44. Your Personal Cathedral Project
Everyone can work on a project that will last hundreds of years...
Hello! I’m Kevin Kruse, founder and CEO of LEADx and NY Times bestselling author of 15 Secrets Successful People Know About Time Management and the forthcoming 11 Secrets Successful People Know About Goal Setting. Welcome to Success & Significance - my take on health, wealth, and relationships (my “3 to Thrive”, read more here). Hit the Subscribe button below to join over 20,000 members who never miss an issue and unlock premium content.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
I was just listening to a podcast called Possible by Reid Hoffman. If you don't know him, he's a venture capitalist. He was the co-founder of LinkedIn, an early PayPal guy and just one of these billionaire tech visionaries - a knowledgeable, nice guy. He's got this newish podcast I just recently discovered, and he was talking about Cathedral Projects, a term I'd never really heard before. I'm not sure if it's his term or where it came from. But he talks about working on things that will last and provide help or inspiration to people long after you're gone, so for hundreds of years.
I can't even remember the context of why he was talking about it. He's either interviewing people about their cathedral projects or he started a new AI company and I think he's thinking about it as a cathedral project for himself. This idea got me thinking. I love that term Cathedral Project.
My mind immediately goes big and I think about all the people that have a medical breakthrough that changes the course of history, improves health, or a patent on some technology, like the resistor or the integrated circuit, that changes technology and impacts humans. I'm not that kind of guy. I don't think I've ever had that level of IQ and maybe I just didn't have that path. I'm not going to be a change-the-world-invention kind of person.
But I think at another level, there is another level that's accessible to most of us. In my mind, I start to think about starting businesses. Most businesses won't last 100 years. The company I started in my 20s, it's still around, it's a derivative, but some of the same people are still there. It's been about 30 years, and will it last another 20 or 50 maybe, but while it's cool that it's even lasted 30 years, I don't view that as a Cathedral Project.
I think about my books. They're not Shakespeare; Shakespeare's books last hundreds of years, but they're going to be around, especially now that everything's digital. The world's knowledge will be stored and accessible forever. So every book I write to me is a small Cathedral Project. Hopefully, it will help someone a hundred years from now, 200 years from now, even if the context has changed. And so there's those kinds of projects.
Then I started thinking about Cathedral Projects we could all do, like impact our family. In a way, when I'm posting on Instagram or when I'm writing a book, I'm often writing for my kids who are all young and adulting now. I want to give them some words of wisdom from dad in these books, even though they're for everybody, I'm really thinking of them as an audience. But I can think of people like, maybe art is your thing. Can you create a painting or a sculpture that is meaningful to you and is appreciated by your children and then someday their children and their children and on and on?
I think all of us could do a Cathedral Project as simple as a journal. I'm the descendant of Patrick McCarron who came over from Ireland to the United States when he was a kid. Imagine if I had his life journal where he talked about his goals, his dreams, his challenges, his advice, how he solved problems, how he thought about things, his words of wisdom after having these amazing experiences that I can't even imagine.
So, whether you create a piece of art, whether you write a journal, and it's like digital can be lost, a physical notebook can last forever. Humanity's still looking at Da Vinci's notebooks because they were on paper. So, create a notebook, create a legacy letter, which doesn't even have to be a book, it can just be a long letter to all of your descendants. And of course, don't limit yourself, think about all these other bigger projects and inventions too. I'm just captured by this idea of Cathedral Projects.
SELF-COACHING QUESTIONS:
How much of your energy, time, and thoughts are going into short-term projects versus long-term projects?
What do you want your legacy to be? Who do you want to help?
What skills or passion can you apply to your Cathedral Project? Art? Business? Writing?
Begin now! What will you start working on right away?
Until the next issue, remember…
Impact > Income,
Kevin 🙏
PS - Open loop tease to next issue
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