The builder's yardstick: your life as the measure of all things

Image created by ChatGPT with DALL-E

A builder builds, and a builder can build many things: a product or service, a team, a company, an essay, a song, a friendship, a home, a family, a culture, a skillset. The builder’s mindset is a perspective, a set of premises, habits, and techniques, to enable and valorize a life built around the building of such things.

But the builder’s mindset is broader than any particular project. It’s broader even than a career of such projects. The builder’s mindset is, most widely, about bringing a builder’s perspective to life. It’s about building your life as a whole.

Here are two of the most common questions I get about the psychology of building:

• What if I’m not sure what I want to build? Does the builder’s mindset even apply to me?

• If I give up on my [startup / graduate degree / sport / marriage / other project that’s not bringing me value or joy], won’t that mean I failed as a builder?

The builder’s mindset, understood as applying to your life as a whole, provides the ultimate yardstick for evaluating and resolving these kinds of questions, as I’ll illustrate below. Once you come to view your life as your ultimate building project, you won’t want to cede any of its design specifications to the arbitrary dictates of authority (mine included!) or convention. In lieu of all those unquestionable “should’s” and “shouldn’t”s that clamor for your dutiful compliance, you will answer to a single mandate: “this is your life you’re building, so choose accordingly.”

For those looking for guidance, this might sound painfully abstract, even empty. But it is actually quite contentful. Here are some notable facts about YOUR LIFE:

• It is yours. Your life is your one and only ticket to existence, and you are its ultimate stakeholder. Your life is, properly and as a matter of fact, uniquely important to you. 

• It is time-bound. “Your life as a whole” gives you a discrete yet extended timeframe to work with, something like 80 years (going up as civilization progresses). This is a longer time horizon than we typically think about just by default, but also much more concrete and bounded than the amorphous “someday maybe” sorts of terms in which we typically think about our distant future. 

• It is complex. It will have distinct but highly interactive components, all of which need to be working in harmony in order for the whole to function. The configurations are boundless, but there are some natural constraints that arise: for instance, you’ll need to spend a large portion of your time working to build and sustain the life you want. You’ll need at least some social connection, physical and mental fitness, aesthetic inspiration, recreation and rest, and you’ll incur severe costs if those things fall below a certain threshold. Contra such bizarre dichotomizations as implied by the phrase “work-life balance,” none of these things are separate from or “mere means” to a fully-lived life; they are indispensable aspects of one unified whole. It is harder to do good work when you’re deeply lonely, just as it is harder to connect with others when you hate your work.

• It is a human life. Evolution has equipped you with a unique and magnificent survival tool: a reasoning faculty. If you want your life to go well, you need to think your way through it, and, even more than that, to think up the kind of life you want to live. You need to build the vision for your life, the competence to achieve it, and the motivation to make it worthwhile. You need to learn how to do all of this, and additionally learn how to continuously adjust and tune these things as you learn. No other organism needs to (that is, gets to) do all this. And no other organism can screw up its life as badly as we can, to the extent that we default on thinking and choosing (or worse, trade them off for their counterfeits).

• It is the one true “end-in-itself”. Your life is not a discrete series of means and ends; rather, living your life is both the means and the end. We do not “build to live” or “live to build”; rather we live by building, which is the only way to live as a human being. We continue to build our life until the moment we die, and the joy of getting to build it is a big part of our reward. On this perspective, a human life is not rendered meaningful and worthwhile in virtue of its utility to some “greater good”; rather, a human life fully lived is the greatest good of all.

With this framing in mind, let’s take each of the two above questions in turn:

1. What if I’m not sure what I want to build? Does the builder’s mindset even apply to me?

Once you understand that the builder’s mindset applies to your life as a whole, then this question becomes almost incoherent. If you are honestly asking yourself “what do I want to build?” or “what work do I want to do?” and not just mindlessly settling into some default path, then you are already approaching your life as a building project. The builder’s mindset applies to every aspect of this project, including but not limited to how one chooses and manages the more particular projects that comprise it. 

