While he built, he listened to a wolf in a bright room.
This wolf had a very good jaw and a light behind him and he spoke about lung capacity and discipline and the old ways, and he said that a wolf who could not bring down a house was not a wolf, he was a tenant. He said: they will tell you that you are small. They love telling you that. They need you believing that the size of the wolf is the size of the wolf. Chima played it twice, three times, while he sanded the housing. It felt like being handed a spine.
It took him some months to notice that the wolf in the bright room had never brought down a house either. He sold a course about it. He had named the course after Chima’s family. He had made more from the telling than Isaac ever made from the doing.
That is the second thing to know about Chima: the loudest voice offering him a self was charging him for it, and the certainty it sold him was manufactured in the same shed as the fan.