The Art of Bricklaying

When plans A, B, and C fail, how do you continue to build a life?

“I never worry about you; you always figure it out.”

My Mom used to tell me that, when I’d call her in an agitated state.

She knew the drill: I'd call her freaked out about something ... anything — from a conversation that had gone sideways to a client going belly-up. She’d patiently listen as I rang all of the agst out of a situation, then provided a calming receptacle where it could exist, away from my peripheral vision, until it evaporated and we never had to speak of it again.

But she’s gone now, leaving me to new coping mechanisms for change, for when things don’t go my way and I’ve run out of rabbits to pull out of a hat.

I started the year inspired, contemplating new pathways and managing out the well-trodden ones that were no longer serving me. I met people working on inspiring things, worked my plan, and built a pipeline. The last few months of new business building have yielded glimmers of vast possibility but not much more in my pocket than some business cards and icky lint.

Being a founder and operator working with startups in an industry known for both its innovation and volatility, I expect this and have a contingency plan. But I learned this year the hard way: It’s not solid. It was built in a different professional era, under different life circumstances, by someone whose operating mindset had always been months, even years, into the rosy future.

I always lived in the What Could Be. The What Is was too much of a buzzkill.

In this clip from our May web discussion, founder, investor, and tech veteran Dave Lu shares his abundance philosophy and overcoming the “scarcity mindset.” In this conversation with journalist Grace Hwang Lynch, Dave also touches on bringing passion and values into a business career and his purpose telling the untold stories of Asian American impact.

---

My brand of “fake it till you make it” philosophy has worked wonders for me, led me to succeed before I was successful, helped me see around corners.

But now I’m looping back into career neighborhoods I assumed I would no longer inhabit in this lifetime, dusting off career milestones from ten, fifteen years ago that have for whatever reason become interesting again, like my wardrobe from that era, which my tweenage daughter calls “Retro Y2K”.

I’ve never been one to hold onto things and wait until they are cool again, preferring constant forward motion toward some place that I could not always define but would know I’d reached when I got there.

Now I’m an idea-hopping hitch-hiker with a fascination for shows like "Poker Face,” in which the female protagonist wanders in and out of dusty towns and others’ deep-seated dramas, solves a murder, and moves on. The beauty of this show, to me, is in the range of experiences she has, with no future plan to tie them to. She commits fully to a temporary situation, because the present is all that can be guaranteed. And because there are beautiful souls and stories that hold her, albeit briefly, in place.

There have been some deeply gratifying moments in my recent journey — people who have shown up, some whom I’d just met, who have said, "I can get you a few miles up the road to a weigh station with a decent bathroom. Tell them I sent you and they’ll give you a key."

And some have told me stories that have stopped me in my tracks.

One,

Elizabeth Bohannon

, guided my shift in mindset, from one of Hope, translated in my personal parlance as optimism for no particular reason, to Faith.

For years she’d been battling an incurable cancer that she recently learned was in remission:

“...the last three years, I’ve asked myself: what does it mean to live without hope? I decided it wasn’t so bad. I’d cultivate faith instead.

Not religious faith, but what the Jungian psychologist James Hillman called “animal faith.” The kind your feet have when they carry you across the floor. The kind your hands have when they reach for the coffee mug. The faith that the ground will be there when you take your next step.

The kind of faith that doesn’t ask for promises, doesn’t look ahead. It lives in this moment, and the next, and the next. It says: I am here. I will make breakfast. I will feed the dog. I will take a walk in the sunshine.

And slowly, those small acts of faith, practiced in the shadow of uncertainty, build a life."

Another friend gifted me with a reading of my own subconscious intentions, helping me visualize, via Reiki, my “Hell Yes!” — the intuition I had cast out while entertaining more profitable but soul-withering opportunities.

Another friend shared with me a story that resonated. A successful small agency owner with a stellar reputation in her industry, she decided, in the midst of the COVID lockdowns to start an Internet company. For years I advised her, continually marveling as she persevered across all the things associated with the Founder Condition: 180-degree pivots, co-founder partings, complicated technical, legal and financial challenges. Despite these frictions she’d come to our chats fresh-faced with a new outlook, detailed with gorgeous new messaging, convincing me anew of her mission.

Over time our conversations became less-focused on her startup and more on her life adaptations to it. We talked about our families and the challenges of being both caregivers and providers; about people who made us uneasy because they gave off a familiar, frenetic vibe; about her move to another part of the country, which made me crave a similar existential palate cleanser; about our moms dying and where we landed from that precipitous drop in our support structures.

Her former life as an agency owner I had presumed to be over. But one day, after some time had passed between our last conversation, she announced a recommitment to her old firm, in a new way. She put herself on the payroll, something she had never done before, and billed for her hours, making her all the more cognizant of her time and how she spent it. She was also creating her own product line based on her love of Mahjong, which she said she had found herself turning to when she needed to decompress.

She had re-emerged from her entrepreneurial chrysalis without a shiny new Internet company but was light and free as a butterfly.

She told me, somehow, in her exhausting struggle to keep advancing at all costs, she regained an appreciation for a more innate existence. She had stopped relying on momentum as her savior and was now guided by instincts honed in the present. She abandoned the blueprints for castles in her head, deferring now to a bespoke life that was simpler and tangible, sometimes messy, that might scale or might not and yet was, counterintuitively, more profitable.

And she was building it, as she described to me, “brick by brick.”

After our conversation I started thinking about my “bricks”.

Last month I attended a conference focused on “Brain Capital” and was transfixed by the conversations, convinced that mental health was an issue as critical to our collective future as climate change. It reinforced my belief that we are at a pivotal moment in time where we must create the necessary structures for mental well-being to preserve and optimize the workforce: BRICK.

I grapple with the binary nature of work; how we’re taught hard skills but not how to navigate work lives that best identify and utilize our experiences, gifts. and priorities. We should. BRICK.

I am working with founders who infuse my day with energy, just by inviting me to witness them in action. I merely instigate the thinking of these enterprising Picassos and make sure their brushes are clean and ready to use when the time is right to paint with abandon. BRICK

I am raising two adolescent females who will one day be middle-aged women, and who I want to look back on their childhoods fondly, with the tools they need to be happy. BRICK.

No day is complete without my morning coffee and some form of storytelling: podcasts, streaming video, live conversation, books, Substacks: MORTAR.

This is the foundation I have to work with, from which Plans B and C will come.