20,000 bricks

Fred craned his neck at the enormous industrial chimney that towered above him.

The column of red bricks rose for hundreds of feet before it was swallowed by blankets of smog, belched out by tightly-packed mills and textile factories.

Fred placed one foot on the ladder and began to climb.

Left.
Right.
Left.
Right.
Left.
Right.

He grunted as he pulled himself over the summit, swinging his legs with a practised elegance that seemed odd on him.

Panting, he wiped beads of sweat from his forehead with the oil-stained handkerchief he kept stuffed into his waistcoat pocket and looked down at a world in miniature.

Church spires rose like icebergs in a sea of terraced houses, stretching for miles before giving way to rolling hills that hugged the horizon.

He sighed. It was time to get to work.

Fred had been given an impossible task: demolishing a 200 feet tall chimney without damaging the surrounding buildings. That meant no dynamite.

He had no help.
No crane.
No safety equipment.
No explosives.
No nothing.

But he had a ladder and he had a hammer, and that was enough.

So each day, Fred climbed to the top of the chimney and swung his hammer, knocking it down one brick at a time.

A chimney like that has twenty thousand bricks.

Twenty thousand.

And Fred took down every single one by himself.

When he was asked how he could take on such a laborious task, Fred replied ‘It don’t do to think about how long it’s gonna take you. You just gotta keep bashing some off’.

Every startup has a chimney: a big, seemingly impossible challenge that must be overcome.

Every startup has bricks: smaller, occasionally unglamorous but necessary tasks that move them one step closer to their larger goal.

Founders must identify the chimney to be conquered and drive their team to chisel away at the bricks every day.

Big chimneys can be dangerous. Their overwhelming size can make us forget they’re made up of individual bricks. They paralyse us into inaction.

When journaling about the process he went through to create ‘Grapes of Wrath’, the author John Steinbeck wrote ‘There are so many things to go into this book…Mustn't think of its largeness but only of the little picture. Just a stint every day does it.’

And so it is for startups. Great founders keep one eye on the chimney and the other on the bricks.

Elon Musk wants to colonise Mars. That’s a big chimney. Building a rocket capable of manned interplanetary flight right off the bat would have surely led to failure. Instead, he built the Falcon 1, which was able to enter Earth’s orbit. That was his first brick. And that brick was made up of smaller bricks, like manufacturing the nose cone and fuselage, and conducting the test flight. And all those bricks were made up of even smaller bricks. In startups, it’s bricks all the way down.

Howard Schultz didn’t create a global chain all at once. He opened a single coffee shop in Seattle and kept iterating until they got it right. 35,000 Starbucks later, here we are.

Spanx is a billion dollar fashion brand that sells a range of clothing in 50 countries. But it was a single shapewear product created by Sara Blakely that laid the foundation for its success.

Knocking down a chimney with twenty thousand bricks may seem impossible.

But a single brick? That’s doable.

Fred climbed his ladder each day and knocked off those bricks, one by one. Five exhausting months later, he was done.

‘It don’t do to think about how long it’s gonna take you. You just gotta keep bashing some off’.

Pick up your hammer. Let’s get to work.

Today’s story was inspired by this footage of Fred Dibnah, a steeplejack turned tv personality.

If you need help choosing your chimney, or identifying which bricks you need to work on, book a call with me. Bring your hammer.

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Nelson