Five Things I Did Last Week – ACT of Congress (and Why It Shouldn’t Be a Fight)
Richard W.
Senior Regional Operations Manager (Corporate Project Manager, Internal Title) at LeafHome Solutions
The Government Job Myth In the house where I grew up, a tired refrain hung over the supper table like woodsmoke: “It’d take an act of Congress to fire them.” My parents, both tethered to government work—Mother shuffling papers as an administrator, Father prowling as an inspector—spoke it with the weariness of people who’d seen too much. They’d come home with tales of colleagues so idle they might as well have been furniture, yet there they stayed, immovable as granite.
To them, it was a gospel truth: government jobs were a safe harbor—steady wages, unshakable security, benefits that hummed along like a well-tuned engine. “Get yourself a government post,” they urged me. “You’ll never want for anything.”
I wanted everything else.
A life unbound by forms in triplicate, where risk wasn’t a dirty word and reward wasn’t capped by a pay grade. Naturally, I bolted the other way.
School: A Boring Disappointment School had been a yawn, a slow drip of boredom I endured rather than embraced. By fourth grade, my parents couldn’t fathom my homework—Father, a Korean War vet who’d ditched school at sixteen to enlist with a forged age, and Mother, denied college in ’50s Alabama because her father wouldn’t sign the papers. By middle school, I’d stopped bothering with assignments altogether, coasting through on raw knack. Tests pegged my IQ at 138—gifted, they said, teetering on genius. A curse, really. Tell a kid he’s sharp, and he wonders why he’s even sharpening pencils.
Years later, a revelation clarified the disconnect: I’d been adopted three days after birth, a restless cuckoo in their steady nest.
The Art of the Deal & My Early Business Attempt Failures At twenty-one, in 1987, I stumbled across The Art of the Deal. Trump’s brash blueprint—less about politics, more about bending the world to your will—hit me like a jolt of cheap coffee.
By twenty-two, in 1988, I’d scraped together a loan for a D10 bulldozer and pitched myself to Kingdom Gould Jr. and his son Caleb, dreaming of reclaiming a mine at Laurel Sand & Gravel. They sized me up over thirty minutes and sent me packing—too green, too much a gamble.
I shrugged, undeterred, and soon found myself in Fort Lauderdale, visiting my uncle, a retired Marine Corps A-6 pilot turned chiropractor. There, an apartment complex for sale caught my eye. I mapped out a plan, pitched banks, and got nothing but chuckles. A twenty-two-year-old with no internet at the time to lean on didn’t sway lenders in those analog days.
So, in 1992, I gave in. The Baltimore City Police Department became my reluctant classroom.
The Police Department & ComStat Accountability Police work was a street-level seminar in the human condition—panic, deceit, survival, all laid bare. I threw myself into it, not just as a cop but as a tinkerer. I built the city’s first nickname database, swapped handwritten warrants for digital templates, and coaxed computers from the Phoenix Foundation when floppy disks still ruled.
Then came ComStat, a revelation. Chiefs didn’t just tally arrests; they drilled into the marrow of crime—patterns, hotspots, why it happened where it did. Officers weren’t coddled; they were pushed to prevent, not just react. It was government with teeth, a rare beast that bit back at laziness.
After twenty years, I walked away a Detective Sergeant, itching to trade handcuffs for a ledger.
From Food Trucks to Global Supply Chains I started with a food truck—not exactly an empire, but a strategic move. The Gourmet Grilled Cheese trend was taking off, and I saw an opportunity: low overhead, high margins. Within a year, we had:
Then an investor came along. They wanted it all—the name, the followers, and a 1985 box truck. I looked around. The market had shifted. What had been six food trucks had grown to over sixty. Competition was slicing into profits, parking spots were harder to come by, and lunch rushes weren’t as lucrative.
So, I sold.
And moved on. First into retail, then a bar, then international supply chains.
Shenzhen, China: Where Efficiency is King For several years, I had been sourcing products for my retail stores, relying on importers and middlemen—and paying for it. If you don’t control your supply chain, you don’t control your business.
I cut out the middlemen and went straight to the source. I toured factories, met manufacturers, and optimized production lines. What I saw was staggering.
Workers weren’t arguing about job descriptions or complaining about oversight. They were tracking:
They were relentlessly optimizing.
Meanwhile, in the U.S., government employees were upset about being asked to list five things they did last week.
The contrast was impossible to ignore.
Construction & The Musk Email Controversy
Today, I steer construction projects nearing $100 million, a world of daily logs, weekly rundowns, and relentless scrutiny over seven sites. Slack off, and I’m out—no safety net, no tenure to cradle me.
Contrast that with my DEA Task Force days, where “Federal Fridays” emptied offices by noon, a ghost town I mistook for a drill my first time.
Then Elon Musk lobbed his email grenade:
“List five things you did last week.”
The howls of indignation were comical—clerks and bureaucrats clutching their desks as if accountability were a personal affront. I could rattle off five things I did yesterday without breaking a sweat.
The Reality of Work Accountability
I’ve lived both lives—public sector’s padded cells, private sector’s tightrope. I’ve sipped coffee in Moroccan souks, paced Odessa’s cobblestones, roamed St. Petersburg’s shadowed alleys, chasing how people tick across seventeen countries.
What ties it all together? The sharp edge of answerability.
Government’s layers smother it; business demands it.
Taxpayers fund the former—don’t we deserve a tally of what’s done? Yet Musk’s nudge sparked a tantrum, not a reckoning. If you can’t name five things, what’s the point of punching the clock?
The Need for Leaner Bureaucracy
Bureaucracy doesn’t need fatter budgets—it needs a leaner spine.
In Shenzhen, they’d laugh at this fuss; in Baltimore’s squad rooms, ComStat proved tracking works.
If you love your craft, five things should spill out easy as breath.
If not, maybe the chair’s not worth warming.
#AccountabilityMatters #PublicVsPrivate #ElonMusk #Efficiency #LifeLessons
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