The long answer: I used to work in marketing. Like lots of marketing people, my job was to create landfill. I created a LOT of landfill. But I still wasn’t happy. I wanted to do something that mattered. To me.

One day I was riding my bike on a trail past a big pile of old boards that – decades earlier – had been a farmhouse. I stopped and looked around. The boards were beat to hell from a lifetime out there in that field:

I went back later and hauled a bunch of them home. I cut them up with an old handsaw, nailed them together, and sanded out most of the sharp edges. When I was done, I stood back and looked at the bookshelves that had been – in their earlier life - the floorboards of someone’s home.

It felt good to rescue the boards. It felt good to make something useful from them. It felt good that what I'd built was really, truly beautiful. Looking at those shelves that night I finished building them, I was happier than I had been in years. No kidding: years.