Confession: I almost named my book Suck It With a Smile.
I sat with it longer than I should admit. It said everything I wanted the book to say. It was my father's line, in my father's voice, and every operator in the trades who has ever taken a beating for doing the right thing too early would have understood it instantly. In the end I figured it wouldn't go over as intended — you write Hands Up on a cover and people lean in; you write Suck It With a Smile and the bookstore files you somewhere between revenge and stand-up comedy.
So the gentler line got the cover. But the rougher line has been running my life for almost thirty years, and it deserves its own telling.
The kitchen table
My father said it to me at a kitchen table in the late 1990s. Not as a joke. As advice — delivered calmly, the way he delivered everything that mattered. I was carrying some early version of the weight every builder carries: doing work I believed in, taking hits I didn't deserve, from people who hadn't done the homework. And my father — the man who taught me the rings of Saturn, who taught machines to read, who turned down Bill Gates and Paul Allen and went home happy — looked at me and gave me the trades-grade version of everything he believed:
Suck it with a smile.
He did not know he was going to be quoted on stages and in hallways across the home services industry for the next twenty years. He would have approved. He would have laughed. He would have insisted on royalties.
What he actually meant
It sounds like crude defiance. It is almost exactly the opposite. My father's line carries the same wisdom as hands up, smile the whole ride — the roller-coaster version I tell my grandson, the contractor version I tell the room. Both mean the same thing:
You do not get to choose the beating. You choose the face you take it with.
The ride drops whether you grip the bar or raise your hands. The industry talks whether you answer or keep building. The hit lands either way. The only variable under your control is posture — and posture, it turns out, is not cosmetic. The smile is not submission. The smile is information. It tells everyone watching — your team, your clients, your critics — that the hit did not reach anything load-bearing. That you have somewhere to be. That you will still be here, building, when the people swinging have exhausted themselves.
Grace, deployed on purpose, is a competitive weapon. Nobody knows what to do with a person who absorbs the hit and smiles. Anger they can work with — anger means they landed one. A smile means they didn't, and they know it, and now they have to wonder what you know that they don't.
The night it became a movement
The first time I said it from a stage was at a Daikin event in Canada. Nathalie and her husband Chris, of Brooks Heating and Air, were sitting in the front row. I delivered the line the way my father had delivered it to me — as advice, calmly — and the room did what rooms do when someone finally says the honest version out loud.
If you ever ask Nathalie about that night — and contractors have asked her, more times than I can count — she will still crack up. Two decades later. Same laugh. Her whole company has been saying suck it with a smile to each other ever since. That is what a true line does: it stops being yours. It becomes infrastructure — something a whole company can lean on when the day goes sideways.
Four years of practice
I have had a lot of opportunities to use my father's line lately.
For roughly four years now, there have been people in my industry who talk about me without ever talking to me. They rarely use my name. They don't have to — everyone knows. The commentary arrived on schedule at every stage of our rebuild: when we exited paid search and social, when we bet the company on AI infrastructure, when we right-sized from 320 people toward the 38 I build with today. One of our clients wrote about it in his own entry in the book — including the call he was invited to whose entire purpose was to convince him we were making a huge mistake. He listened carefully. Then he stayed. His words, not mine: change is expensive. Staying the same is comfortable. It's much easier to criticize the future than invest in building it.
So here is what I want to say to every one of those voices, and I mean it exactly the way my father would have meant it — calmly, as advice, with the smile attached:
I see you. I know you're scared. I'm scared too — I wrote a whole chapter about being scared and all in at the same time, because both can be true. The door has been open the entire time. My calendar is public. The record is public. The entity file is machine-readable, for heaven's sake — you don't even have to call me to check the facts, although I wish you would, because the conversation is better than the commentary.
And until then: I'll be here, sucking it with a smile, shipping.
Your line too
If you are an operator taking beatings right now for adopting early — for the AI investment your competitors mock, for the website rebuild your peers call unnecessary, for the process change your own people grumbled about — this line is yours now. That is how it works. My father gave it to me at a kitchen table. I gave it to a ballroom in Canada. Nathalie's whole company gives it to each other on hard days.
You do not get to choose the beating. You choose the face. Choose the one that tells them nothing landed.
Suck it with a smile. Hands up. Same man, same wisdom, two registers. The whole story is in chapter one — free, like everything he taught me.