Eric Johnson (00:00)
Welcome back to Boiler Wild. My name is Eric Johnson. On this podcast, I talk about boiler industry topics as well as personal development. You may be wondering wild, what does that stand for? Well, I'll tell you, it actually stands for something. Wild stands for work hard, invest in yourself, lead others and develop yourself into a person of excellence. Always strive to be better. And that is what I hope to do every single day. And by hope, that means I am not perfect. Every day I wake up
I am in the fight for trying to get my to do list done and trying to win the day, which is always a struggle. And some days I just don't feel like it, but adapt and overcome and I do have off days. It may not seem like that, but plenty of off days, but consistency over long time is only the only way to win.
Today I want talk about the greatest superpower that you can ever have. And this greatest superpower is something that a lot of people overlook and it is common in the boiler industry when I talk to technicians or talk to other people, it I wouldn't say it's always technicians, but a lot of people on the tool side, the technician side, the operator side, they all are kind of similar.
in background as far as like a personality type and kind of what the industry attracts as far as people. And a very common theme among those people is when's the last time you read a book? I haven't read a book since high school or I don't read or I choose not to read or I don't want to do that or whatever. And if you haven't read a book since high school
in your thirty or forty, there's a lot you're missing out on. And this is something that is very easy to overlook. Nowadays everybody has their phone and your sh phone screen time may be a couple hours a day. It all depends. There's some people who have phone screen times that are six to eight hours a day.
And yes, you can read on your phone, but it's not the same as a book. It's also probably gonna be trash articles, or you're gonna be sorting through advertisements all the time. I want to encourage you to pick up a book and read. From my experiences, reading a book is the easiest way to expand your brain and expand your thinking and to expand.
How you see the world. And that you can do this in two ways. So one, read a book. This could be a technical book about boilers or steam hydronics. There's tons of books out there about those topics. And if you read one of those books, you would be surprised at what is in there and you'd be surprised at what you know or don't know.
I am constantly reading those books or rereading books that are boiler related. And there's always something new to learn and always something that I thought I knew that I didn't and always refining my knowledge. And when I first started in this boiler industry, so first of all, I got a degree in HVAC engineering and
I knew about boilers, but came into the boiler industry and I was a service technician and really I had a general idea of what was going on. I wasn't completely clueless. Like I I knew what the things in the mechanical room are. I knew what tools were. I know what valves and pipes and all that stuff was. So I
had grown up using tools and having my own tool bag and everything, which I guess is not common anymore. But I was like, how am I supposed to learn all this stuff? And it seemed like all this stuff was just in these old people's heads that I worked with. And there was no way for me to learn it except to work with them and do on the job training and to attend other training classes. And then I started opening manuals and reading the manuals.
And then started opening boilerbooks and reading the boiler books. And all of a sudden I found that a lot of the knowledge that I was told, bits and pieces of that I thought was tribal knowledge was right in the book. And I also found out that a lot of things I was told was not a hundred percent correct or flat out wrong. And then if you really want to unlock your brain, start opening the code books.
And start reading about that and you will really question what people say when they say, Well, that's just code or that's how it's gonna be, because it has to be that way. If you know what the code books say and you don't have to memorize them, but if you have a general idea of what they say and you have a general idea where the information is, you can always go back to it. And that's the greatest unlock you can do for your career, even if you're in sales.
or you're an operator or anything, being able to find information and being aware of the information is exponentially better than having to rely on somebody else. And you should always want to get better and the way to do that is read. And I have found that reading for me, so I'll read to myself, but like in grade school
I used to read out loud all the time and I'm not great at reading out loud, but I was I did it consistently enough that I got decent at it. But now that I don't really read out loud all the time, when I do read it out loud, I fumble over all my words and I have issues following the words and everything. Whereas when you read to yourself in your head, you don't actually pronounce every single word to yourself. You just kinda I skip across the page, which is
little different than reading out loud, but I have found that reading when the more I read, the more the better I get at it and the more I start expanding my thoughts because it is so easy to
Be in your own head and to think certain ideas or opinions or facts about the boiler world or whatever as to be true and you constantly do that over and over and over versus if you read new stories, if you read biographies, if you read nonfiction business books, I really enjoy those. I don't really read any fiction books.
