These posts have become something like a diary for me. I write down what I've lived, and I share it in the hope that it lifts someone, and helps a man who's stuck see that a better future is possible.
This one is about the life I've been blessed with, and my attempt to understand how it all came to be.
I want to say this clearly up front: I'm not listing what I've been given to boast, or to collect praise, or because I think I'm better than anyone. I'm sharing it because I've been given so much, and because almost all of it came from trying to have faith in things that stretched me past what I thought I could do.
And I've learned that blessings come with a test of their own.
Wired to experience things
Let me start with how I'm made, because it explains a lot.
Since I was young, whenever I felt drawn toward something, I wanted to try it. I played baseball, basketball, football, and golf. I played trumpet in middle school, then drums for a few years. I've ridden dirt bikes and mountain bikes. I ski and I snowboard.
I got decent at most of them. But once I knew what it was like to do something, I usually let it go. I like all of them. I just don't obsess over being the best at them.
I'm someone who loves to experience things, especially new things that excite me. And I've come to believe that's not an accident. Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ have played the biggest role in my life, and They've given me opportunity after opportunity to experience life the way I was designed to experience it.
Broke, and building pools with my dad
In my twenties I was broke. I didn't know what I wanted to do for a career or how I was going to make money. I'd built pools part-time with my dad for years, but it wasn't something I loved.
Marrying Lisa and starting a family changed everything. A wise mentor told me not to overthink my career. Pick something that lets you provide for your family and be with them, he said, and he suggested swimming pools.
So I went to work with my dad. Honestly, I wasn't excited about it. My dad was a tough man to work for. But I went into that trade with all my heart. I learned to build pools from the ground up with my own hands. My goal was to get good enough that my dad didn't need to be on the job, and eventually I got there on most of the work.
I was young, eager to build something for my family, and still very inexperienced. I had a lot to learn.
2005: Starting from nothing
My dad wasn't open to growing his business the way I wanted to grow it. The only path I could see was for Lisa and me to start our own company and figure it out as we went.
We knew nothing about running a business. We went for it anyway.
It fit exactly how I'm wired: a new experience, and opportunities that seemed to be everywhere.
Then 2008 came, and the crash. Work slowed down and fear took over. For a few years we were blessed with just enough work to provide, but most of the time we were scraping the bottom of the barrel. I wasn't living what I'd hoped for financially. Looking back, though, I was building a foundation for what was coming. (I wrote about the lowest point of that season in The $500,000 Check I Wrote Myself.)
2010: The door I didn't know to look for
In 2010 I found an amazing pool company called Premier Pools and Spas. They had just started licensing their name and their proprietary back-end process to builders across the country. I was blessed to find them early, and they accepted me as their licensee in Temecula.
It was the chance to learn from the best in the industry, and it gave me hope that I could be like them one day. We doubled the company year after year. It was extremely challenging, and it was right in my wheelhouse.
That business is still here in Temecula. It's still one of the greatest blessings of my life, and it still stretches me.
2022: Dallas, and a home in Mexico
In 2022 I got a call. The Dallas location, Pinnacle Pools and Spas, needed a new owner because the owners could no longer run it. I took it on with friends, and over the last few years we've turned Pinnacle around into a successful business with amazing people, building great pools for families in Texas.
What a challenge it's been, for me and for my family. Travel is now a regular part of my life. We bought a home in Dallas so it would feel like home when I'm there. And I've had to work on my marriage more than ever, because being away is hard on a marriage.
That same year we bought a home in Mexico and started fixing it up. We wanted a place to go as a family and with friends, to disconnect and live more simply for a while. It's been a test too. It's another responsibility that needs attention.
Life has gotten more complicated. It's also gotten so much fuller, with more places, more people, and more kinds of experience than I ever imagined as a broke twenty-something with no plan.
The test hidden in every blessing
Here's what I've learned. Every great opportunity in my life has had a great challenge hidden inside it. The business, the expansion, the travel, the homes: each one brought something I had to grow into.
And those challenges have become some of the most precious gifts I have.
- They gave me perspective. I've seen life from more angles because I've had to live it in more places and more roles.
- They forced me to grow as a man, mentally and spiritually. A bigger life demanded a bigger me.
- They drew me closer to my Maker. Without Him in the middle of all of it, I would have broken and quit.
"For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required."Luke 12:48
The test of great blessings is that they take exceptional focus. Left unattended, they can become your downfall. A business can swallow a marriage. Travel can pull a father away from his kids. More stuff can mean less peace. The work is to use every blessing to live with more perspective, not let it become the thing that pulls you away from what matters most.
Why most men stop at the boundary
Most people I know settle into their lives and never go past a certain boundary of what they'll let themselves experience. The conventional advice is to live conservatively and stay in your comfort zone, because there's danger out there.
And there is danger out there. I won't pretend otherwise.
But there's also so much good.
I still catch myself doing this today, deciding where my limits are before I've tested them. But I've learned something that takes the fear out of it: with the Lord as my guide, whatever I attempt will be a blessing, whether it works out or not. If it succeeds, I'm grateful. If it fails, I learn and grow closer to Him. Either way I come out more than I was.
This life is a test of faith. It's a test of how much we really believe in God, and how much we believe He's with us when we step out and experience what we feel driven to experience.
Small, and grateful
When I look back at all of it, at the broke twenty-something, the scared business owner in 2008, the licensee who found an open door in 2010, the man who took on Dallas, I don't feel big.
I feel small. The blessings have been so great and so miraculous that it's impossible for me not to see His hand in all of it.
So here's what I'd say to you, man to man:
- Pay attention to what you're drawn to. That pull may be how you were designed to grow.
- Take God with you past the boundary. Faith isn't avoiding risk. It's trusting Him inside it.
- Expect the challenge inside the blessing. When it comes, don't treat it as a sign you were wrong. It's part of the gift.
- Guard what matters most. Give your blessings exceptional focus so they don't become your downfall, especially your marriage and your kids.
- Give Him the credit. Gratitude keeps a blessed man humble and close to the source.
Where have you drawn a boundary around your life that God may be asking you to step past?
— Jeff