Imagine an architect asking “what if I haven’t decided on a design for this home? Then do architectural principles even apply to me?” If your architectural principles don’t guide you on how to arrive at a good design in the first place, but only on, say, how to execute on some preconceived design template, then they’re functioning as mere tactics, not principles. Likewise for the life-architecting principles that constitute the builder’s mindset.

So how do those principles—like self-honesty, intellectual ambitiousness, first principles thinking, win-win relationships, remembering what you know, and building yourself by building—guide one’s choice of what to build in the first place? Here I’m just going to quote the answer my husband Matt Bateman recently tweeted to the question “How do you best help someone who does not know what to do for their career?”, which sums up the approach as well as I could:

First I would want to be sure that you’re thinking about “career” in the right way, as that is often the blocker. The right way is something like:

“career” (n.): a series of dents you make in your universe that earn you money, competence, self-esteem, and a sense of meaning, and, further, that will gradually open up additional opportunities to make different and/or bigger dents for possibly more money and meaning

If that’s already roughly the concept with which you’re operating, there’s a lot of idiosyncratic advice I would give depending on where/who exactly you are, but here are things I often end up recommending:

1. Get a job, any job, whatever job seems overall best to you out of the ones within reach. Just don’t worry about whether or not it fits your “career”. If you’re thoughtful about your work, the dots will connect looking backwards, as Jobs said, *no matter what the work is*. [Builder’s mindset principle: build yourself by building]

2. Meet people who are doing things that you find interesting and admirable, which is to say, meet people. Intentional socializing is a power tool in life and so it helps here. If you surround yourself with people who work well and happily, good things will occur as if by magic. [Builder’s mindset principle: win-win relationships]

3. Identify universe-denting activities (i.e. work) that you already do or enjoy that don’t naturally offer remuneration. Continue to develop those interests. And institute a standing policy to look for experiments that might move them in a remuneration-offering direction. [Builder’s mindset principles: remember what you know, intellectual ambitiousness]

4. Replace less helpful pursuits. If you’re spending your life playing video games or whatever, find ways (gently, with infinite self-forgiveness) to limit these habits. Seek leisure that has more long-term upside, which usually includes learning how to see and feel that upside. [Builder’s mindset principles: self-honesty, no intrinsic motivation]

One thing I’ll add is that this experience of “not knowing what you want to do with your life” is not only normal but extremely common among the most ambitious builders. That’s because, in choosing to build a life for yourself instead of mindlessly following some template that’s been handed down to you, you opt out of the comforting illusion of certainty that such standard templates can often provide. (See Paul Graham’s excellent essay on “How to do great work” for more insights on this.) Recall how the 18-year-old Steve Jobs decided to drop out of college after 6 months and just take the classes that interested him, instead of chasing after a default credential whose value was opaque to him:

I didn’t know enough about what I wanted to do, and besides that, I figured I could drop out and then drop back in and take the classes anyway and learn just as much. So I dropped out after six months, and then I dropped in for a little over a year.

I spent about a year and a half there… And I enjoyed it greatly. It was a hard time in my life, but I enjoyed it a lot. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. And Reed was a very intense place, very bright people—everyone out to change the world, but not knowing quite how…. So that idealism was formed, but also the feeling that there had to be a more successful way [of] realizing some of that idealism.

And when, some 13 years later, the 30-year-old Jobs got pushed out of the company he had co-founded, he again opted for the less certain but better-suited path over the well-templatized but poorly suited ones at his disposal:

I had hoped that my life would take on the quality of an interesting tapestry where I would have weaved in and out of Apple: I would have been there a period of time, and maybe I would have gone off and done something else to contribute, but connected with Apple, and then maybe come back and stay for a lengthy time period, and then go off and do something else. But it’s just not going to work out that way.¹

I personally, man, I want to build things. I’m thirty. I’m not ready to be an industry pundit. I got three offers to be a professor during this summer, and I told all of the universities that I thought I would be an awful professor. What I’m best at doing is finding a group of talented people and making things with them. I respect the direction that Apple is going in. But for me personally, you know, I want to make things. And if there’s no place for me to make things there, then I’ll do what I did twice before. I’ll make my own place. You know, I did it in the garage when Apple started, and I did it in the metaphorical garage when Mac started.

