Chapter 8

A year and a half passed, Nicholas completed his two-year degree at Riverside Community College. As was his habit, he had meticulously researched his next steps. A state university would cost $35,000 a year, a pile of money he didn’t have. With some scholarships, loans and grants, he might bridge the gap, but the financial reality remained stark. He hated the delay but accepted it as the price of his circumstances. He reminded himself of his mantra concerning obstacles and decided to take a year off and work full-time, building up enough savings to pay for his next steps.

Ever since that doctor in juvenile detention had suggested writing as an aid to learning, Nicholas had maintained the practice of daily journaling religiously. By now, skipping even a single day felt like missing a meal—a physical discomfort he couldn’t ignore. His writings weren’t profound literary works, just observations about life, questions that arose from his experiences, connections between ideas—essays in the tradition of Montaigne or Hoffer. He had notebook after notebook filled with his precise handwriting, each volume a milestone marking his evolution.

The past year’s coursework had gifted him with three ideas that now consumed his thinking. In psychology, his professor had casually mentioned the concept of “flow”—that state of complete absorption where time warps and dissolves, where you become the activity itself. The professor had described it as the optimal human experience—the sweet spot where challenge and skill align perfectly.

During his relentless pursuit of understanding the lessons of the Stoics, he encountered Aristotle’s concept of arete in his Intro to Philosophy class. The professor passed right by it, but it ignited his imagination. The notion of arete—the virtue of excellence and the pursuit of life’s mastery—deeply resonated with his new quest.

He found himself watching for people who embodied this quality—individuals who transcended mere competence, whose expertise had transformed into something approaching art. June, the waitress at the Andy’s Diner, was one of those people. She moved through her shift, her manner as cheerful and warmly welcoming at the end of her shift as it was at the beginning. She balanced six plates up her arm and served them, remembering every table’s order.

Or his European History professor, whose lectures left students silent and thoughtful. Minds expanded.

Or Ray at the auto shop, who could diagnose instantly diagnose engine problems with his ears alone and honestly explain them to a customer who could barely get the hood open. And who delivered what he said he would. Every. Single. Time

The connection between these seemingly different concepts—flow, arete, and the Japanese concept of kaisen (constant improvement), crystallized into a question that wouldn’t leave him: How did one build excellence from nothing? What was the architecture of mastery?

So, he decided to kill two birds with one stone. Keeping his Saturday job at Ray’s, he began looking for carpentry work during the week. Not because he knew anything about construction—he was as green as they came—but because he wanted to witness the building of skill from its foundation, to understand mastery by attempting it himself.

Through Ray’s brother Hank, Nicholas found Al West, a subcontractor who specialized in custom homes and kitchen renovations. According to Hank, Al was seeking a laborer who could follow directions without complaint. Nicholas had no experience, but he possessed a strong back and a willingness to work.

He got the job.

Al West was a man in his fifties, skin tanned to leather from decades under the sun, his frame whip-thin but corded with muscle that seemed made of something denser than ordinary flesh. The man could—and did—work Nicholas’ dick into the dirt without breaking a sweat. On Nicholas’s first day, Al handed him a tool belt and issued his only instruction: “Keep up.”

By lunchtime, Nicholas’s shoulders burned with a fire he hadn’t known muscles could produce. By day’s end, he could barely lift his arms high enough to open his car door. When Nicholas returned the next morning, moving stiffly but determined, Al merely nodded as if he’d placed a silent bet with himself on whether this college boy would last the day.

“Most college boys don’t last a day,” was all he said, the words hanging between them like a challenge.

Nicholas met his gaze evenly. He wasn’t most college boys.

For the first few weeks, Nicholas was nothing more than silent human machinery—carrying lumber, hauling debris, holding materials in place while Al worked. But beneath his labored breathing and sweat-soaked shirts, Nicholas was doing something else entirely: he was watching. Watching how Al moved, how he measured, how he made decisions without hesitation. Each night, no matter how exhausted, Nicholas recorded it all in his journal that night—sketching tool configurations, documenting terminology, noting the subtle ways Al’s body anticipated the demands of each task before they arose.

A part of his first few paychecks went to tools, most bought at a local pawn shop. Not because Al suggested it, but because Nicholas recognized that the distance between himself and mastery could be measured partly in equipment, in having the right tool for the task.

Al was framing a house from the foundation up, something Nicholas found profound. He had never created anything of permanence before. There was something almost holy in standing within a space where nothing had existed, the realization that they were creating shelter for some family.

Al wasn’t a teacher in any conventional sense. He didn’t explain his methods unless directly questioned, and even then, his answers came in fragments, practical rather than theoretical.

“Why sixteen inches on center for the studs?” Nicholas had asked early on, watching Al frame a wall with metronomic precision.

“Code says so,” Al replied without looking up, his hammer striking a nail with three perfect blows.

Later, when Nicholas persisted, Al elaborated slightly: “Sixteen inches means your sheet goods line up right. Plywood’s four feet wide. Sixteen goes into forty-eight three times or ninety-six six times. Makes the math easy.”

From Al, this constituted a dissertation.

Yet he was teaching Nicholas, whether intentionally or not. Nicholas absorbed knowledge through observation, through mistakes that earned him growled corrections, through repetition until his muscles memorized what his mind understood. His body was developing wisdom independent of thought—the same way a kid learns to ride a bicycle.

What fascinated Nicholas most was watching Al frame. The man possessed an almost supernatural sense of dimensions and space. Setting studs sixteen inches on center, Al rarely bothered with measurements after the first one. The nail gun would fire in rapid succession—pop, pop, pop—and the wall would stand ready, every spacing precise. Decades of identical motions had calibrated his body to the mathematics of construction. His arm knew what sixteen inches felt like without needing the certainty of a tape measure.

Nicholas wrote about him extensively in his journal. Years and years of rising at 4:00 AM, arriving on site by six, enduring whatever elements nature provided—rain or shine, summer swelter or winter freezing. The physical demands alone would break most people; if you haven’t worked outdoors during a midwestern winter, Nicholas wrote, you have no conception of hardship. Your fingers go numb, yet you must still manipulate nails and screws. Wind slices through whatever layers you wear. The mucus in your nostrils crystallizes with each breath. But the work continues regardless, because the work is the job.

Al would have been bewildered if someone had remarked on the difficulty. It was simply the job, its demands unremarkable. His favorite saying was “it is what it is”. He didn’t think he was special. There were hundreds, maybe thousands, like him scattered throughout the city. Mostly men, but some women, perfectionists who could drive a nail with three perfect strikes, who could cut trim to within a sixteenth of an inch without measuring twice.