The Chicago Minded chain. A man digging, and what the shovel pulled up out of the ground is the city itself.
I had this made years ago. A man digging. And what that shovel has pulled up out of the ground is the Willis Tower, the city itself, dug up. The blade is set in green where it bites the dirt, because that is what comes up when you actually work the ground. And underneath all of it, one word: MINDED.
That is the part people miss. The city ain’t decoration on a handle. We dug it up. And now we carry it on our back. Not literally Chicago, spiritually. You go get the information, and then you carry it, and then you hand it to somebody who was never shown where it was. If they paying attention, they can take it and level all the way up.
People ask what Chicago Minded means. It is right there in the metal.
You mine. M-i-n-e. You dig for what is yours. And you mind. You mind your business and you do what you supposed to be doing. Same shovel, same word, same job. Digging for what is yours is minding your business.
Everybody else noise, who did what, who is a crook, who ain’t playing fair, that is somebody else dig site.
I am David Hawkins. I am from Chicago, Illinois. I live out in the Denver area now with my wife and our kids.
I am a journeyman, licensed in more than one state. That is a thing you earn and keep. It do not get handed to the next man when the project change. Right now I am on a sixteen story commercial building. Tomorrow I am writing a book, cutting a podcast, or building a system that runs without me.
I do not operate in one lane and I never have. Some days that is business and credit. Some days it is astrology. Some days it is a travel guide, or a word search book, or a phone call with a man who has been in the Illinois prison system twenty seven years and is still in there doing the work, with an out date of 2032 and no way to speed it up.
People want to know which one I am. All of them. That is the point.
Most people ain’t stuck because they lazy. They stuck because nobody ever showed them the door was there.
Chicago Minded exists to hand people the whole thing. The resources, the perspective, and the opportunities they never knew existed. Not the trick. Not the shortcut. The whole trade.
I learned that one on the job. I was willing to teach anybody the entire craft, because I was never planning to do it forever and somebody taught me. But people only ever wanted the piece that would move them ahead that week. That gap, between wanting the result and wanting the understanding, is what everything here is built to close.
Dig for what is actually true, not what is comfortable.
Build something that holds weight when you ain’t standing there holding it.
Grow into the life you actually wanted, not the one you settled into.
Three words, in order. Every one of them makes you do something.
The average guy from the street who wants it to still sound intellectual. The electrician, the driver, the cook, the barber, anybody in any trade. The person who has been in survival mode so long they forgot builder mode was available.
It started in Chicago. It ain’t only for Chicago. Same situations, every state, all over the globe.
Me and my wife. That is it, and I would rather tell you that than dress it up.
She runs the back end of this business while working her own job, and she writes here under her own name, because there are things a woman needs to hear from a woman, and me saying the same words would land sideways no matter how right I was.
We are building this in public. I still work. It ain’t finished. That is not a disclaimer, that is the whole demonstration.
