What an Expert Looks Like: 10,000 hours

This past Friday, I spent time with our plumber in a small mechanical room on one of our projects. We were trying to figure out why we were not getting water pressure into the house from the main water line out on the street.

I sat on a small step ladder and chatted with him while he replaced the main valve on the water line. That’s the valve right before the water meter. It’s where you go to turn off all of the water going into the house when you have a leak. This valve was more than 50 years old. Though the valve looked OK, he figured it was the first and cheapest section to look at as the source of the water pressure problem.

Once we’d agreed to an approach to the problem, we started talking about business, and life, in general.

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