Every ambitious person is building a castle of cards in a tornado. The only way up is row by row, from a base wide enough for the ambition, and rebuilding with a smile every time it falls.
Each of us highly ambitious people is putting together a castle of cards in the face of a tornado. The tornado is made of uncertainty, life, and a trillion external factors that do not care about the plan. Nobody gets to build in a cleanroom.
The only way to reach the heights of utmost performance is to build the castle slowly and purposefully, row by row, with a base as wide as the ambition is high. A taller castle needs a wider base. There is no trick around this, and every time I have tried one the whole thing came down.
The bottom row is all the basic things that keep you running at high performance. Good sleep. Healthy nutrition. A body that is fit and a mind that is quick. None of it is glamorous, none of it goes on a CV, and every card above it stands on it.
The second row is already more abstract. Your sources of news and information. What books you read. What discussions you have, and with whom. This is the row that decides what your brain is fed, and the quality of everything you build later is bounded by the quality of what goes in here.
From the third row onwards the cards get more and more concrete, depending on your goal. The training hours you put in to become an Olympic swimmer. The clients you manage to talk to so your product gets better. The networks you build, the conferences you join, the people you keep in touch with. These are the cards people see and admire, and they are the ones that fall first.
All of these rows need to be well layered on top of each other, and there is no gentle way to say what that takes. Sometimes it takes the cruelty of a taskmaster holding an electric whip. You need to rearrange your monkey brain into the order that manages to lay out the cards, and the monkey brain does not want to be rearranged.
So the rules are concrete and boring on purpose. Don’t take your phone in your hand first thing in the morning. Eat well. Don’t overdo it with caffeine. Stretch. Read, explore, research, discover. Network. Keep your relationships intact and flourishing. Pet the cat. And most importantly, kiss your wife.
A stable foundation is an unmatched, unfair, asymmetric advantage. It will keep you sane and smiling through the toughest storm, and it is the one advantage nobody can raise money for, hire for, or buy. You just have to lay the cards.
The castle of cards will fall. There is no doubt about that, so plan for it rather than against it.
The tornado of social and civil responsibilities, viruses, pandemics, flight delays and the other trillion bad things that can happen will blow over the top few rows on a normal week. Some weeks it takes the whole structure. A sick day turns into a sick week, a project blows up, someone you love needs you more than your plan does, and suddenly there are cards all over the floor and no castle.
Your number one task is not to keep the castle standing. Nobody can. Your number one task is to always improve the structure, to always rebuild card by card, and to start from the bottom every time. Sleep first, then food, then the body, then what you read, then the training hours and the client calls and the conference badge. Not the other way around, however tempting the top rows look.
Then you regroup, and you rebuild, with a smile on your face every single time. Using the carrot whenever you can. Using the stick whenever it is needed.