Ron Collins
Aug 8, 2017 · 3 min read

I keep looking at daunting tasks as a house I don’t know how to build, looking for a blueprint I’ll never find.* I am obsessed with the finished product and have grown to embrace the result instead of the turmoil that is the journey.

I love this analogy, because building houses, and working on just about anything else associated with them, is what I do. And I can utterly identify with the overwhelming proportions of the task unknown: I had to go from being a bookworm mamma’s boy who barely knew how to hold a hammer, to a grown man responsible for hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment, labor and materials, within a few years. And yes, I had some sleepless nights.

I had a lot of good bosses who taught me things more important than just the hands-on details of a given task: they taught me principles of getting them done, too. One man who took me from being a decent framer to being a reputable and reliable lead framer, a leader of men and builder of homes, used to have all kinds of little sayings. One was: “do ALL of one thing, then do ALL of the next thing.” In other words, don’t skip around and end up with half-started projects and loose ends all over the place. Build the floor, the whole floor, nail off every last square inch of it, before you even think about building any walls. Et cetera.

You get things done, by getting their elements done in an orderly and sensible manner. This helps with that sense of overload, because instead of feeling outdone by a whole house, you just look at the day’s project of getting the floor built, and build it. You’re done. The floor is done. Now it’s time to worry about snapping out walls and cutting plates for them. Build ALL the walls, get them braced and plumb-aligned, THEN worry about cutting rafters or setting trusses. The walls, all of them, are done.

As for the whole house, I have this mind trick I use, that the whole house already is built because I already know that the future contains that built house. My job is to fill in the elements systematically, even when I don’t fully grasp everything in the plans yet. I will. I know I will. Of course I will. The house already exists, in the future. I just haven’t arrived at the day when it is standing there done yet. But I will. I know I will. Of course I will.

I am not always an overly confident person, I had to learn to be that, to give orders and make decisions and stand my ground about them. So my little time-travel trick helps me: nothing to do with confidence, the house being built is inevitable, and my being the one to make it so has already been set in motion. Just do the job.

You might try expanding your lovely analogy something like this in a way that suits your style. I find building a house to be the ultimate analogy. Jesus did too: he said a house built on sand won’t last, and was right. The Constitution of the United States of America was drafted by men now called “framers”, and their house has stood all this time, and withstood some weather.

Whatever it is you need to get done, think of it as already done, then just time-travel along the path of doing it so you get to see the result you already know awaits you. It works for me, and you have no idea how high a mountain that was for that bookish momma’s boy to climb. The view, is breathtaking.

*looking for a blueprint I’ll never find.

(and yes, I have built more than one house with no plans at all. They were already built, in the future, too. The blueprint, is YOU.)

    Ron Collins

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    Facts don’t care about your faction