Chapter Three

What we build matters. But it was never meant to tell us who we are.

I have spent most of my adult life building things.

Businesses. Teams. Strategies. Financial models. Turnarounds. New ventures. Occasionally, rebuilding things that weren’t working quite as well as everyone had hoped.

I like building.

I like walking into something complicated and beginning to see the shape hidden underneath it. I like asking questions, finding patterns, connecting people and ideas, and watching something become stronger than it was before.

For a long time, though, I think I allowed what I built to become rather too closely connected to who I was.

Perhaps you know that feeling.

Someone asks what you do, and before you’ve really thought about it, you’ve given them your title.

Accountant.

Founder.

CEO.

Consultant.

Partner.

Whatever happens to be written underneath your name at the time.

We do it so naturally that we rarely stop to notice what has happened.

A description of our work quietly becomes a description of us.

And when the work is going well, that can feel rather good.

The trouble begins when it isn’t.

When the scaffolding moves

Achievement is remarkably good scaffolding for an identity.

Until someone moves it.

A business struggles. A role ends. A relationship changes. A plan doesn’t work. Someone rejects us. An opportunity we thought was ours goes somewhere else.

Suddenly the things we had unconsciously relied upon to tell us who we were become less certain.

I’ve experienced enough success to know how satisfying it can be.

I’ve also experienced enough failure, disappointment and unexpected endings to know that success makes a rather unreliable foundation.

For years, I probably thought the answer was to build better.

Work harder.

Make wiser decisions.

Become more successful.

Make the next thing work.

There is nothing inherently wrong with any of those things. Excellence matters to me. Stewardship matters. If something is worth doing, I still believe it is worth doing properly.

But somewhere along my journey, God began asking a different question.

Not:

What are you building?

But:

Who are you becoming while you build it?

That question changed rather a lot.

A different definition of success

I still love business.

Perhaps more than I ever have.

But I love it differently now.

I no longer think business is primarily about creating something impressive.

I think it is about creating something useful.

Something that serves.

Something that gives people opportunity.

Something that develops others.

Something capable of continuing without its founder having to carry it everywhere on his back.

Something that creates freedom rather than consuming it.

That has changed the questions I ask when I sit with business owners and leaders.

Of course, revenue matters.

Margins matter.

Cash matters.

Strategy matters.

Execution matters.

You cannot run a healthy business indefinitely on good intentions and inspirational quotations.

But increasingly, I find myself interested in the questions sitting underneath the numbers.

What is actually going on here?

Why does everything still depend on you?

What are you afraid would happen if you let go?

What are you building this for?

When will enough be enough?

And perhaps most importantly:

Who are you if one day you walk away from it?

Those are business questions.

But they’re also life questions.

Stronger than the founder

I’ve become fascinated by the idea of building businesses that their owners can eventually walk away from.

Not because they have stopped caring.

Quite the opposite.

Because they cared enough to build something that didn’t permanently require their presence.

There is something deeply healthy about that.

A business should eventually become stronger than the person who started it.

People should grow.

Responsibility should move.

Leaders should emerge.

Systems should mature.

The founder’s grip should loosen.

Perhaps that’s one of the reasons this idea resonates with me so deeply now.

Because I think the same principle applies to much of life.

We are not here to control everything we touch.

We are here to steward it for a season.

Businesses.

Positions.

Influence.

Money.

Opportunities.

Even relationships take a different shape when we stop asking what they can give us and begin asking how faithfully we can care for what has been entrusted to us.

That word — stewardship — has become increasingly important to me.

It changes ownership into responsibility.

And responsibility into gratitude.

The work beneath the work

These days, when I sit across from an owner or executive, I’m increasingly aware that the problem they first describe is rarely the whole problem.

They may arrive wanting to discuss growth.

Or profitability.

Or structure.

Or succession.

Or a difficult member of their team.

And we’ll talk about those things.

But if we stay in the conversation long enough, something else often appears.

Fear.

Identity.

Control.

Weariness.

Loneliness.

A dream they’ve outgrown but don’t know how to leave.

A business they created for freedom that has quietly become their prison.

That’s usually where the more interesting work begins.

I don’t think my role is always to arrive with the answer anymore.

Twenty years ago, I probably felt more pressure to do that.

Now I’m much more comfortable sitting with the question.

Listening.

Noticing.

Occasionally asking the uncomfortable thing everyone else has politely avoided.

And leaving enough silence for an honest answer to appear.

Curiously, that has made the work more meaningful, not less.

Building without being consumed

There is another reason this matters to me now.

Life is bigger than work.

That sentence sounds ridiculously obvious written down.

It hasn’t always been quite so obvious in the way I’ve lived.

There are people I love.

Places I want to see.

Books I want to write.

Conversations I haven’t had yet.

Men I hope to encourage.

Meals to linger over.

Evenings when the best possible use of my time will be sitting outside with Maria while the birds make an unreasonable amount of noise settling into the trees.

I don’t want to build a life so impressive that there is no room left to live it.

And I don’t think I’m alone in that.

Many successful people eventually discover that the thing they built to give themselves freedom has become the very thing preventing them from experiencing it.

Perhaps the answer isn’t to stop building.

Perhaps it’s to build differently.

The Builder

My faith has changed how I understand all of this.

I used to separate things rather neatly.

There was business.

There was life.

There was faith.

Different rooms.

Increasingly, I don’t see those divisions.

If God is interested in who I am becoming, then surely He is interested in how I conduct a meeting.

How I treat someone who cannot advance my career.

Whether I tell the truth when doing so costs me something.

Whether I build people or merely use them to build businesses.

Whether success makes me more generous or simply more impressed with myself.

Whether I can hold what I’ve been given with open hands.

Business can be ministry without ever having a Bible verse printed on the wall.

Sometimes ministry looks remarkably like doing excellent work, treating people with dignity, asking a good question, keeping your word and helping someone carry something that has become too heavy.

I’ve come to believe that God wastes very little.

Perhaps that’s why all those years of numbers, boardrooms, businesses, successes, mistakes, difficult conversations and unexpected turns still matter.

They were never the identity.

They were training.

Still building

I’m still building.

There are businesses I’m excited about.

Ideas scribbled in notebooks.

Books I hope haven’t been written yet.

People I want to work alongside.

Rooms I’d love to speak in.

Things I hope will grow.

Things I hope one day will continue perfectly well without me.

The ambition hasn’t disappeared.

It has simply found a different place to live.

I don’t need what I build to prove that my life mattered.

That’s already settled somewhere much deeper.

And strangely, that makes building far more enjoyable.

You can take risks when failure doesn’t get to rename you.

You can celebrate other people’s success when their success doesn’t diminish yours.

You can let someone else lead.

You can walk away when the season is over.

You can hold plans loosely.

You can build with open hands.

Perhaps that’s what I’m learning now.

We should build things well.

We should build things that matter.

We should build things that serve people and, where possible, outlast us.

But we should never ask what we build to carry the weight of telling us who we are.

It was never designed to.

And neither were we.

A quiet thought to leave with…