Free Press Online

May, 2008

Tedd’s Rules— a commencement address

Unity College 2008 Commencement Speaker

Tedd Benson

Tis the season for commencement addresses, so we thought we’d print one. It’s a rare one that isn’t uplifting and inspiring, and this one seemed to fit that bill — without flying over the top. Tedd Benson offered these remarks — slightly edited for length — last Saturday at Unity College’s graduation ceremonies, where 129 students received either two- or four-year environmental degrees.

I’m deeply honored and very humbled about being asked to speak on this milestone day in your lives. I’m also a little bit surprised, and for the same reason you might be disappointed. You see, when you strip me back to my essence, wiping away some of my biographical spit and polish, I’m really still at heart a carpenter, which was my career choice at your age, and carpenters aren’t typically asked to give commencement speeches.

I’m a little nervous about this because it’s pretty easy for me to guess what you’re thinking right now: “Who IS this geezer? I hope he doesn’t talk too long.” I realize sitting there patiently could be hard. I’m now literally the only thing left standing between your years of hard work and your diploma, so I’ll try to be sensitive to that. I do have some thoughts for this day, but this is not a pulpit and I’m in no position to preach. I offer these words with humility, or as my dad used to say at the end of making a persuasive argument: “Of course, I could be wrong.”

As Unity College graduates, my preconceived notion here is that I am talking with you as new teammates, as Unity’s environmental focus and mission for sustainability likely lands many of us on the same team. Old as I look, I have a lot of working years left, and I very much believe that in that time—let’s call it 25 years—we can make this a much better, more sustainable world for our family and friends, for our communities, for our country, for this planet, and, of course, for ourselves.

To keep this simple and short(er), I have just three pieces of advice to give you—none original—but taken together they still amount to this veteran’s pointers to his new teammates. I’ll call them Tedd’s rules.

Rule #1. Be happy.

Love what you do. I know this sounds trite and obvious, but too few people follow this rule. I know many people who have spent their entire lives being absolutely miserable in their work. I’m sure you do too. When you see it go on year after year, decade after decade, it’s enough to make you cry. Even financial security doesn’t compensate for this bad choice.

Sustainability begins in you. It is critical that you find work that satisfies you in that very deepest part of your soul. You can’t be useful and effective if the thing you do every day is at cross-purposes with your heart.…

Mastering anything takes a long time. It’s true of art, music, writing, law and medicine. It’s also true of forestry, farming, mechanics and my profession, carpentry and building. Have patience (including you, parents). However long it takes, whatever it takes, find something to do that you never have to force yourself out of bed for. From then on, there will be few limitations to what you can achieve.

Remember also that your graduation today doesn’t determine your path; it only increases your freedom to be very selective about it and your ability to master it.

When I was in school, I had ambitions of going into journalism or politics or law. I wasn’t really sure which avenue to pursue because I wasn’t really committed to any of them, but they were on the list of accepted professions to be pursued by college students, so I thought that’s what I should do.

As luck would have it, I ended up spending some concentrated time doing carpentry when I came to New England. I knew I loved building things, but always assumed that carpentry was beneath me somehow.

But in this period, I met a very special master carpenter who was the most skilled building craftsman I had ever met and also the most passionate, even though he was already past retirement age. One day, upon hearing that I was an English major, he gave me a five-minute recitation, by memory, of his favorite Yeats poem. It blew me away and taught me that you don’t have to give up one thing to become another, you can take it all with you.
I also learned from this man and others that the dignity of the work comes mainly from having the right attitude. They taught me that carpentry isn’t just a job of banging nails in wood, raising walls and laying floors; but it’s rather a much higher mission, having to do with improving the quality of people’s lives for generations and generations into the future.

When I understood its deeper dimensions, and when I came to finally understand just how challenging and incredibly difficult it is to truly master the craft of building, I was hooked for life. I have now been a builder for over 35 years and I have just as much energy and commitment for it today as I did when I was 25, and I’m not at all eager to stop because there’s so much more to learn and do.

There are a few interesting outcomes to Rule #1 and you’ll learn more of these when you get there, but I’ll give you a peek.

When you work for the love of it, you don’t work for money. It becomes an outcome, not the primary goal. My wife and I spent many of our early years with very little money and a few recent years with more than adequate money. I prefer the latter to the former, but though I remember the years of living in a one-room cabin, simpler meals and half-filling the gas tank, I don’t recall ever wanting to do anything else. The hard times and easy times honestly aren’t that different when you find your calling.…

When you work for the love of it, you will find, in Abraham Lincoln’s words, “the better angels of your nature.” I don’t know what would have become of me if I’d chosen a different path in life, but I do know that this one has demanded me to try harder to rise above my petty and selfish tendencies, if only because the small side of me only serves to inhibit the collective progress of our team.…

Rule #2: Buck convention.

Cherish your naiveté. Innocent idealism trumps cynical realism. In a world that has gone so wrong, ignorance can be a powerful tool.

You have no trouble thinking outside the box when you’re not in it. In this world, there’s an overabundance of the rational, reasonable and realistic and not enough big, hairy, audacious, let’s-stretch-ourselves belief in the possible. So, challenge conventional wisdom; much of it has proven to be both unwise and unsustainable.

