He was fifteen when he chose his father’s coffin.
Keep
Climbing
Now
Nobody Builds the Tenth Floor First
Ten steps to rebuild your life from the ground up, by a vice president of construction who is still living them.
He was fifteen when he chose his father’s coffin.
Nobody Builds the Tenth Floor First
Ten steps to rebuild your life from the ground up, by a vice president of construction who is still living them.
I want to take you somewhere first.
It’s a little before six in the morning and I’m pulling through the temporary gate of a job site. There’s a thin orange line along the horizon, and the portable lights are still on because the sun hasn’t caught up with them yet. The superintendent has a set of drawings spread across the hood of his truck, held down with a coffee cup.
I was standing at that gate at six in the morning, looking at dirt. We built it anyway. That’s the whole book, if you want it in one sentence. The rest is me telling you how.
— Chapter 1 · Read the whole chapter free
At fifteen he chose his father’s coffin. Along the way he went through two divorces, watched a business he had built collapse, and slept some nights in his car. Then came nineteen years on construction sites and the one rule that never failed him: you pour the foundation first.
Thirty-nine short chapters in four parts. Every one ends on the ground with a Job Site to walk, an Olaso Lesson, an Author’s Challenge, and one reason to keep climbing. Not a book by a man who has it figured out. A book by a man who kept building anyway.
Inside: the climb, in ten steps
The book told you what happened. This is where you do the work.
One tool for every chapter, none of them in the book, each built from that chapter’s lesson and sized for a pen. A thirteen-week climb: three chapters a week, a Job Site Walk every Friday, and the Ten Steps rated before you start, halfway up, and at the top, so the movement one good or bad day hides is there in your own handwriting.
Letter size, white paper, room to write. Use it with the book, or on its own if you have already read it.
More about the workbook · A printable PDF edition is coming here soon.
Short pieces on the lessons in the book, written for the man standing at the gate at six in the morning.
A construction VP’s one rule for starting over at any age: you pour the foundation first. What nineteen years on job sit…
Read →A simple morning routine from a 64-year-old construction VP who still wakes up afraid some days: the window, the scale, …
Read →Worry is not a task on the schedule. A construction VP on the difference between preparing for tomorrow and rehearsing a…
Read →Osvaldo “Ozzie” Laso is a vice president of construction. His career began with odd jobs after his business collapsed in 2007 and a chance to document who was working on a job site. A contractor taught him to read plans. Nineteen years later he oversees construction from the owner’s side on communities of hundreds of homes.
He began Keep Climbing Now at sixty-four by writing down a hundred thoughts about his own life, and finished it at sixty-five, still living the work it describes. It is his first book.
For bulk orders for a crew or a company, signed copies, or to have Ozzie speak at a safety meeting, toolbox talk, or event:
Published by Steel & Summit, Miami.