What building beyond yourself actually costs

Sep 20

2 min read

LIFT Newsletter 067

We clap when something succeeds. We almost never see what it costs to keep going long enough to get there.

Here is the part nobody shows you.

When you are building something meant to matter beyond you, for your people, your community, further than yourself, the hardest thing is not the work. It is the doubt that comes back, again and again, and asks whether any of it is wanted at all.

I know it because I live it.

Ten years building COMB, my leadership work with companies and their teams,

and a year and a half now with LIFT, the one I write to you from, and the doubt still visits.

There are stretches where it looks like the market does not want what we offer, and I sit with the question of whether to stop.

And then we work with someone.

A leader, a team, a person quietly stuck, and I watch what our work actually does for them, how much it shifts, how needed it turns out to be. That is what regrounds me. That is what makes me start again. Not once, over and over, for years.

That is the real cost of building beyond yourself. Not the money or the hours, though there are plenty of both. It is confronting your own doubt on repeat, and choosing to carry the thing anyway, because you have seen what it does when it reaches the right person.