Despite often being depicted as such building a car isn’t easy. This is a reality that I have become intimately familiar with as I fumble through of my own build, Project Why Wait.

No matter how you slice it building a car is a form of skilled labor, and there’s a learning curve to every new task. How-to articles and YouTube videos have made these learning curves smoother, but the road from idea to execution is by no means straight.

It’s full of switchbacks, hair pins, forks, cliffs, dead ends and everything in between. Say nothing about the number of roadside distractions (life, other projects, etc) that appear along the way.

The challenges one encounters during a build are virtually endless and frustratingly, not all of the challenges are fun. Some are even downright stupid –s10 motor mount engineer I’m looking at you– but each offers a teaching moment.

Be it how to do a specific task, or just another lesson in being proper planning and patience.

In moments of frustration it is important to remember that every project hits peaks and valleys. From the best of the best, to the weeknight, or weekend warrior. Everyone finds more rust than they expected, more damage than they thought possible, and more fitment issues than they care to admit.

All these unexpected ‘gotchas’ come with building a car because, well, that’s just what comes with building a car. The saying “if it were easy everyone would do it” might be cliché, but it’s true.

As an amateur builder I spend lots of time drooling over the fabrication talents of those with skills that far surpass my own. Mike O’Brien, Rob Ida, Nigel Petrie, Keith Charvonia  and Gene Winfield, are just a few of the people who make up a long list of builders I admire.

At face value it might look like they each have some sort of superior deity given talent, but, while it’s true there is such a thing as mechanical inclination, they’ve each hit the limitations of their skill at some point.

The key is they’ve pushed through.

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Day 2 at @semashow met a whole bunch of great people today, caught up with friends that I hadn’t seen in a while and just cruised through appreciating the level that these builders are on. It’s been a real experience and I’m taking a whole lot away from all of this.

A post shared by Nigel Petrie (@engineeredtoslide) on Nov 1, 2017 at 7:47pm PDT

They too also all look up to builders they admire. Everyone strives to be better, and often the best way to learn is to observe those who are better.

Creating anything, from a car, to a business involves overcoming a series of challenges and struggles and there’s beauty in that struggle.

Each bloody knuckle, burned through panel, or outright failed approach offers a lesson. Some of these lessons come at the most inopportune times (as I’m sure anyone who’s had a failure at the track can attest) but persevering through them is where the magic happens.

Through the darkness of blown deadlines, depleted budgets, and late nights of limited productivity there is a light.

So next time you toss a piece on your scrap pile in frustration. Or find yourself stumped, remember in the end you’ll know more than you had at the beginning. Not one person who knows what they are doing today knew what they were doing when they started.

When you are done and it’s just you and your creation doing what you built it to do it will all be worth it.

That is of course until you tear it all apart to start again.