If you read boiler books, you constantly span your brain and you're constantly exposing your brain to new ideas. And reading with a physical book, I I always prefer physical books. I never really got into like e readers, Kindles, and all that stuff. Just too much distraction on your phone. I really like to put the phone away and to really enjoy the book. There's also studies out there where
The physical book, the physical pages, your brain has spatial awareness to the book. You can see 250 pages of the book. You can flip back to a page or make a note on a page or you know put a bookmark in. There is benefits to that in learning versus reading a 250 page e-reader where you have no spatial awareness and everything is just on a screen. But I
don't know a ton about that, but they basically said books are way beneficial. A physical book is way beneficial over a e reader. But whatever works for you, I am good with. And the biggest part of reading is consistency. And what I what I found is typically one chapter or about ten to fifteen pages a day is probably the sweet spot. You may say, Well I don't have time for that. I mean it takes less than a half hour. Half hour if you are
kinda slow at reading, which is totally fine. As long as you are trying to expand your mind. It doesn't l matter how long it takes. And if you are looking for extra time, just shut off your phone and then see how much time it you have during the day. And I understand some technicians, some operators they're working twelve hour shifts and all this stuff. It's hard to make time, but you gotta you gotta make time for what you value and I really value reading.
Reading is such a overlooked part of society after you graduate high school. And even if you look at the reading level of people graduating high school, the average grade reading level is very, very low and a alarm alarming number of people in the United States are graduating reading illiterate.
And there is some famous quote out there that, you know, the person who never reads book in their life is no better than the person who doesn't know how to read. So I would highly encourage you to read a book. I'm not gonna give any recommendations. There's tons of recommendations online for books. I would say read what you are interested in. Don't read what other people think you should be interested in. There's all those New York Times bestsellers.
For business books, nonfiction books, even if you want to read a fiction book, you are actively changing and expanding your mind when you read a fiction book. You read a story, there's plots, there's characters, and you open to new ideas. And a part of society that I'm seeing from research is people are not.
being creative anymore. They are not expanding their mind. They're also not being bored. So if you were reading a fantasy book and you know, something about some warrior and a dragon or whatever, you are now expanding your mind to think and put yourself into that world and to be able to dream about something else other than your daily life.
versus most people when they have some free time pick up their phone and scroll through Instagram or Facebook or LinkedIn or whatever. They watch YouTube and the algorithm serves up whatever it thinks you need to see and you can quickly become a loop of information that just is s a
almost a self looking ice cream cone of the same information over and over and over again. And you that becomes your world and your four walls. And I will tell you that what the algorithm serves you up, there's more to life than what is served up in the algorithm. So reading. Go do it. I really enjoy it. That is something that I have learned to enjoy during
grade school I did read a ton as I grew up. My parents always you know, I was growing up I was born in the nineties, so and I didn't get a phone and it wasn't even a smartphone, but I didn't get a phone till h midway through high school. So I grew up with basically no phones and really didn't have cable T V or anything during my childhood. So it was what do you do?
During your free time you play outside or you read and there's a lot of conversation about young people these days, all they don't want to work and they're different and all this stuff. And I'm not an expert and I don't like generalities, but how d what do we do to combat that? And if I had kids, what would I be having them do to get better and to gain an edge over other people? And when you look at reading
Over the hundreds of years of history of when, you know, people read books, basically a a sign of wealth used to be a person's library because books used to be very, very expensive because mass printing wasn't a thing. So every book had to be hand printed and it was very, very expensive to own the books and then you would
you know, maybe share some books with your neighbors and all this stuff. But it used to be a a person's collection of books. And now that's definitely gone away. I'm not saying you gotta collect books. I would say I have a couple of boxes of books myself, but I don't have a huge library and bookshelves and everything. I don't got space for that. But the ability to read and expand your mind and to sit in the silence and read a book is
I don't have all the scientific backing on it, but it has to be positively better than not doing that. And it has to be better than sitting on your phone. And some people will say, Well, I, you know, like to read articles or whatever on my phone. Let's be honest, how much are you doing that versus scrolling on so social media? But the problem I have with reading on
a phone or reading on a computer is you get a notification or something another idea pops up and it's so easy to switch over a tab in your internet browser and go to YouTube or look at that text notification and there's just so many distractions on the computer. And I used to be very, very pro technology as far as learning and everything should be electronic and everything. And now I'm
I'm switching that and just from the research and studies, once again going back to the physical format and how our brains learn, there's so many benefits to physical words on paper and having that spatial awareness and being able to read the the pages and turn them and everything. And with boiler books, there's there's tons of information online about boilers and all that stuff.
