Got called out on a furnace diagnostic in late March. House about fifteen minutes west of Kingfisher, out where the section lines still mean something.

Before I'd even stepped out of the truck I was taking inventory. Half-built chicken coop in the side yard, good framing, nothing on the roof yet. Next to it, a greenhouse with three walls of polycarbonate and no fourth wall. Next to that, stacked neat under a tarp, three different kinds of hardwood lumber. A pallet of pavers that had been there long enough the weeds were growing up through it. The garage was open. I could see an EV charger still in the box, sitting on a workbench next to a partially disassembled tractor.

The customer came out and shook my hand and the first thing he said was: I know, I know.

I said: I didn't say anything.

He laughed. You didn't have to.

I'll say this up front. This man was not scatterbrained. He was one of the sharpest customers I've ever stood in a utility room with. Every project I could see was started at a high level. The chicken coop framing was square. The lumber was stickered the way you're supposed to sticker it if you actually know about wood. The labels on the basement wiring were the labels of someone who knew what he was doing and expected to come back to it.

He wasn't failing to finish things. He was starting everything because everything was genuinely interesting to him.

Barbara Sher wrote a book in 2006 called Refuse to Choose. She'd spent decades coaching people who came to her frustrated because they couldn't pick one career, one hobby, one focus. She called them scanners. The academic version overlaps with what the Big Five personality researchers call openness to experience. High scorers pull meaning from variety itself. A new interest isn't a distraction. It's another door opening in a house that has a lot of doors. Marilyn Kerr at the University of Kansas found something that lines up. The grief of these folks isn't failure to focus. It's the grief of closing doors.

Here's what I've learned. If I try to quote him on the thermostat and the dual-fuel and the zoning and the ductless mini-split all at once, he is going to say yes to all of it, and three months from now none of it will be done.

So I picked one thing.

I said: your furnace is going to quit this year. That's the only decision that has a clock on it. Everything else on your list is a good idea. None of those have a clock. I told him to put in a new furnace and AC sized dual-fuel ready, run the thermostat wire for whatever controller he builds next year, leave the zoning for year two and the greenhouse for year three.

He said: nobody ever sequences it with me. They either try to sell me everything or they act like I'm not going to do any of it.

I said: you're going to do all of it. You're just not going to do all of it in June.

He called me in October. Heat pump is going in this month. The chicken coop still doesn't have a roof. But the chickens he will eventually have are going to have heat.

Core line: "The respect is in treating his fourteen interests as fourteen real things. Not as symptoms. As fourteen real projects a real adult is actually capable of finishing, one at a time."

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