The Value of Building Sandcastles

Have you ever noticed how much kids adore building sandcastles? To many of us adults, it seems like a waste of time, as sooner or later, that sandcastle is sure to be washed away by high tide or trampled upon by unassuming adults and curious children strolling up the beach. Sandcastle building is in sharp contrast to our results-oriented culture that prizes accomplishment over all else. 

Due to my kids love of sandcastle construction over the years, I’ve come to realize that it's all about the process and experience, not the end result. And if you pay close attention to how your kids build their castles, you are sure to learn some new things about them. For example, my 10-year-old son likes to build castles very close to the water line – he tells me that it’s exciting to have the higher waves lap up and test out the sturdiness of our castle – demonstrating his penchant for risk (signs of an entrepreneur perhaps?). He named our sandcastle Atlantis, celebrating that soon it would be submerged in water, just like the mythical city. He focuses on building strong walls and foundations, rectangle fortresses, deep moats and early defense systems of piles of sand in front of the castle walls. In contrast, my 7-year-old daughter focuses on the esthetics of the castle, making sure every wall is decorated with drippy wet sand, all the turrets are in the right place and that the moat fully encircles the castle. Her focus on making key improvements in the artistic aspects of our castle are surely a demonstration of prioritizing form over function, as even solid fortresses need to be visually pleasing. They find me useful as the labor – I comply with their requests to build the less interesting but necessary aspects of the castle, like the moat, shoring up walls after a particularly large wave, or filling buckets with the type of sand that’s moist enough for tower-making but not so wet it sticks to the bucket. While my own sandcastle building talents are limited (and the kids enjoy demonstrating their superior skills), I’ve noticed that they value additional helping hands on their creation and they appreciate my purposeful focus on the project (without the typical cell phone distraction, as my phone is sure to be tucked safely in the bag further up the beach). It becomes a team-focused exercise where everyone has a role to play, without the normal sibling bickering that commonly ensues between them during other activities. I’ve noticed they’re also happy to enlist others that come along – be it younger kids that might have good ideas to contribute or unassuming adults who could prove to be additional useful labor.

Building sandcastles with my kids nearly every day during our summer vacation this week caused me to take a step back and realize that even in business, we could all do more to allow for the focused co-creation of things, taking the time to learn more about each other and enabling an array of talents to materialize across the team - focusing a little less on the actual outcome, and more on the process itself. If you take the time to watch, learn and listen, you’ll find that the natural roles that people fall into will tell you a lot about them, and perhaps they’ll notice that you - like me - can serve as useful labor!