I am often amazed at the link between our real lives and our jobs as home inspectors. All too often, I will learn a lesson in some area of my life that helps me gain a bit more insight into the world of inspections. This happened recently when I was pondering another milestone in my life and I wanted to share my thoughts.
I have a daughter who’s recently become an adult in all 50 states. It seems inevitable that when a major life event happens, like realizing that your child is officially no longer a “child,” it seems to conjure up various thoughts and memories. And realizing that I am the parent of an adult has got me thinking about all sorts of things!
One thing that has been on my mind lately are my fond memories of my early 20’s. Now, I realize that not everyone will have fond memories of their early 20’s, and some people’s memories of that time may be less than ideal. I think it’s safe to assume, however, that those people lucky enough to find themselves in a fortunate situation join me in enjoying that time of our lives.
We were brand new to this “being an adult” thing and, unbeknownst to us, lacked the skills to seamlessly pull it off. Often, we floundered from one moment to the next, but the great thing was that we lacked the wisdom and insight to even realize we were floundering.
It’s a wonderful time in a person’s life. Most of benefitted from a quality education and we were certain that we were now the smartest person in the room. We were simply waiting for a chance to prove it to the world; to show how much we knew. Waiting for a chance to show how much better we were than almost everyone else out there!
If you’re currently living it up in your 20’s, enjoy it. It will likely prove to be the best time of your life. You think you know everything, that you’ve got the world by the ass, but you don’t yet know enough to even comprehend what it is you don’t know.
My daughter gave me a postcard from her travels, and I keep it hung on the mirror in my bathroom so that I can read it every day of my life. It’s a simple, one-line quote from Socrates, consisting of just eight words. “All I know is that I know nothing.”
Enjoy the wonders of your youth, the time before you begin to come to the realization that you’re not the smartest one out there; that you don’t know everything, and that you must continue learning, lest you fall behind.
This realization, the beginning of wisdom, is especially relevant to the home inspection industry. When we first started out as inspectors, fresh out of school and full of energy and promise, we hit the ground running. We did as many inspections as we could, as fast as we could, simply unable to see why anyone would do otherwise.
And like that young adult, we simply had not yet developed the capacity to understand why we should do things differently. Granted, some people lack the cognitive abilities to make such a distinction, but that’s topic for another discussion. This discussion is simply about growth: as a mind, as a person, and as a professional.
If you’ve done more than a handful of inspections, I challenge you to go back and look over the first inspection report you ever wrote. The first thing most inspectors think is “How did I ever get someone to pay me for that?” With a few as a hundred inspections under your belt, your inspection report will begin to look different than it was when you started. But the funny thing is, if we jump forward to 1000 inspections, it’s likely that our inspection product will look nothing like those first few reports. And again, after a few thousand, the odds are that our report will be light years away from the one we produced on that first day in the field.
This simple fact, that good inspectors (and people) grow and mature as they learn, tells us all we need to know. We have the capacity to do a better home inspection, to write a better report, to work for better clients, to associate with better real estate agents, and to inspect better houses. We can get better; it just takes time to learn the lessons we need to grow.
The sad thing is that most of us are resigned to learning our lessons the hard way: by going through them ourselves. The fact that you’re reading this now, however, tells us that you are someone who sees value in learning things in ways other than the pain of firsthand experience.
If we can learn about another inspector’s problems, find out what they did or didn’t do that came back to haunt their dreams, chances are that we’ll take those lessons to heart and make the changes in our routine necessary to prevent the same thing from happening to us.
But alas, the newbie inspector, like the newbie adult, has to start learning lessons the hard way, before they begin to understand the simple fact that there are, indeed, lessons to be learned.
We are going to learn things, one way or the other. For most of us, that learning is going to be controlled by other people and the situations we find ourselves in. At that point, we’re limited to adjusting on the fly, trying to make the best of an already bad situation.
We could, however, take steps toward controlling our education, experiencing as much as we can about our profession from a secondhand perspective. In today’s interconnected world, the possibilities for teaching ourselves are almost endless: reading, watching, and listen to experts is easier than it’s ever been. We can take classes in person and online. We can join established message boards and associations, or we can create our own. It is relatively easy to associate with, learn from, and possibly even shadow more experienced professionals. The education is there for the taking.
We’re all going to learn lessons as we move through life. The lucky ones among us will eventually learn that we can exert some level of control over that learning.
But we’ve got to learn that we need to learn, before we can begin learning.
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Thanks, Joe
