size. In fact, I’d never seen a shift cable bushing like the one it needed, so I managed to create a workable bushing that should last them at least long enough to get their hands on the correct bushing for the van, and I went home.
So here I am, 3 a.m., and tomorrow is going to be a big day. The plan will be developed. The timeline created, and the countdown will begin.
Bring it on.
Lift the World
~ stephen
Lift the World 