Less Makes You Stronger

You know, I've spent most of my life building things.

And every once in a while when I pull up on a job site, I'll see something and I'll go, you know what, there's probably a good lesson in that.

And this one, what I'm about to talk about, came from just looking at a concrete block.

Now, I have seen thousands and thousands of concrete blocks in my lifetime.

And I never thought about this, but it did make me do some research because it was like, man, you know, surely what did they use back in the day? Because they didn't have concrete block or maybe where did even concrete block come from? uh, because we use it for, you know, foundations or, or pillars or, you know, uh, retaining walls.

I mean, there's a lot of re there's a lot of usage, uh, for the concrete box.

So just like, man, I wonder where that came from.

So I looked it up, you know, and they were concrete blocks were, were first came out in the 1800s, maybe mid 1800s.

And when they first started making them, they were solid.

So you can imagine, uh, the weight of that and how much it weighed.

If you have a solid, let's say eight inches tall by 16 inches wide and it is solid, man, that's a lot of weight to carry all day long.

So it was very labor intensive as hard on the guys that were carrying it.

It was hard on the guys that were laying it.

So around the early 1900s, builders started to develop the hollow core or the hollow block of what we have today.

Because of technology and all that jazz, you know, they were able to do that.

And so what they did, instead of filling the whole thing with concrete, they just left the hollow or the space inside of it.

And it seems obvious to us now because...

You know, the only solid block I see is very thin, not these big heavy ones like they used to have.

But somebody had to figure that out and they realized that they that they didn't need all the material to accomplish the purpose of the block.

So they take some of it away, make it lighter, make it easier to handle.

And when you properly reinforce that, it still does the job.