What's stopping us from building?

This piece by Marc Andreessen has been really been sitting strongly with me.

I won’t summarize it as I wouldn’t do it justice. It's worth your time to read.

My strongest reaction is to this quote in particular -

“Every step of the way, to everyone around us, we should be asking the question, what are you building? 

What are you building directly, or helping other people to build, or teaching other people to build, or taking care of people who are building? 

If the work you’re doing isn’t either leading to something being built or taking care of people directly, we’ve failed you, and we need to get you into a position, an occupation, a career where you can contribute to building.

There are always outstanding people in even the most broken systems — we need to get all the talent we can on the biggest problems we have, and on building the answers to those problems.”

So where is the building? 

Creating something new inevitably means changing something old. And change is messy.

New is messy. Perhaps because we are so messy, humans detest mess. We love clarity, certainty and even when we talk about adventure it’s typically framed in our own preferences.

Building takes a lot of time in the mess. It takes spending more of yourself on action than critique. It means constantly fighting to push your own and others’ politics, egos and bureaucracy to the backseat. The best teams I’ve ever seen aren’t perfect. They’re focused and it carries them through the mess. I’m fascinated by the raw magic of smart people solving complicated and interesting problems.

A much faster route to feeling valuable is to control, to criticize and to contain. These are cleaner pursuits, and plenty of corporate cultures reward these with big titles and kingdoms of personnel real estate. To be fair, these mindsets really do have their moments. There are bad ideas that need to be stopped and unethical moves that need to be called out. 

But my own observation has seen many more controllers than creators. And I’m not sure that’s quite the right balance. As so much feels out of control, I hope we use this moment to learn more about creation. 

I believe at their core most people do want to build, teach or care for others. In their own way, the person delaying a critical order because a certain box isn’t checked is likely doing so out of a drive to do their job well. The artist may not be quite fully engaged in their collections department day job, but it may be a whole different world when you see them in the studio. 

Our system is not set up to put the right people in the right roles from the get go. Systemic inequities limit or even prevent choices for too many. A lot of our most significant career decisions happen in the first ten years when we’re still finding out what’s even out there and what we really care about. Some jobs pay considerably more than others due to a complex market web of industry, education and profitability that doesn’t always equate to impact. 

Within all of that, work culture sells a few standard operating myths. We each tend to pick one up and wear it around as our team colors. Confirmation bias is along for the ride and confirms our suspicions accordingly.

1. THE BIG DREAM - the mystical land where the perfect job pays well all while you work amongst a glorious team of perfect like-minded coworkers and heroic infallible leaders. In the big dream, purpose is handed to you as a mission of undeniable impact to humanity. Perfection exists and you just need to keep moving until you find it. If your situation isn't perfect, you must focus on the greener grass until you find it.
2. THE BOOTSTRAPS- there is no luck or privilege involved in this world. If only you were to work yourself to and past the point of exhaustion, you too would be successful. There are hard working providers and there are lazy takers. You are either one or the other. 
3. THE OFFICE SPACE - all work is meaningless and you just need to sit (or stand) there for 40 hours and collect your paycheck. We’re all trapped in an endless cycle of bureaucracy and nonsense. You watch people cling to their red staplers and wonder if this is all life was really meant to be. 
4. THE AGENDA - all managers and executives are out to get you and cannot be trusted. There is always a grand master plan that you are just not privy to. This is all happening to you. You are an innocent bystander to the vendetta of power and corporate greed. Nothing is fair and that’s just the way it is. In this world there are only takers or victims. 

With a nice binary always or never, we could see right to the best decision in any scenario. In some ways it could be easier to navigate if one of these were completely true. We could know exactly who and how to blame for the mess!

But these aren't universal truths. And when we dive into the world of work with one of these myths as our view, we get conflicting information on top of whatever challenges the work presents. That frustration and confusion tends to jump us right into avoidance, aggression or whatever other coping mechanism feels good.

So what can we do instead?

At Newance, we're in the people business. We have influence but rarely control. So, we confront a lot of those feelings (albeit to a lesser degree) all the time.

Here are some of our lessons learned:

1. CONTROLLING TO THE CONTROLLABLES - Time and energy goes to what we can control - the activity, the quality of our work, the efforts we make to build real relationships, the ideation for what's next. The more effort that gets poured into what we can control, the better results we see in anything outside of our control. The more effort that goes into worrying and focusing on external factors, the more time and energy that we're really just wasting.
2. WHAT CAN WE DO TODAY? - We rarely start projects that begin and end in a single day. It's more like we start, adapt, change again, start over and keep pushing through. But that all adds up! This piece by James Clear and his book Atomic Habits on the power of tiny gains says it best. So we try to hone in on what we can do today and then on executing it. I gauge every day as good or bad based only on that - did I spent it building what I want?
3. PLANNING IS NOT DOING - I've had several managers who taught me what a sense of urgency really means. One in particular (looking at you Ryan Kramer!) used to say "Stop getting ready to get ready." And I still to this day catch myself getting ready to get ready. It's just so much easier to see a clean, beautiful planning deck than it is to go out and face rejection or put your ideas out into the world. Is thoughtful planning important? Yes! But it should not be confused with the labor and grind of actually building something great.

We're all still a work in progress on thriving in a mess. Some days are definitely better than others. But increasingly, I'm inspired to see so many people thinking about how to better build, teach and care for others.

If I can help you figure out what to build or to keep building, my free office hours are open!