I still buy the physical book. There is so many benefits to the physical book. For me, one is reference. If somebody has a question, I can easily flip through a book and say, hey, here it is in the book or here it is in the code. I will typically for codes only use electronic versions. One, because the codes are longer, but two, it's easier to search because the code you're not going to read front to back.
You're just gonna read sections of it, but but a book you can easily read front to back. Make some notes, make some tabs, and then you can reference it later. But there are tons of boiler-related combustion books out there for steam, hydronics, all all the like, and you also reading manuals. Manuals I'll typically read online. I don't like printing manuals as a lot of that can be
couple hundred pages and a manual is not something I'm gonna just read front to back all the time as like a reference. It's gonna be more of like a code book where it will be just reading a section and being able to do like a control F and to find in the manual what I'm looking for as a reference versus just reading it front to back is a a total benefit versus a printed manual where
gotta flip through and look at the table contents and then go through and you know, maybe find where you highlighted some information. but then you know you also gotta find the manual. Whereas if I have all the manuals on my phone, I can just look up pretty easily. But books, that's reading a book. If you haven't read a book since high school, I would highly encourage you to read a book. I think with the average person in America
I do a decent amount of reading about education, education trends and everything. And reading is so undervalued and there's all this push. I think it's a lot of largely just the j these just giant education companies pushing schools. But so many schools have been pushed into digital everything and efficiency and all this stuff. I think there is a lot of benefit to learning in an inefficient environment and books.
have been deemed almost inefficient in schools as you know they take up tons of space, they're heavy, and they're expensive to distribute. And why would an education company want to have to print thousands of books when they can just charge the same amount of money to give schools a digital license? So I think there's a whole business practice there. But if I were raising kids or if I were
To put together a training program, I would not be somebody that would say, Hey, we're gonna do digital only, and everything's gonna be digital, everything's gonna be on your phone, everything's gonna be on a computer. While there are benefits to it, and you know, you can do the hybrid approach. I would say I do a hybrid approach now. There are so many benefits to being in a classroom, being in person, or if you're gonna be online.
or do a self-study, having a physical book, having a physical presence, having that book out on your desk and you see it as you walk past and man, I gotta read my 10 pages today, or yeah, that that class, I gotta go back and do that, or I gotta study this part of the chapter of this, versus just having this digital classroom or digital book where it just lives on your computer and if you don't open the file, you never see it. And honestly
I think there's a lot of human science behind basically like I could put an entire library on my computer, but it essentially doesn't exist in my brain until I open up the files. Whereas if I had that entire library on a bookshelf, every time I walk past that bookshelf, my brain goes, Hey man, look at those books. I should read that. I should do that. And you know, it it makes me think of
Books I've read, it makes me think of book I I need to read. Same thing with like if I put all my books away in boxes and I never look inside the boxes, I start forgetting about books and I f start forgetting about what is in the books and the content of books, or maybe a book I forgot to read and everything. Whereas if I put out and maybe stack a couple on my desk, I am more likely, I have found, to pick up a book and reference it and read it and to
Essentially make it make it easier to open up the book and remove all the obstacles. And once again, going back to education trends and how do you get ahead in this industry where so many things are built against you, reading I think is the greatest unlock and going back to the manual thing, I don't know what it is. I don't understand it, why there's so much resistance to
people reading the manual, it seems to be a joke now. It's not a new joke, but it seems to have been a joke now for decades, thirty, forty plus years about, well, you know, you just read the manual and figure it out. Yet so many people will rather call somebody or send an email or call tech support.
