Once I built a retaining wall in our backyard.

We had a wall that kept the mulch and dirt out of our driveway, but it had eroded over time. It seemed like a relatively simple project. All I had to do was rip up the existing brick and put new cinder block down in its place. But, as often happens with me whenever I try to do something around the house, it got more complicated. The ground needed to be leveled; the blocks had to be sealed; and above all, they needed to be straight.

But I got frustrated. I got impatient. I only had a limited amount of time to do this because, well, I was bored. So instead of using the right tools to make sure that my lines were straight, I eye-balled it. The first few blocks in the row seemed, to my eyes, to be pretty dead on the money. But as I added more and more blocks, the retaining wall line started to drift. What I thought was a straight line at first curved as it ran along the edge of the driveway.

I compromised at the first and paid the price at the end.

Be careful, friends, of what seems like a small compromise right now. It might not seem like much in the moment, but when you make a small drift at the first it expounds into something much more noticeable later.