My dad didn’t know how to be a dad. He got married to a high-powered DC businesswoman who out-earned him significantly, and when they decided to have me, she started the process of transitioning to stay-at-home work in her field and my dad gave up his hobbies to pursue senior roles in his field. He was a career manager, builder, and educator, and these things made up his identity as a person once he committed to his work. Over the next 15 years he rose to the pinnacle of his field, becoming one of the most accomplished and notable builders of his era in the United States – over those same 15 years, he raised me as his employee.

This is not to say that my dad sucked as a parent. I hardly noticed that he traveled sometimes up to 20 days a month, worked 60+ hour weeks for over a decade, and performed high-stakes and stressful work. With that incredibly full plate he still coached every sports team I was on – basketball, baseball, and football for about 10 years. He took time to practice 1-on-1 with me pretty regularly, too. He was regularly home for family dinner, took my younger sister and I on a handful of great vacations, and taught me to drive a manual transmission. The picture I’m painting here is of a pretty solid 90s suburban dad, but what made him uniquely effective and terrible as a parent to a young man was his management style.

Dad’s management philosophy was rooted in employee development. By developing your employees within the business you increase retention, depth of product and process knowledge and history, grow your own future management candidates, and oftentimes end up with a more cohesive working unit. Each of these aspects of good business have positive knock on effects, but the ultimate goal is to build a team driven by a desire to generate a brilliant work product. Whatever it is you’re doing, he believed, your goal should be to excel at it. This sounds like it should be a given, but in construction’s ever-tightening race to deliver on time and under budget while contending with constantly shifting time-tables, moving development targets, and the reality that one contractor’s errors will compound the difficulty of another contractor’s work, the tendency is for construction companies to adopt a bare-minimum mentality. My dad hated the concept of setting the bar as low as possible and encouraging workers to clear that bar by the smallest margin possible. Ultimately, the bare-minimum model would take over essentially all disciplines in the construction field. While in the office, he watched the boulder he’d pushed uphill so laboriously begin backsliding. But at home, he had an environment free of market pressures that might dilute or otherwise confound his philosophy. He also had an ideal candidate with a blank resume and who hadn’t as of yet formed any real work identity, that he could shape as his model employee – me.

My childhood is filled with the same kinds of stories that a lot of American millennials have: getting yelled at to the point of tears when trying to memorize multiplication tables, being forced to perform outdoor chores, getting dragged to hardware stores and then acting as surgical assistant while the parent performs handiwork. The unusual context surrounding my versions of these types of stories was the constant specter of my father, ever the executive, putting me through performance reviews, establishing short and long-term goals, and instilling in me the values, vocabulary, and perspective of an empowered worker. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the time that I was tasked with shoveling the driveway, and applied about 0% of myself to accomplishing the task. After about 20 minutes, Dad came out to check on me, saw that I wasn’t taking it seriously, and declared, “Alex, if you worked for me I would fire you.” I was six.

Our conversations were full of utilitarian concepts like my ‘toolkit,’ which got employed everywhere from which shots I was comfortable taking on the basketball court, to higher level tools like confident speech, clear communication, and speaking concisely (coincidentally, my absurdly verbose narrative voice can be traced back directly to that last one, a way for me to rebel against his influence on how I expressed myself). There are dozens of similar concepts I could describe, but for today I want to focus on one specific set of rules that he imparted to me, and continues to hold up as one of his strongest nuggets of wisdom. Honestly, I agree with him on that point; if there was anything my dad was truly a master of, it was developing tidy, easily digestible packets of knowledge that were sticky enough and concise enough to be remembered, and useful enough and true enough to be frequently applied to day-to-day situations.

Here are what my dad refers to as “The Five Rules.”

1. First thing’s first, one step at a time

Don’t do things out of order, and don’t try to multitask or skip ahead. One mnemonic device used to great effect in this ruleset is that each rule has a callback to where it is in the order. In this instance, the words ‘first’ and ‘one’ are important for the first rule, rule number one. There’s a good amount of sense to this rule. None of these are particularly mind-blowing, of course, and they’re not meant to be. There are other rules, sayings, and mnemonics for specialized situations, but these are THE Five Rules, and they need to be pretty universal.

The key to this rule, in my mind, is to avoid confusion. My dad and I both have pretty pronounced ADHD, and while I take medication for mine, he never bothered. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that the first, most essential rule for him is one about being methodical and setting limits on the scope of your actions.

2. Two sets of eyes on everything

Get somebody to check your work. Simple, sure, but this rule is about safety as much as it is about trying to avoid errors in your work. Remember, my dad constructed buildings for a living. It is very, very easy for a superintendent to stay in a construction trailer all day answering emails and doing paperwork. A good superintendent, though, will be walking their site and making sure that no work is performed in a vacuum. Whether it’s roughing in windows and doors, measuring footings for concrete, or installing fall protection for your workers, each task performed incorrectly will have an impact on your project’s budget and schedule. And if your safety efforts are poor, it can cost a life, regardless of the ocean of regulatory headaches it will invite.

The more straightforward interpretation of this rule, which is something along the lines of “have someone read a particularly important email with you before you send it,” is still important. But the depth of application here goes further than just ‘two heads are better than one.’