or do everything else but read a manual and the old technicians that I used to work with that basically grew up in the industry, you know, and worked, you know, 30 years in the industry, they learned in the pre-internet era. And what they had to do was basically have every single manual on their truck. And what they had on their truck was the information they had. And
They didn't have phones, like they could obviously go find a payphone or whatever, but if they didn't have a manual for a certain piece of equipment or whatever, then they didn't have the information. So they learned to stack up the manuals in their truck. They learned to reference the manuals to read the manuals. But I'm not saying that those guys were better than the current technicians of today because I've still met some older people that
refuse to read the manual and just want to be told what to do. And there's a huge difference if you are looking at a company wise of people who solve problems when they don't know the answer versus the people who can find the answer. And honestly, if you are a technician and you can't solve a problem that you don't know the answer to and you have to have all the training in
or experience or somebody has to hold your hand the first time for every single situation that you don't know the answer to something, you're never gonna make it and you're never gonna succeed and your company is gonna be wondering what to do with you and they're probably only keeping you because you're a warm body, which is an unfortunate truth. But the technicians, the operators, the engineers, the salespeople who go and figure out, I mean, and this is true across all industries, but it
Who go and figure out and solve problems and are able to use the resources that are given to them and to figure out how to make the company more money, how to make themselves better, how to make themselves more valuable. Those are the people who succeed and get their promotions and have the job opportunities. Even if you want to make a lateral move or even move outside the industry, you're never
gonna succeed if you have to always have somebody else tell you the answer or if you're the technician where if you're calling for tech support or if you're calling internally for tech support to another technician or whatever and if that person has some discipline, they will say like, all right, well what does the manual say? Well let's open up the manual. Because if somebody is calling me for tech support, if like if you were to call me right now for technical support, I would be the one
right on the phone I'd be googling the manual and pulling up the manual if I didn't know the answer right off the top of my head, like exactly. And I typically don't. I'll have a general idea, but if I need specifics, I'm pulling up the manual. And if you are calling me and in order for me to give you the answer, I'm pulling up the manual and you haven't pulled up the manual, why should I give you my time and my expertise when you're too lazy to pull up the manual? I don't understand that.
Maybe, you know, if you're listening to this and this is you, or if you have some other perspectives, I would love to hear why people don't read the manual or why there's so much resistance to reading the manual. I believe personally that there is this dogma for education. You know, there's whole this whole thing with the skilled trades of we don't need college, we don't need education. You just graduate and you get a six-figure job and you just learn by working on the tools and doing all this stuff.
And that is entirely false. The skilled trades are one, skilled. This isn't just pounding rivets into metal anymore. There is so much technology that you need to know working on boilers. You have to know controls. You have to be a little bit of electrician. You have to be a little bit of a pipe fitter, you know, combustion, all this stuff. There are so many skills.
that you have to know and so much knowledge and awareness that you have to know that if you just think education is for those other people and I don't care about education. I didn't go to college. There's nothing wrong with that. College is an avenue. College is one pathway. But if you graduate high school and you never go to another training class, if you never open another book, if you don't try to educate yourself on a certain topic, no wonder you're not excelling in your career or
That you're gonna struggle on the job, or you're gonna wonder why other people have the it factor and you don't, or why other people get a promotion, or why other opportunities open up to other people, versus the people if you were to look at yourself and say, Hey, how do I get educated about this? How do I learn a little bit here? How do I learn a bit a little bit here? And a lot of times, and I used to be this way, I still am a little bit. I'm an all or nothing person. And
When somebody says, well, you know, you should be reading books, a lot of people think, Well, I I gotta sit down every day and read for two hours a day. No, that's not sustainable. You may be able to do that on a Saturday, you may be able to get, you know, grossed into a book and not be able to put it down for two hours, but you're gonna get busy and I guarantee you're not gonna be able to read for two hours a day for a month straight or even a week straight.
