[Issue# 008] My dock burned down at 1 a.m

Hey, it's Mark.

I flew home from a business trip last week and didn't get to bed until after midnight. I had barely fallen asleep when my phone woke me at 1 a.m.

The dock was on fire.

The dock I built 23 years ago.

You can see in that picture how that went.

I ran down the stairs to the dock, and when I got to the bottom, I saw a big propane tank sitting right in the middle of the fire.

I knew INSTANTLY that was a bad thing.

Then I just stood there and watched the flames die down.

Some of the best memories I have of my kids when they were little happened on that dock. They swam off it, jumped off it, and grilled hot dogs on it with their friends. I have thousands of photographs from it, and every one of them seemed to be running through my head that night.

It wasn't just lumber burning.

It was twenty-plus years of friends and campouts and laughter, hundreds of kids and thousands of jumps. The memories themselves were safe, of course. But the place that held them was gone.

I was sad, and I was frustrated, and by the next day I had made a decision. We have another dock on the other side of the lake.

I was going to tear this one down and be done with it.

No rebuild.

Maybe you have stood in that same spot. Something you spent years building goes up in smoke, and the only decision that feels right is to walk away. I think a lot of leaders are standing there right now. Deals fall apart overnight, and plans that took years to build get erased in a single quarter. Many of the leaders I sit with are carrying all of it alone, because the people closest to them have quietly stopped telling them what they see.

When something burns, walking away can feel like the strong decision.

I was about to find out it wasn't… and the person who would show me was my son.

He saw something I couldn't.

My son Markus came over to the house, and the first thing he wanted to talk about was the pilings. "Dad, I can't believe you got that thing put out," he said. "You saved the pilings. Some of those go twenty feet down. Those are the hardest things to replace."

Then he walked me through his whole plan. When the lake freezes this winter, he is going to walk out on the ice, cut every piling back to where the burn stopped, level everything with a laser, and rebuild the foundation right back to where it was. Somewhere in the middle of explaining it, he started dreaming. "You know what never worked on that old dock?" he asked. "If you could do it over, what would you change?"

Before I knew it, I was right there with him. I told him I never liked how the water came up over the top and soaked everybody standing up there. He had ideas for that, and I had ideas about his ideas. Ten minutes earlier I had been ready to tear the whole thing down.

Now we are designing a new one together. Then I realized exactly what he was doing.

I stopped and said, "Markus Timm, I know exactly what you're doing."

I had chills running down my spine.

To understand why, I need to take you back more than a decade.

Let me explain more.

More than ten years ago, Markus was in China, chasing plans he had spent years preparing for. Then he hurt his hand. It was a silly injury, honestly, and one he did to himself, but it landed him in a hospital where nobody spoke English, and they had to operate. It was scary for both of us. Every plan he had worked so hard for was gone in an instant.

I left work and flew halfway around the world to sit beside him. When I got there, I looked at him and said, "Son, I know this stinks. But… what does this make possible?"

Then I didn't answer it for him.

Instead, we spent the next three days unpacking that question together, in China, in the airport, and on the sixteen-hour flight home. The words themselves take about five seconds to say. The mentorship around them took three days. I have never believed those words hold any magic. What gave them power was the proximity around them.

You can give advice from anywhere BUT transformation needs somebody in the room.

Here is what that question made possible. Markus couldn't go back to his original plan, so he started traveling with me instead. For months, he came on every trip I took. Every flight, every Uber ride, every hotel stay. He walked into rooms and met people he never would have met if he had stayed in China. Looking back, that was the moment I started becoming more than his father. It was the beginning of being his mentor.

I want to be careful about one thing, though. That question has never made anything bad good.

The injury was still terrible, and the dock still burned.

So whatever burned for you this year, you are allowed to be sad about it.

You are also allowed to ask what it makes possible.

Here is what the fire couldn't reach.

