Cross posted from Howard Brickman's article on Hardwood Floors Magazine: Inspector Blog.

Do you remember “Mr. Know It All” from “Rocky and Bullwinkle”? Bullwinkle would make some ridiculous remark that was completely wrong, but he said it with ultimate self-confidence and an assertive manner.

Do you know any “Mr. Know It Alls”? You know the type. They use their self-confidence and an assertive manner to bluff their way through every situation. The customers don’t know enough about the wood floor business to know if they are being given the straight scoop… or not. As long as everything goes as planned, the misinformation doesn’t seem to do any harm.

But let’s think about another approach that transforms Mr. Know-It-All into Mr. Knows-It-All. Think about how effective it would be to combine self-confidence and an assertive manner with actually knowing what you are talking about. This is done with some hard work by learning the important fundamentals. It starts by learning the technical vocabulary of 300 words… Learning how to properly spell and pronounce the words and their definitions… Then reading and reading and reading…

“The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.” — Mark Twain. It’s a little late to be handing out a summer reading list, but here are some good books to put on your recommended reading list.

– Wood Handbook, published by the Forest Products Laboratory (PDFs of the chapters are available free here.)
– Drying Eastern Hardwood Lumber by John M. McMillen and Eugene M. Wengert (also available free on the Forest Product Laboratory website)
– Understanding Wood by Bruce Hoadley (Taunton Press)
– Identifying Wood by Bruce Hoadley (Taunton Press)

E-mail me when you get through these and need some more titles. Don’t get discouraged. Google the words that you don’t understand, or use a dictionary. I think that we still have dictionaries in the 21st century. I have been reading and rereading these and other books for over 30 years, and you never seem to really “Know-It-All”.