Comfort is a sign of stagnation. If you aren’t uncomfortable, odds are you’re at a plateau. When you climb up a hill, you’re pushing yourself; you’re straining to achieve greater heights—heights you can’t achieve if you’re strolling across a plateau. When I went to my first Austin Builders Association meeting, there were about 500 people gathered there and I felt really uncomfortable and out of place.

God won’t ask you for your balance sheet when you get to heaven. Today may be a victory, but tomorrow may be a defeat. Your ego can be your worst enemy. There’s nothing stopping you from eventually becoming the butt of your own joke. Be careful, especially that the praise of those around you doesn’t exceed the worth of what you give to them. Humility is a currency worth far more than any boasting or hot air. So, spare yourself the censure and the ego, don’t read your press releases. Do the best job you can, be grateful for the victories and use the defeats as lessons on how to grow.

Everyone has them, but nobody is there but you. According to the Larry Dix dictionary, a Pity Party, noun, is any period of time in which the individual indulges in a cycle of grief, wallowing and feeling sorry for oneself. While not limited to any duration or extent, pity parties can range anywhere from 30 seconds to 30 years. While they may feel good at first, soothing hurt feelings, broken pride, or reminiscing on failure, pity parties are ultimately a waste of your time. As a human and entrepreneur, your life is bound to be rife with failures, just as much as the next person’s. What can set you apart from the guy next to you who’s too busy crying to himself over a hiccup in business is your ability to see your success in the middle of your blunders or misfortunes and keep going. Whatever reputation precedes you, the last thing you want to be known as is the guy who gets weepy and weak whenever the circumstances get hard.

This story centers particularly on the events surrounding an issue I was having with a job site. One of the gentlemen working for me got on the phone with me and I just tore into him over some of the problems we were having. He was a nice, older man, and usually did a good job. He ended up being a long-term placement of mine, really a great guy, and he just took this abuse. I didn’t cuss at him, but I was entirely condescending. It wasn’t ten minutes later when he knocked at my door and asked if he could speak to me. He wasn’t nasty at all, just as calm and collected as can be. He says, “I don’t have a problem with you yelling at me, but don’t ever yell at me on the phone. If you have a problem with me, we can work it out face to face, but anyone can be a badass on the phone.” That always stuck with me, what a great life lesson that ended up being.

Some may think that having these secrets--this insider information increases their status or worth. No, it’s just dishonest. Anything not belonging to you, any great business idea shared with you is not yours to share. Over the last several decades, I’ve really learned to appreciate people who keep their mouths shut and the lost art of keeping my own mouth shut.

The early bird gets the worm. Punctuality is essential; it establishes a precedent of respect. I respect your time, ergo you should respect my time. With consistent punctuality, you create a routine geared for success. If I’ve gone to the trouble to attend or schedule a meeting and you can’t make it within fifteen minutes, I’m leaving. I don’t owe you any more than that. Most stores don’t open the door until their corporate prescribed time, not a minute before, rarely a minute after. Some businesses break the mold.

What sets apart you from the people who want what you have, is your ability to work hard and work smart. There isn’t a single self-made man out there who hasn’t pulled a series of all-nighters and made countless sacrifices while others slacked off so he could make it to where he is today. Everyone likes hearing these success stories of famous and powerful people, Elon Musk for example, but he didn’t happen overnight.

Hard work pays off, maybe it doesn’t always pay off fast, but in an instant oatmeal society, that hard work is worth more than the microwavable efforts of a rushed and botched job. With everyone going for the gravy but neglecting the biscuits, how you work can make the biggest difference in the world. My family didn’t have everything growing up, but my parents were very hard workers. We started working from a young age; I want to say about 9 years old.

So often we can’t find the effort or humility to look a person in the eye and apologize to them. Whether we wronged them or made a mistake, it takes more humility to than many people have to admit that. If they beat you up for it, so be it, but you did what you needed to do in apologizing to them.

One of the few things in life any human being will ever have control of is their attitude, and patience is a huge part of that. Many a good man has entered a cycle of anxiety that stems from stress and impatience with elements that remain outside of their control. I’m sure many people have also heard the phrase that “haste makes waste.” This phrase becomes a pretty viable mentality to apply to any occupation in life.  If you rush through things, end up doing a sloppy job on it, that’s more time you’ll have to spend going back to fix it or do it right, better to measure twice and cut once than to waste the energy and material.

It seems anywhere you turn these days someone is complaining about “those darn millennials.” I’m getting tired of hearing about it just because regardless of what anyone says, they’re the wave of the future. They’re the largest buying block since the baby boomers (1945-1965). In the span of thirty-five years these kids are seeing so much more and exposed to such a radically different world than the baby-boomers knew. With technology being at the epicenter of their lives, connecting them to anywhere on the globe, comparing the differences in the generation’s childhoods is like comparing apples to oranges.

I was always told growing up that there are three kinds of people: wolves, sheep, and sheepdogs. The monikers should seem fairly obvious, but I’ll explain: your average human being is a sheep. The sheep being inattentive, oblivious, and just following the crowd is prey to the wolf--who wants the sheep or what the sheep can offer. The sheepdogs are the ones who watch out for the wolves, always wary. You can’t be a sheepdog if you’re not paying attention to the world around you. Pay attention when someone opens a door in a convenience store. Pay attention to your finances, your checking account and your cash flow. There’s no excuse for ignorance or obliviousness. You overdraft at a three dollar coffee and ask yourself what happened, well, you weren’t paying attention.

It wasn’t tithing, at that point we began giving what we believed we could spare beyond what it would take to keep the business and ourselves afloat. It wasn’t too long after when we had a meeting with BB&T, our bank at the time. I had great financials, a business plan, so I went in and met with them—they said they’d get back to me in a few days. Their eventual response—“Well Larry, we love your business, it’s doing well, but we can’t loan you any money because your cash flow is so poor.”

My wife has always said I am a very passionate person, the most passionate person she has ever known. She isn’t talking about the thing you may be thinking of, but if you’ve ever seen me eat, you can tell I am very passionate about that. I absolutely love food. I don’t have a real wide pallet, but what I like, I like. This can sometimes have a negative impact on my waistline and what have you, but the takeaway here is that when I focus in on something, I hone in with a passion most humans will never know.

As we sit and wrestle with ourselves, we have to reflect on what is crucial. So much of our lives get lost in a lack of perspective. We could have a great family, we could have a hard-earned job, but nothing takes away that sense of accomplishment and achievement faster than the cold, creeping grasp of past mistakes. There’s so much to be thankful for, even in the smallest of things.

Let’s make this personal, in a universe so great and vast, you’re going to be the only you that has and will ever exist. To draw even greater perspective, if we take the average of 100,000,000,000 stars per galaxy and the average of 6 planets per solar system, that equals roughly 6,000,000,000,000 planets per solar system, and I won’t bore you with the moons. The fact that your collection of carbon and other elements exists, consciously here on this earth is incredible. Just think about that in the overall scheme of that. It’s so hard for our minds to wrap around that.