The ROI of Manual Labor

I believe most LinkedIn members have worked hard in their lives. By "hard work" I mean physical labor, the type that makes you sweat, makes you sore and gets your hands dirty. I'm talking about construction work and landscaping to name a couple types of this kind of work.

I also believe that most LinkedIn members no longer earn their pay by manual labor. You may be wondering, why would a current college professor/lawyer, a minister, and a group of 12 future businessmen, ministers, military officers and a physician do this type of work in high humidity and 90 degree heat when they didn't have to?

Read on!

Last week during our Spring Break, I led a group of Wheaton College Football players to the San Blas (Guna Yala) island of Sugdup (crab island in the Guna tribal language, my father's native language) in the Caribbean just off the coast of Panama. We made 800 concrete blocks by hand. We had no electricity to run cement mixers so we shoveled tons of sand, rocks and 94 pound bags of cement to make the blocks. I hadn't done this type of work in 5 years since, you guessed it, I led another group of Wheaton football players, and 3 years before that.

The program, the Wheaton Football Ministry Project is the brainchild of Wheaton Defensive Line Coach and friend and former teammate Jeff Peltz. For the past 25 years, he sent approximately a hundred teams to Africa, South America, Eastern Europe, the Caribbean and Central America. WFMP helps former Wheaton Football players who are missionaries with construction needs. My groups in 2016 painted a church and helped rebuild two churches in 2019 and two weeks ago.

Here's what I learned from this concrete block making project:

1) Construction work is team oriented and perfectly suited to a football team. It takes a team of about 7 to make a concrete block quickly and well.

2) Hard work is not to be avoided, but endured and embraced.

3)You quickly learn what techniques work and what doesn't.

4) Find your "battle rhythm" and then stay in that zone until you complete your task.

5) Someone has to be in charge, clear direction is key.

6) Working at this level of efficiency still requires down time. Take the 15 minute break in the morning and afternoon.

7) Have a goal and work to achieve it. Our goal was 800 blocks of concrete. We met it during our last day and hour of making blocks.

This list is by no means exhaustive. Please put down in the comments section of this post what you learned from your manual labor experiences that you still use.