You Can Build Whatever Kind of House You Want

You Can Build Whatever Kind of House You Want

By chris danilo on Sep 01, 2016 07:00 am

You've got a nice plot of beachfront property and you can build whatever kind of house you want.

No rules, just your vision.

Each project, business, or mission we start is a brand new house.

We get to decide where we build it, what we build it from, and what it will look like.

But there will be challenges. Some that you can see, and some you can't.

In order to make your house a successful incarnation of your vision, it helps to do three things:

1) Be really clear about why you're building it.

It's going to be nearly impossible. 9/10 businesses fail. Yours probably will, too. You're going to have to listen to friends and family tell you that you're irresponsible, myopic, or both.

You're going to question your drive.

The only way you're going to get through this is if you have a really clear "why" that articulates your purpose.

If you don't know why you're doing this in the first place, I promise that you're going to quit when it gets hard.

2) Build something that gets easier and better as you build it.

This means spending the time to nurture a self-organizing team, spending the time ironing out a positive cash-flow business, or adding a social/viral component to your product.

If it doesn't get better as it ages, you're going to spend a lot of time and money maintaining a crumbling house. Think: brick, concrete, and stone.

They cost you something in the short term, but they'll make your life easier in the end.

That brown leather bag gets better looking as it ages.

Your car is a depreciating asset, is the drive worth the money you could be spending on something else?

No one wants to be the only person using Instagram. It works better if I invite my friends.

You're going to face a number of challenges when managing your team, building your business, or launching a product.

But if you're just starting out, you might as well build something where the wind is at your back. No?

3) Do the hard work first, when it's easy, instead of later when it's harder.

You can build any kind of house you want, but don't complain that the windows are drafty after you said you wanted big windows but then bought the cheap kind.

Don't complain that the basement flooded when you decided to spend your renovation money on the new kitchen.

Don't complain when your floors grew mold beneath them, after you told the builder not to rip up the pretty, wide-pane wooden panels.

It's your project. You're going to have to live with the decisions that you make. The bigger your project gets, and the more you've invested in it, the more you're going to want to protect it by not changing anything that's difficult to change. (In large institutions and organizations, this is called bureaucracy, which is the set of protocols and rules that attempt to protect the organization from change.)

Asking the hard questions of "will that window affect the cost of the electric bill?" and "that pipe over there, I'm worried about that," and "what kind of sealants are effective for wooden floors in this climate?" are harder to do once you've built the house.

It's easier to say "oh, I won't worry about that" until it's too late.

Your project is the same way.

What are the difficult things? What is the work you're avoiding?

Chances are, that's the most important work you could be doing.

What kind of house do you envision? What will you build it from? Where will you build it?

It's up to you to either front-load the tough questions or bite your tongue later.

The Only Thing That Matters for your Project

By chris danilo on Aug 31, 2016 07:00 am

The spectrum of Optimism to Pessimism is too simple.

It doesn't convey the nuance of skepticism, cynicism, or credulity.

We could dive deeply into the mechanics of each, and break down the philosophical detail, but does it matter?

I'm serious.

What are you trying to achieve?

If you're a changemaker, an entrepreneur, an employee, a parent, a teen, or a HUMAN BEING; it doesn't matter.

What matters is what gets you up in the morning and executing your dreams.

Does optimism help? Of course, it does. It very rarely hurts to be optimistic.

Does Pessimism help? I doubt it. Don't even try.

Does Skepticism help? It might, but it might not. It depends on the context.

It's easy to get distracted by the nuts and bolts of rhetoric, just as it's easy to get distracted by the hard work of your project by designing a logo before you've made your first sales call.

What's important are results.

Start doing what works (for you) and gets results. The rest doesn't matter. The rest is a distraction.

Recent Articles:

The Truth About "No Pain; No Gain"
The Secret to Building Something Amazing
The 2 Prerequisites to Surviving Long Meetings
How to Compromise on a High-Stakes Project
The 3 Things Essential Things Good Managers Do