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Cara Brookins

Keynote speaker and #1 bestselling author of "Rise: How a House Built a Family," known as the mom who built her 3,500-square-foot house with her four kids using YouTube tutorials.

Sep 30, 2026

19:25
What does the word mean to you?
19:26
It's about adapting to change in real time so that we can make really sound decisions even when we're under pressure.
19:33
And the reason that I started talking about adapting and adaptitude is because I was speaking a lot about resilience and bouncing back.
19:41
And we get a couple of years after COVID, by 2023, people, you just say the word resilience and people's eye would start to twitch.
19:48
People were so tired of not only the word, but of doing it.
19:52
Right? So instead of increasing our ability to adapt, to bounce back, We have to learn how to do this on the fly.
20:00
We have to get better at adapting to the changes as they're happening and continuing to move forward through disruption because we can't just wait for it to be over.

8 MINS LATER

28:03
But how does a person know when it is OK to simply say, I've done what I can do?
23:24
What was his reaction once he fully, when did he fully grasp, what age did he fully grasp what had been accomplished?
23:30
You know, it's such a different story for Roman, and in some ways in a sad way, because, you know, the older kids had that camaraderie on the construction site, and, you know, that was the way that we built our family structure really for the first time, you know, in a strong and healthy way.
23:45
You know, we worked through so much of the trauma that we had gone through and became this really kind of strong, cohesive force together.
23:52
And Roman was on the outside of that, right? Like he grew up in that much nicer, you know, cohesive family, but he wasn't part of building it.
24:00
So then the story went viral in 2017.
24:04
The book was released in January of 2017.
24:06
About two weeks before it came out, the story went viral globally.
25:20
How did the final recipe from the family unit of the five of you, how did that come together because of the building process?

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