Conventional wisdom tends to build up big, thick, defensive walls to ward off the evidence that it might be wrong, incomplete or inadequate. Habit and history are powerful forces, but they also often create arbitrary mental boundaries and constrain possibility. Over time, habit becomes belief, belief becomes cultural law and questioning it becomes heresy.…

Soon after I went off on my own in carpentry and building, I started to seek a better way to build because I’d become dissatisfied with what is known as stick construction. Ironically, it is also called conventional building. As an alternative, I eventually decided to embark on a mission to revive the craft of timberframe building in North America. From a rational perspective, the idea was nuts. Although timberframing had been the dominant form of wood building for several thousand years, it had been completely dead for the previous four generations; there was nobody to learn from and the only available tools were antiques. Furthermore, I didn’t even know how to do it.

So, there were some significant obstacles, but I had some things going for me to improve my odds for success:

  • youthful naiveté

  • blind ignorance
  • unwarranted optimism
  • dumb perseverance
  • no Plan B

Today, I know how to timberframe. I’ve written four books about it and there are now around 400 companies throughout North America that specialize in this ancient, but now completely modern, building method.
So, what big, thick walls of conventional wisdom stand in your way? There are many and there is much at stake. For tens of thousands of years of human development, we struggled to protect ourselves from nature, but now it is nature that needs to be protected from us.

To build a sustainable world for humans, we’ll first need sustainable beliefs and aspirations. We need the power of innocence; we need a new vision from those who haven’t yet been boiled in the stew of prevailing illusions and disconnections. Those who are innocent to the ways of the world already know that: 

  • Prosperity is not just about money and stuff
  • Our purpose here on earth is not to shop and consume
  • Progress is not inherently defined by growth
  • Productivity does not trump health
  • The desires of present lives are not more important than the needs of future lives

That leads to…

Rule #3. Save your world.

It is also the best way to save the world.

It’s actually a simple thing to define wealth and progress more maturely, more humanely and with more sustainable ambitions. It just needs to happen in the hearts and lives of people like you and me, one at a time.

Almost 40 years ago, I heard a speech by the great English economist E.F. Schumacher in which he said something that has been my mantra and beacon ever since. I’ll pass it on exactly as I wrote it down. “The most powerful and useful thing any individual or organization can do is to create a visible model of the ideal world they envision.” His point was that it is often useless to struggle and fight against the big world problems. It’s typically frustrating, ineffective and depressing. On the other hand, it’s much easier, much more positive and much more rewarding to work toward your ideal of how the world should be, to simply create it where you are.

Schumacher was echoing Gandhi’s advice: “Be the change you want to see in the world,” but he was also specifically talking about creating tangible evidence for others to see, allowing your visible model to inspire others in a potentially endless cycle of positive change. Schumacher’s take on the concept was to not only “be the change,” but also to be deliberate about ensuring that others see it and learn from it. Every good model of a better world, large or small, has the potential to become a movement. This simple idea is the definition of the term “seeds of change” and it is something that any person, group or community can do, right now.

Inspired by the Schumacher/Gandhi challenge, my wife Christine and I have spent our years together trying to build good, visible models of the world as we’d like it to be for everyone.

First, in our family: we have tried to make this our number one priority and a place where love and patience are boundless. We have two amazing daughters and 39 years of marriage to show for it.

Second, in our business: we have tried to make it a place where everyone has the opportunity to reach their full potential and where responsibility, authority and money are fairly distributed. We have 80 associates, many of whom have been with us for over 15, 20 and 25 years to show for it.

Thirdly, we have our buildings. We believe homes greatly matter in the lives of people and communities. This Winston Churchill quote is carved into a beam you see as you enter our building: “We shape our buildings; thereafter, they shape us.” Our company mission statement therefore doesn’t mention buildings, it says, “Through process and product, to improve the quality of lives.”

We now are trying, audaciously as usual, to shape the future of homebuilding. Our OPEN Prototype Initiative, in partnership with MIT, is an attempt to make a visible model of the sustainable American home. In our vision, this home will be capable of lasting 500 years, require zero energy for heat and power and will be affordable. It may take many years for this vision to be fully realized, but once again, there is no Plan B. I’m happy and proud to say that our most recent effort in creating that model is also a partnership with Unity College and it will rise right across the campus in the next month or so. Our vision and yours are now destined to be entwined for many centuries.

So, I guess this speech could have been much shorter: Tedd’s rules are:

Be happy, buck convention, save your world.

There is no doubt that the world is in distress and that these are difficult times, but I believe that we will not only endure, we’ll prevail. In the deepest part of us, there is an inner truth that fires a spirit capable of compassion, sacrifice and an inherent longing for sustainability.

Somewhere within us, we know what the rabbis, pastors and preachers have been trying to tell us for centuries: that this life is ephemeral and transient, that success and failure as popularly defined are a lie. It is the mission of our team—as I like to think of us—for each of us to find meaning with our hearts and our minds and our hands and our souls. The work of our lives is simply to bring out all that which is within us, and doing that will not only save us, it will save the world.

My sincere congratulations to each and every one of you. Go team!

Building houses eats up lots of resources and energy. Yet, one of the country’s leading environmental colleges invited one of the country’s leading homebuilders to give the commencement address. Why?

Unity College President Mitch Thomashow says it’s because Tedd Benson is “a visionary and a dreamer” who in his early 20s realized a sustainable society needed sustainable houses and set about changing how houses get built. In the 1970s   Benson virtually singlehandedly revived timberframe building nationally, and he founded his own company, Bensonwood Homes. Now, in partnership with MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Benson is working on “The OPEN Prototype Initiative” — developing prototypes for mass production of modular, adaptable, energy-efficient houses. Later this month, Benson and MIT will assemble “Unity House,” a prototype of one of these houses, on the Unity College campus. It will become home to the president of the college and is designed to produce as much energy as it consumes. Onsite construction is expected to be completed within 20 working days and to generate fewer than three barrels of onsite waste.