Build Quality in your own life day after day

Build quality in your own life day after day.

There is a story about a soon to be retired carpenter that had worked for one home builder most of his life but now was ready to call it quits.

He told his employer of his idea to get out of the house construction business so that he could live a better life with his wife and family.

He knew he would miss his weekly paycheck, who wouldn’t, now a days, but he had pretty much made up his mind. He believed he had enough money saved up and his earned social security checks would be enough to help him get by.

The home builder was sorry to see his employee go and asked him one last favor. Could he build just one more house, only one more and then he could retire? He asked him and told him it was a personal favor that meant a lot to him.

The carpenter agreed and he proceeded to start working in the house. He worked for a few days and then weeks but soon it became clear that the man’s head wasn’t into building this house. Even though he told the builder he would do it, he was going through the motions but at a very slow pace.

He resorted to ship jack workmanship and used very low quality materials. Come to think about it, it was a very regrettable and unhappy way to end his long career, his many years of service to this home builder.

When he finally did manage to finish the house, the home builder came to inspect it and before he left, he looked at his employee in the eyes and told him, “I want you to live in this house. This is your house, my gift to you.

What a surprise and shock to this man. He was dumbfounded and then it hit him. If he had only known he was constructing his own house, he would have done it all differently. He would have used better materials, he would have paid more attention to details, he would have simply done it better. Now, he had to live in the home that he had carelessly built.

So it is with many people all over the world. As they construct their lives each and every day, they don’t give their best effort. They collect a paycheck but they don’t involve their minds and their souls in their work. They don’t feel pride for what they do. They are only concerned with a paycheck and on many occasions, they bad mouth their employers, the hand that feeds them. With great regret they look at their lives and what they have created and they feel sad.

Vince Lombardi, one of the great football coaches said, “The quality of a person’s life is in direct proportion to their commitment to excellence, regardless of their chosen field of endeavor”.
This is a very important message. It doesn’t matter what you do for a living. You might be the janitor in your company, what you do is very important to the company. Imagine what clients would think if they see the bathrooms dirty and the facilities full of trash?

You might be the guy that drives the company truck and makes deliveries. The way you treat your truck, how clean it is, even how well you drive, will send a message to clients and to everyone that sees your truck while you drive around.


A dirty bathroom, a dirty truck, will have an effect in clients and some will stop doing business with your company.

You might be a truck driver or a delivery person, when you deal with a client, at that particular moment, you represent the whole company.

In fact, at that particular moment, you are the company. The client doesn’t care who the President of the company is. The client only cares about the business he is transacting with you and whether you are satisfying his needs and doing what you are supposed to do to please him or her.

We are now competing with countries all over the world and now more than ever, we must all make a tremendous effort to turn out quality products and services. We must be leaders in those industries in which we compete. We must be certain that we do as good a job as it is possible and that way we will feel very proud of what we do.

The house we are building might be our own house once we are finished.