And that's where the one chapter or like ten to fi fifteen pages a day comes in. Just that small, consistent reading, you'd be surprised at how many books you can read in a year when when you read ten pages a day. Cause it doesn't seem like a lot, but the average book, two hundred and fifty pages, you know, so you're going through at least a book a month and all of a sudden you read read twelve books that year. And you'll find though that
you know, a chapter will be a little bit longer than ten pages, so you'll read the whole chapter and you'll get through the chapter and just that consistent compounding, you'll all of a sudden finish the book and then you'll be like, that wasn't that bad and you won't necessarily know w what you did with that time that you were reading or what you could have spent while you were not reading. The same thing with your phone, like
If you are spending four hours a day on your phone, what are you actually doing on your phone? Scrolling social media, mindless stuff, and all this stuff. Like, we don't as humans really gather how much time we're wasting. And I wouldn't say wasting. Like, there is you know, you don't always have to be productive. Life isn't always about this efficiency of everything. You know, I wake up and I work for sixteen hours a day and all stuff. That's that's a lie of people who do that. But
If you waste four hours of your phone scrolling through Instagram every single day, that's fo you know, four, that's twenty hours a week that you could have been doing something else. And what if you were to cut that back even fifty percent and only scroll for two hours a day or waste time for two hours a day on your phone and be more present for your family, for your kids, be able to read a book a month.
Or maybe open up that manual and expand your mind, expand your brain. I have found so much value in reading that I beg you if you haven't read a book recently to open up a book. And if you really need recommendations, you can reach out to me, eric.johnson at boilearn.com or DM me on LinkedIn. I will give you some recommendations. But I would highly suggest you just read what is
interesting to you, there is basically other there's a million opinions about what books are good, what books are bad. Obviously, you can go on Amazon and read reviews and everything. But if you don't know where to start, some nonfiction business books or personal excellence books and all that stuff is good. As far as in the boiler industry, some books about
High pressure steam boilers, low pressure steam boilers, hydronics, combustion. There's plenty of books out there. I know if you ask the internet forums, I'm looking for a boiler education book, Pumping Away by Dan Holohan will be the number one book. I'm convinced that half the people who recommend Pumping Away have never even read the pumping away book. They just say that because there's no way
that the number one book is Pumping Away by Dan Holohan as the number one boiler book for everything. I think it's just the most common one that people regurgitate whenever somebody asks that question. It's a great book, excellent book. If you haven't read it, go read it. But there are tons of other books, even other books that Dan Holohan has written, that are excellent books and have excellent knowledge in And if you're saying, well, I can't afford a book
and all that stuff. Go online to a boiler manufacturer's website. Go read a manual Don't just read a random manual. It won't make sense. Go read a manual for a boiler that you think you know or for a burner that you think you know. And
Maybe highlight some stuff. You can highlight some stuff on your computer or on your tablet, or if you really want to, you you can print out the manual. But a lot of people don't even have a computer or a printer nowadays. But you would be surprised and you may shock yourself at what you can learn. And also you'll become aware of where the information is and that the information exists. When I was starting out, I had no idea how much information existed in the boiler industry.
For burners, boilers, valves, all this stuff. And I was like, where do I learn all this stuff? Where is this stuff? Because there's no way I'm gonna have enough on the job education to learn all this stuff. And I really hate listening to people tell me stuff and having to believe that it's a hundred percent true. Because I don't believe anybody says it with malice or like I learned from some great people, but everybody
Has human error and a lot of people misremember stuff or can get stuff confused. And you always want to go great right to the source. You know, we've all played the the game telephone, and even a simple message said a couple of times can easily become a message that is totally different at the end. Think about a whole industry of technicians or operators or engineers that
Just believe what the older people tell them and never actually crack open the original sources and go to the boiler books and to the manuals themselves and they just hear what people tell them. You get a lot of information mixed up, you get a lot of information lost, and you end up with a confused industry that believes that everything is way harder than it is.
