Fantastic Builders and Where to Find Them

1st installment in a new series

Introduction to the series

Welcome to my favorite new bite-sized blogging experiment to date: a series of psychologically-illustrative narrative snippets from the lives of amazing builders. Because the only way to really understand and internalize the “builder’s mindset” (or really any universal prescription for living) is to see its inexorable logic play out in the context of many particular lives and narrative arcs.

I feel particularly excited to launch this series today, after having just spent 2 days among some of the world’s most thoughtfully ambitious builders and champions of building at the 2024 Progress Conference in Berkeley, CA. The first “builder spotlight” below offers one small glimpse into the kinds of inspiring humans and building endeavors I encountered there.

I hope you’ll enjoy this first pilot installment of “Fantastic Builders and Where to Find Them”, and I welcome any and all feedback on how to make it better. The stories that get the most love will likely get expanded on in my forthcoming book, so please let me know which ones really resonate (and feel free to point me toward other builders I should feature!).

Builder spotlight #1: “Must Love Dogs” (Celine Halioua)

Image source: https://x.com/celinehalioua

Principles on display: Your life as the yardstick and finding person-life fit

Celine Halioua, the 30-year-old firebrand founder and CEO of Loyal, is one of the purest examples of practical idealism that I’ve ever had the pleasure to encounter. Her long-term ambition is to increase the human lifespan through anti-aging drugs. This is notoriously hard for a million different reasons, some of them regulatory (the FDA doesn’t like approving experimental drugs for non-disease targets), some economic and structural (e.g., it takes 20-30 years to see if a human anti-aging drug is working). But instead of giving up or getting cynical, Celine found an ingenious path forward: start by extending the lifespan of dogs, and establish a precedent for the human use case from there. 

Whenever I hear Celine speak, her boundless energy and optimism belie the enormous complexity and multi-decade time horizon of the mission she’s taken on. How does she do it? And how does she stay so cheerfully patient through all the regulatory and bureaucratic hurdles that have forced her onto this circuitous path to begin with? 

The simple answer is that this path has been anything but “forced” on her; she chose it, indeed custom-crafted it, based on the sum total of her values and proclivities. During the talk she mentioned that she happens to be a dog lover, and afterward I asked her whether she would’ve been able to sustain the same excitement about this path if she hadn’t been. “No,” she said, after a moment’s reflection. “I’ve actually come to love dogs and dog owners even more since I started this,” she continued, smiling with delight as she described her conversations with prospective customers and the lengths to which they’re willing to go for the chance of a few extra years with their beloved pet. 

This is the big secret behind Celine’s seemingly infinite reservoir of energy and enthusiasm: she has charted a path that she can love, with her own life as the ultimate yardstick.

Builder spotlight #2: “Mr. Lazy” (David Allen)

Image source: https://www.facebook.com/DavidAllen/

Principle on display: Building yourself by building

Many people have positively shaped my life, but there’s only a handful—maybe 3 or 4 among those still living—whose ideas have fundamentally transformed my life for the better. David Allen, the creator of the Getting Things Done (GTD) system I was lucky enough to discover back in college, is among that handful. Beyond the many well-documented wellbeing and productivity benefits of GTD, its most personally meaningful benefit was its role in helping me build and maintain self-trust. By providing a reliable method for capturing and tracking our intentions and choosing whether, when, and how we want to act on them, GTD makes it both harder and less necessary to BS ourselves about what we intend to do.

And so you can imagine my barely-containable delight when I got to spend 30 minutes picking David’s brain in a 1:1 Zoom call the other day. (Thanks for making the intro,

Frode Odegard

!)

David spoke—and listened—with the calm, easy manner of someone who’s living his best life and knows it, and so feels no need to prove anything to anyone. You’d never guess from his mental spryness and casual demeanor that he’s either a day over 60 (he’s 78) nor the same guy whose work has transformed how millions of people and organizations around the world relate to their work.

Here are some tidbits he shared about his backstory and how he went from being penniless and hospitalized for heroin addiction (a story you can read more about in this Wired piece) to becoming the world’s most sought-after productivity expert and executive coach:

For all the immense success David has enjoyed as a result of Getting Things Done, he never actually set out with any sort of “grand plan” of transforming how people work or achieving any sort of large-scale influence. “I’ve never been that entrepreneurial,” he said; rather he’s always experienced himself as “just putting one foot in front of the other.” For instance, after the “self-exploration” journey that led him to drop out of his UC Berkeley PhD program, take up heroin, and eventually hit rock bottom, David needed to pay the bills somehow. So he started taking odd jobs wherever he could find them. (One of his first jobs, he recalled, was driving a delivery truck for a company making small industrial tools for some of the first “startups” in what eventually became Silicon Valley.)

Some of David’s friends at the time were starting their own small businesses, and they needed help “managing their systems”—i.e., getting themselves organized. David was always “Mr. Lazy” (his words) and liked the idea of making things more efficient. So he’d spend some time helping one friend get organized, then he’d “get bored, move on, and find another job,” and so on. At some point he learned that the types of jobs he was doing were called “consulting” (not a category he’d ever encountered growing up in Louisiana), and that he could get hired to do more of them. Then “some corporate guy saw” what David was doing for these small business executives and said “we need this for our whole team,” so he asked David to do a training for his company, which then got picked up by other companies, including Lockheed, where it was “one of their most popular trainings.” “Who’d have thought I’d end up in the corporate world?”, David mused. Consulting eventually turned into coaching for top executives, who would hire him to come to their office, sit desk-side with them, and help them implement the system he had come up with. It was 20 years later that someone said to him, “David, you’ve gotta write the book.” And it was another 4 years before he’d gotten the book written and “out of his head,” with little expectation as to how it would sell.

The rest, as they say, is history.

If you need a free and easy GTD start guide, by the way, Tyler DeVries has written a good one.

And that concludes the first installment of “Fantastic Builders.” Let me know what you think, and stay tuned for many more to come!