3. Categorize, Prioritize, Realize | Accumulate, Analyze, Actualize | Observe, Identify, Execute

Rule 3 is the one that has never quite solidified. I’ve heard half a dozen different Rule #3’s in the past 25 years. In keeping with the theme, Rule 3 should have three parts, so I went a head and provided three versions of the rule, each with three words. Each set has the same general purpose but lend to different applications.

CPR, Categorize, Prioritize, Realize, is a three-step process for tackling a large amount of tasks – first, put them in categories, then prioritize the categories and the items in each category, and then get to work until you’ve made it happen. Funny enough this is exactly what my approach was for this Brain Dump series. I had a massive list of ideas in a notepad document that was impossible to imagine actually getting completed, but in Part 0, I was at least able to categorize the ideas. The Boil-Down series takes my most prioritized ideas from those categories and tries to realize them as finished products, or at least fleshed out concepts that let me have some closure.

The Three A’s is a fun mnemonic and also uses my first initial so I thought it was a decent way to play into my dad’s theme. It’s not too different from CPR, but the language points toward data as opposed to a to-do list. Accumulate data, analyze that data, and then make decisions based on what you learned. I work with a lot of data at my day job, and these three steps are essential to my work.

Observe, Identify, Execute is the only one of these three that I have heard straight from Dad, while the other two are my takes on the spirit of the rule. It definitely sounds more like my dad when compared to the others. He’s aiming for a less specific type of direction, but is still emphasizing the importance of watching and learning first, narrowing down and defining a path forward, and then performing the action or actions chosen based on the previous steps. The word ‘execute’ has my dad’s fingerprints on it. He liked to approach problems by staying quiet for a long time, letting other people talk, and when he decided on a path of action he was specific and decisive.

4. Consistency + Predictability = Reliability + Trust

This is probably my favorite rule. Dad really liked using algebra as a lens for decision making. The clear, evenly applied rules of algebra were like art to him, and he endeavored to reflect that simplicity and order wherever he could. Again, we have a rule #4 with four words, and the format is pleasing to look at and easy to remember. But the content of this rule is so widely applicable and so impactful when heard for the first time that I’ve watched it set people completely at ease with me when I bring it up in an interview or performance review.

The first time I heard this rule was when Dad was teaching me to drive, and it wouldn’t surprise me if that’s how he first conceived it. One of the major keys to avoiding accidents on the road is to be predictable to other drivers, and the easiest way for someone to see you as predictable is when you are consistent. If you are consistent, and therefore predictable, then you will be seen as reliable by most people. Finally, if you describe someone as consistent, predictable, and reliable, it’s reasonable to say that you can trust them. None of these words require a positive inclination, either. This process holds up perfectly well regardless of whether we’re talking about a safe driver or an alcoholic. It’s also worth pointing out that on each side of the equation there is an intrinsic value and an extrinsic one. Consistency is something you control, while others decide if you can be described as predictable. Similarly, reliability is on you, while trust is given by others.

Like I said, though, when I’m in a job interview and someone asks me what my goals are, it’s low-hanging fruit to say “I aim to become more reliable and trustworthy,” and when they ask the inevitable follow-up question about how I plan to accomplish that goal, the answer is plainly obvious: “by being more consistent and predictable in my performance.” Every time, without fail, the person across from me loosens their shoulders, softens their eyes and appreciates that they’ve received a well considered response. Dad would say that this is an excellent rule to have in your toolkit. He’d also say that how you’re perceived is just as important as the content of your message, so being prepared to deliver a straightforward and satisfactory answer can make a significant impact on someone with whom you’d like to make a good first impression. Actually, he would use a heck of a lot fewer words – he’d probably just say “that’ll work.”

Totally off topic, but as a guy who highly valued succinct communication, one of my dad’s favorite responses to a long, drawn out email or an overly wordy interview question was, “no.” Hey Jeff, do you think we should [400 words later]? “No.”

5. Everything Happens For a Reason

If there’s one rule that will be misunderstood at first glance, it’s this one. This rule does not mean that divine providence is in control, so everything that happens was meant to happen. What it means is, things are the way they are because somebody made it that way. Most strange quirks, annoying hoops to jump through, and situations that seem completely asinine at surface level have, at some historical point, come into existence for a very tangible and explainable reason. Sometimes that reason is completely bonkers and there’s a much better solution. Other times, many times, you’ll learn something valuable by discovering why things are happening the way they are. This is the cause and effect rule viewed in reverse. For every effect, there was a cause. The added layer here is to question the cause to determine how to continue forward. I could probably argue that ‘for every effect there was a cause’ is a better way to write the rule, but Everything Happens For a Reason is five words, it’s catchy, and it’s got a little mysticism in it which carries my dad’s personality.

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Them’s the rules. Dad swears he’ll write a book about these someday, probably with relevant stories and expository reasoning. Unfortunately I think that if he was going to, he would have done it by now. So I put it on my Brain Dump list as something I wanted to write about, and I could imagine this type of writeup growing into a book someday. It’s a single sprout from the immense and deep root system of wisdom that I have to draw from thanks to my unusual upbringing, and I’m certain to write more about that in the future. For now, though, I’m happy to have finally written out the few paragraphs about each of these rules that I’ve composed in my head a thousand times over the past couple decades.