At this point Jobs still had a great deal to learn—and some deep dents to make in his own character—before fully coming into his own as the visionary leader we now remember him to be. But he already had the benefit of his accumulated experiences to 1) inform the general types of projects he does and doesn’t want to be building his life around, and 2) assure him that he’ll be able to make something great again, even if he doesn’t yet know quite what it will be. These are some of the accruing rewards of approaching your life with a builder’s mindset.

2. But if I give up on my [startup / degree / sport / marriage / other project that’s not bringing me value or joy], then would I have failed as a builder?

Giving up on long-term projects or relationships incurs costs. One is shedding pieces of one’s working framework of meaning and activity, sometimes in small ways, sometimes in very large ways. The builder honestly faces those costs and asks: is it worth it?

But is it worth it… on what standard? The standard, again, is your life as a whole. When you are changing projects or major project-like aspects of your life, you are changing the shape of your life as a whole. You are choosing—usually with significant uncertainty and hopefully with the guidance of sound principles—between two different lives.

As in the previous question, it should be noted that this sort of life pivot is normal and common amongst ambitious builders. You try things, they don’t work, you change tack. Being high-agency precisely means that you don’t stick with projects, hobbies, careers, or relationships “come what may.” You take the relevant commitments and do an honest accounting of their value as well as their costs—including the opportunity costs—with the seriousness of someone who takes their life seriously, and you make an active decision on that basis, making sure to check your status quo biases in the process.

Here’s a simple analogy: is someone more successful as a product architect if they leave in a feature they now see is damaging rather than improving the customer experience, or if they remove it? Same goes for your success as a life architect—for which you are your ultimate customer.

If you need inspiration for whatever hard pivots or tough goodbyes you might be contemplating in your life, try looking closely at the life stories of the great entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, or other builders you admire; often you’ll find as many instances of walking away from a major commitment as of doubling down on one.

For instance, whereas I’ve often cited Nobel Laureate Kati Kariko’s inexhaustible commitment to her mRNA vaccine research, you can also learn a lot from her decision to finally leave academia in 2010 and join a then-obscure startup called BioNTech.

Or you can listen to Michael Jordan talk about his decision to walk away from the Chicago Bulls in 1999, as beautifully documented in The Last Dance.

Or you can read about how Edwin Land, the visionary inventor of instant photography who inspired much of Steve Jobs’ approach at Apple, walked away from Polaroid—the iconic company he had founded and grown over 45 years—when it no longer let him pursue his creative vision (which he happily went on pursuing at the research institute he founded just for that purpose).

Or you can recall my conversation with the amazing Blake Scholl, founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic, who said of his “failed” first startup:

When we had an opportunity to sell the company in a way that everyone would make a bit of money in a small exit, it was a massive relief to me. I thought, ‘Great, take the exit. Stop having to worry about failure, live to found another day.’ I actually look back and I feel really lucky that first company didn't work because if it had in a big way, I would've been stuck working on something that I just didn't love.

Instead, I got to spend two years at Groupon retaining the bank account and reflecting on what I had learned. A joke I often make is there's nothing like working on internet coupons, to make you yearn to work on something you really love.

Or, for that matter, look into some of the countless public and private stories of people (like my aforementioned husband Matt) who had to go through at least one painful divorce en route to finding the love of their life (if I may say so myself).

Let’s test it out

If you’ve followed this newsletter for a while, you know the “yardstick” I’m describing here is nothing new: it’s the standard I apply to everything, from deciding how much money to go after to managing your flaws to defining and pursuing excellence. I suspect it can also cut through many of the other real or apparent dilemmas that confront us en route to building our best lives. Of course I’m also aware of the risk that my yardstick might blind me to anything it’s ill-equipped to measure (cf the hammer that makes everything look like a nail), so: write in with your unsolvable dilemmas and edge cases and counterexamples, please! Help me put this yardstick to an honest test, and you might just inspire a future post while you’re at it.

1. The grand irony here is that, of course, this ended up being a beautifully accurate description of how Jobs’ life actually played out. But he did not and could not know that at the time.