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Foreign. Hello, people. Welcome back to Buildwing. Build Whip. This is number 47 and this is a little different. I've titled this one Shame A Life Lesson. Now, rather than share this week's happenings as I do, if you've listened to one of these before or read the newsletter and this week's happenings to give you you a brief glimpse, we had Con Expo. We added 57 new training courses to bill it improve and our expenses for the first few months of the year have been perfectly in line with budget. A big win. Rather than talk about the happenings, I wanted to talk about one of the most important lessons I've learned as a growing man and business leader, which is how to process shame. Now, the dictionary defines innovation as the introduction of something new without calling it innovation. This is what we've always been aiming to do, introducing and furthering a new way of thinking and doing within the dirt world. Not surrounding building, the dirt world has building figured out, but regarding the attraction, training and development of people, which is what we've always done and will continue to do. And why are we on this mission to build the dirt world's next generation? If the status quo was working, if what we've always done was working, we wouldn't need 350, 400,000 workers right now to meet just this year's demand. We wouldn't have a terribly unhealthy workforce or we wouldn't be viewed as the bottom rung of the social ladder. So if what we were doing was working, we wouldn't be scratching our heads right now. Everybody knows this. When I talk about it, no one says, no, you're wrong. Everybody knows it. And it's not to say what we've done is wrong. It got us here. It got us here. It's been right in the past, but we know it's not right going forward. We know that it's not right going forward. There's a blinking red light again, with a lot of these statistics. You can go into drug overdose, you can go into suicide, you can go into just basic worker health, you can go into wages and what's happened there. You can go to inflation and construction projects, you can go to declining productivity. All sorts of different metrics are showing that we are not winning. And so what we have been doing it will not get us further. It's not wrong, but. But it's not getting us further into the future. And that is unacceptable. That should be unacceptable to everybody listening, everybody in the industry. And we're doing our part to ensure that it is unacceptable. And while most businesses proclaim boundless innovation, it's in their values. It's painted on buildings. All we do is innovate. I've realized as we have innovated, as we have been trying to chart a new path, that most businesses and organizations and even people, they don't innovate. They choose what's worked for others and for good reason, because it's safe. Look no further than I just came back from the biggest industry trade show. Look at every booth. Are they all that different from one another? Not really. Let's just do what everybody else does, but for good reason. We don't want to stand out. We don't want there to be risk. This has worked in the past. Let's just keep doing it. That's most businesses, that's most everybody. And they stay far from innovation, actually, despite the rhetoric, because innovation, it's not sexy as people talk about it, make it out to be. It's messy, it's frustrating, it's painful. It wastes money and it hurts people. And as a leader, it destroys your confidence and furthers every doubt that you've had and that you didn't even know was there. And how do we know this? How do I know this? Well, I am speaking from experience, because as a business over the years, we have overspent by millions of dollars of investors, money. We've laid off and fired many people. We've had many people leave. And we've questioned everything, professionally and personally, everything. And through it all, me, you know, professional side over here. Personally, I've been in my 20s for a majority of my time in business. So I've been sitting there also asking the question, who the fuck am I? Who is this guy? Who am I? And so you can imagine the collision between those two things. The questioning of oneself figuring out who you are, trying to figure out who you are, versus failing many really good people, customers and investors. And the result of all of this was one word, and that's shame. We're far more hateful to ourselves than anyone is on the outside to us. And I put all of the weight of failure on my shoulders. It was like a storm cloud following me around, everywhere I went. Everywhere. And this internal dialogue of abuse. It wasn't a day, it wasn't a week, it wasn't a month. It was years. It was years. And did abusing myself, did carrying the shame around, did it serve me? You can take a guess. Now. By the grace of God, faith came to my rescue. And I'll spare you the details if you listen to the podcast. I've alluded to it here or there, but I really don't like anybody preaching to me and so I'll avoid doing that as well. But as I learned into faith and through the process thus far, it'll be a lifelong process. I learned, or am learning how to forgive myself. And I have a responsibility to learn from my failures. I own my failures. However, there's no sense in letting them hold me captive. Why senselessly prolong the pain? Why let the pain of failure continue to abuse me. And through life, through business, especially as we continue to innovate, as we continue to chart a new course, which I I wholeheartedly believe we are, I will continue to fail. And all I can do is continue learning in the face of those failures. But then forgive myself and keep doing my best from there. Learn, forgive, continue to do my best. And the relief of this very simple concept has brought me immeasurable peace. It's a calm, it's a kindness that I've never felt. And it's not just made me better for me, but it's made me so much better for everybody around me. So what shame have you held on for too long? What shame have you held onto for too long? What can you learn from it? How can you forgive yourself? And how can you, instead of senselessly beating yourself up, use it as motivation to keep doing your best? Because at the end of the day, that's all we can do. All we can do is our best. And oftentimes we will fall short. We will fail people, we will hurt people. All we can do is we can learn from it, we can forgive ourselves, and we can keep doing our best. So that's a little bit on shame, what I've learned over the past year. As always, I appreciate you listening. Feel free to write me anytime. Aaron A a r o nildwit.com and with that, we'll see you on the next one. Stay dirty.