The older I get, the more I realize how grateful I am that I grew up with a dad that can fix anything— a real life MacGyver, if you will. I know as a kid I found it occasionally irritating to have to wait for him to build something to his standards of quality himself instead of buying the chintzy ready-to-go crap in the stores— my least favorite thing to hear was, “Aw, I can build that for half the price”— but I learned some valuable lessons in all the waiting. I’m fairly certain now that the things my dad has taught me have more than just a little to do with why I’m good at what I do. So in honor of my dad’s birthday today, these are 6 of the most important things I’ve absorbed in the 26 years I’ve been around.

• If it isn’t broken… it still might need fixing. As a kid, this one never made much sense to me. And even now, I struggle at times to understand what was wrong with the trees in the front yard, or the hood of my car, or the clear satellite reception, but when he’s finished “fixing” whatever it is he’s working on, I’m generally glad he took the initiative to improve what previously seemed just fine. I find myself doing this almost regularly too, and I know that this is one of the things I’ve absorbed that makes me a great designer. It’s about paying attention to the details and understanding that the details are what make up the big picture. So even when the big picture looks good enough, dialing in to the details can make good enough into something great.

• Sometimes the best solution is the most creative solution. Creative solutions get billed as jerry-rigging or half-assing all too often. And true, some of the things my dad has “rigged up” over the years simply didn’t work. But if the difference in genius and insanity is success, the same could be said for creativity and half-assing it. My dad has taught me that success here is mainly about your attitude. If you’re looking to get something done quickly, you’re probably half-assing it. But if you pay attention to what you’re doing and you care to do a good job, you might come up with a pretty creative way to do something a whole lot easier. A good creative solution won’t always be the most elegant, but it will probably make the most sense.
• You just have to be smarter than the… Of all the wisdom my dad has passed along this was, by far, the most frustrating to grasp, mainly because this was his answer when I didn’t understand how to do something and for any of a variety of reasons he thought it would be better for me to figure it out on my own. This bit of wisdom works best when you run into microproblems or minor frustrations— sometimes you have to stop what you’re doing and think of a different way to approach the problem. I’ve learned that when I can stop and find a new approach, there are very few problems I can’t solve on my own.

• Lots of things yield after you’ve unloaded a few choice four-letter words. My mom calls this the Higgins temper; I call it highly effective. Creating/fixing/installing/building things can be highly frustrating, especially when things don’t go according to plan. And sometimes, you just have to unload all of that frustration before you can proceed. I’m not saying there’s an absolute science here, but there’s definitely something to this. So curse a little and keep going. This is undoubtedly one of the secrets to persistence.

• Before it can be fixed, you may need to break it just a little more. ..Or push just a little harder, or drill just a little deeper. This can sometimes be paired with the wisdom of cursing a little and carrying on, but not always. My dad has taught me that sometimes you just have to smash the whole thing and start from zero, perhaps because you’re frustrated, but more often because there are some things that can’t or shouldn’t be fixed. Still, sometimes when something can be fixed you have to take 5 steps backwards before you can take one step forward. And finally, sometimes you have to try a lot of different things before you find a solution that works for your problem.The important thing is being willing to do the work, even when it means undoing what you’ve already done. This is the foundation of hard work— it’s about valuing quality, integrity, and dependability over convenience and speed.
• Persistence / Never ever ever give up / There isn’t anything on earth that you cannot do when you use your head. This isn’t so much a lesson as it is a byproduct of all the other things I’ve learned from my dad. When you believe that you can build or fix whatever you care to build or fix, and you don’t give up, you really can do anything.