When I went back out to look at the dock in daylight, I finally saw what Markus saw. The fire took everything about a foot above the waterline, and every board you could see was gone. But the pilings I had driven deep into the earth all those years ago were still standing. Everything under the water was untouched.

What was visible burned. What was driven deep stayed.

I have watched that happen in life, too. Businesses burn. Plans fail, careers disappear, and relationships go through terrible storms. Kids make mistakes, and I have made my share of mistakes as a parent. But if you spend twenty years driving the foundation deep, then no matter what burns, you have something to build on.

You do not know how strong your foundation is until something catches fire.

For a parent, that foundation is all the car rides and trips and ordinary conversations nobody remembers. For a leader, it is every one-on-one and every time you asked a question and actually listened to the answer. You can't see any of it, because it is under the water. You find out it was there the night everything on top goes up in flames.

It went deeper this time.

In my last letter, I told you about the night in Utah when Markus repeated one of my sentences at a dinner table, about going straight at whatever scares you. I had never taught it to him. He caught it, just from being close to me for twenty-some years.

What happened this week went deeper than that. Markus didn't just repeat my words. He recognized the exact moment his own father needed to hear them, and he had the courage to say them to me. That question started as mine, but he is the one who carried it and lived it for eleven years, until it became part of how he is built. So one night, when I was hurting too much to reach it myself…

He handed it right back to me.

Most of us think influence runs in one direction. The parent teaches the child, the mentor advises the mentee, and the boss develops the employee. I think that is only half the story. Maybe the clearest evidence that someone caught what you gave them is the day they can give it back to you.

So a fair warning to the parents reading this. Be careful what you teach your kids. Someday they might get good enough to use it on you.

Who on your team would tell you?

That question isn't only for parents. Markus did for me at 1 a.m. What I wish more teams felt free to do for their CEO. He saw me stuck, and he challenged me with my own wisdom.

I have spent more than three decades starting, building, and selling companies. In my last letter, I said the goal is for the people you develop to pass you someday. Here is the other half of that. The goal is for them to come back and lead you when you need it.

Most leaders aren't set up for that. According to Gallup's research on workplace engagement, fewer than one in five workers strongly agree that they get meaningful feedback when they make a suggestion about improving performance. Think about what that means.

Fewer than one in five!!

Your people may already know where the pump is. They just stopped telling you.

So you end up standing on the dock alone, holding a garden hose.

You can start changing that this week. The next time you're stuck, ask someone on your team, "If you were me, what would you do here?" Then don't defend yourself. Just listen. And the next time someone uses one of your own principles to push back on you, thank them for it in front of the whole team. That one moment tells everyone it is safe to bring the pump.

You have truly succeeded as a leader when your people are comfortable enough to hand your own wisdom back to you.

Who the dock is really for.

This week, someone close to me said something I can't stop thinking about. "You built that dock for the first generation of jumpers," they said. "Markus was one of the first. Now he wants to rebuild it for the second."

I built the original dock. Then I helped build Markus into the man he is today.

Now that man is rebuilding the dock.

As I write this, I am looking out at what is left of it. But instead of burned wood, I can see my grandchildren standing on top of a new dock someday, taking a step toward the edge and hesitating, because it is a long way down. Markus is standing right next to them. Maybe I am up there too. It will be the same lake and the same pilings, with a very different dock.

I will never be glad it burned. But I might never have seen that picture if it hadn't.

And if one of those kids hesitates the way Markus did when he was little, I hope he tells them to go straight at the thing that scares them. I'll just be standing there smiling, because I know exactly where he got it.

This week, I got to sit in some.

Tell me about your fire.

Think of one thing in your life that isn't going according to plan right now. Maybe it is a business that is struggling, a kid who is having a hard time, a relationship that is changing, or a door you were sure you'd walk through that closed.

Hit reply and tell me what it is. Just the thing. Then sit with the question for a day, and if something comes to you about what it might make possible, send me that too. I read every single one.

Mark.

P.S. If you missed last week's letter about the walnut grove, hereit is. This one reads even better right after it.