Begin With Trust

One who has unreliable friends soon comes to ruin, but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother.

—Proverbs 18:24

Heat is what makes metal flexible, able to be shaped and moved. The same is true in relationships: you always start by building trust, little by little, story by story, meal by meal. You always start by building trust. After there’s heat, you apply force. To just heat it up makes no change in the long run. To truly transform a piece of metal, you don’t just need heat, you have to add force. And heat without force is ineffective. You would never heat a piece of metal unless you wanted to transform it. Just heating it would be useless.

And the same is true in friendship: you begin with trust, but you’re transformed by truth-telling. All the trust in the world will not transform you, if there’s no truth-telling.

And the opposite is true, of course, both in the shop and in our lives: Banging on cold metal is useless, and loud, and it wears you out. Don’t bother swooping in with the truth if you haven’t taken the time to build up some trust. Force without heat is both painful and ineffective—both in metalworking, and in life.