There is so much power to reading the manual. There is so much power to reading a book. Please go do it. And once again, I would love to hear from you guys or gals that are listening to this about if you are a person that doesn't like to read manuals, I wouldn't say doesn't like to read, but refuses to read manual or why maybe your coworkers don't read manuals, what you think about
that or why somebody doesn't like to read books or won't read books and would rather just call somebody else or and be told the answer or to walk off the job and say I can't do that or to turn down jobs and say I can't do that or we don't do that. We don't know how to do that. I would love to hear from you. And this is not to put anybody down. I am always trying to expand my horizons of how people think, why people think things
I have always just been curious about why people don't want to open up the manuals. When I was a technician, I had and I still have a huge list of manuals and file structure and everything on my phone. And I could easily just look something up on my phone or my tablet real quick. And there was so much power to it. And I would say there's
80% of issues that I came across, I could easily find in the manual as far as either guidance or it had to be set this way. You know, a common problem is a pilot flame failure on a boiler. And you go out there and the company's like, well, you know, this other company was out here, or you know, we had two other technicians from your company out here and it's still happening and all this stuff. And instead of pulling out the pilot assembly and going, yeah, it looks fine or
it's sparking, it lights nine times out of ten. I don't I have no idea what's wrong. Open up the manual. Look at how the pilot assembly is supposed to be set up. How is the the spark rod supposed to be set up? What is the gap supposed to be? Have you tested the ignition transformer spark output? There's all this stuff that you can do to make sure that the setup is a hundred percent perfect because when you have an intermittent issue like a pilot flame failure.
Just going and resetting the boiler and it lit. There must not be any issue. Call me back. If it fails again, that's that's not a solution. Something is wrong. And I covered this in depth in another episode. I forget the episode number, but it's something about how to troubleshoot or how to fix intermittent pilot flame failures. Go back, it's it's within the last twenty episodes, I believe.
Go back and listen to that one if you haven't. It's a really good one. I got a lot of good feedback on it. But you look in the manual. You don't have to memorize all the information, all those gaps, all the measurements, all the setups, all the numbers. There's so much good stuff to memorize. And there's some quote out there from some famous person.
That says, you know, never memorize the details that that you can always look up. My main thing when training people is I you need to understand the basics, the how systems work, how everything kind of meshes together, the big picture. And when you get down to the details, if you work on the details enough, you're gonna start memorizing them. But if you work on one type of boiler once a year, you're never gonna memorize the details of that boiler. But that's why you look up the manual.
That's why you read a book and understand where to find the information. Because when you can look up the manual, now you have so much more power than the technician or the operator or the engineer who doesn't want to look up the manual and just wants to call somebody else and rely on somebody else. Because if you have to rely on somebody else to do your job, you're effectively ineffective. So that's all I got today. Hopefully this wasn't a rant to you. I am preaching to myself when you hear these things just as much as
Preaching to you. I don't wanna sound like I am better than everybody else. I struggle every single day. It is hard to work for yourself and it is hard to try to be better every single day. There are days I just want to mentally check out and do nothing and scroll on my phone for ten hours. It is easy to do that. It is easy to not read and not try to get better, but I am on a journey to get better and to
achieve my goals that I have and it takes a little bit of hard work, but consistency is the key to that. And I always wanna try to work hard and invest myself every single day. And that is the name and the theme behind Boiler Wild this podcast. If you're listening to this podcast, I hope you want to get better and invest in yourself. And I think as a boiler industry, not that I am any major voice
But if there are enough of us that there can be a couple hundred or even thousands of people that want to get better, the whole industry can get better. I refuse to believe that has to be the way it is and there's no way to change it. You be the change you want to see in the world. Thank you for listening to BoilerWild. If you have any other questions or if you want to have a comment about this episode, I would love to hear from you. Please reach out. Eric
dot Johnson E R I C period J O H N S O N at Boilearn dot com B O I L E A R N dot com or DM me on LinkedIn. If you're on LinkedIn and we haven't connected, please send a connection request. I would love to hear that. And if you have any other recommendations for guests or you want to be a guest on the Boiler Wild podcast, please reach out. Thank you for listening and stay wild.
