The Architect

Last week when I was telling the story of Buck Showalter, I said that he waited two and a half years from the time he was hired to the time he managed his first game. I said that even though he wasn’t wanted anymore by one team, he would be the architect of another team. As I was writing that article, I kept thinking about the word “architect”. What if we would just stop for a moment and think about two years into the future. If you stay on the same path, what do you see? Are you still working at the same job? Are you still in the same physical shape? What is your greatest weakness right now? Do you still have it? Now, what if we close our eyes and we think about where we want to be in the next two years. What job are you doing? How has your fitness level changed? How many weaknesses have you addressed? Someone two years ago from today decided that they wanted to change their path. They figured out where they wanted to be and then worked at it. They sat down and became the architect of their life. That means that today they are living the life they always wanted.

Blueprints and Material

It all starts with an idea, but once you have that idea, what’s next? An architect starts with blueprints. He takes a large piece of paper, or has a program on his computer, and he sits down and gets it all drawn out so that he can start to see it. If you want to be in a certain place in two years from now and you don’t have it written down somewhere, what you have is a dream. What do you want and what does it look like? Now go and write it down. If you want to work from home, what are you doing? Once you know where you want to be in two years and you have it written down, what materials do you need? I was thinking yesterday about something I want to do in about five months. I think I can do everything for less than five hundred dollars. As I thought about it, I thought about how most of what I am going to need, I can store until I need it. So, one of my goals for today is to write out a list of everything I am going to need and then slowly start buying it. Every paycheck I can go and get a few things that I am going to need. The more I thought about all of it, the more doable it all seemed. Is this how a good architect does it? Do they have the ability to put something on paper and see how it will clearly look in six months or two years?

Now What?

I have the blueprints, I know the material I need, now what? This is the part where I think I get lost most of the time. What steps do I need to take to get to the finish line? What do I need to do this week, so that in two years I’m exactly where I want to be? The hardest part to realize is that the goal is to be in a certain place in two years, not tomorrow. If the Yankees play a game in Kansas City in May, how would everyone react if I said I was going to show up in Kansas City at the end of this week. How would you respond to me if I told you that I was planning on showing up to the stadium in February for the game in May? Best case scenario is that all you do is laugh at me. But all of us keep trying to accomplish our two-year goal in two weeks. These are the times that we need to look back on the wise words of one of the greatest architects of our lifetime, Ted Mosby. Back in 2009, Ted Mosby reminded us of one of the greatest lessons ever taught, “Don’t Forget About the Books”. Ted told the story of a great architect who built one of the most beautiful libraries the world had ever seen. There was just one problem, every year the library was sinking two inches. After lots of investigating, they finally figured out the reason, the architect when making the blueprints forgot to take into consideration the weight of the books. You can have a beautiful plan, you can have all the materials, but if you rush it, you are going to make a big mistake. In the past when we rushed, instead of finishing with an amazing product, we had to tear it down way too early.  Slow down, follow the plan. We have two years to get to where we need to be, let’s get there safely so we can start the next amazing project.