Blueprints Before Bricks, Foundation Before Elevation: Keys To The Building Process

Want a life that can carry real weight without cracking under pressure? We explore the building process behind anything that lasts—careers, teams, marriages, and character—and why vision, foundations, and patient execution matter more than hype or speed. I walk through the three questions that sharpen direction (what am I building toward, who am I becoming in the process, and what’s the end goal and why does it matter) and show how writing down your why turns scattered effort into aligned action.

From there, we go deep on foundations: character, humility, and discipline as non-negotiables. Success exposes whatever your base can’t bear, so the hidden work becomes your anchor—reading, reflection, prayer, forgiveness, journaling, and honest communication. I share stories about rushed construction, the messiness of the build phase, and why shortcuts create expensive failures later. We talk crock-pot growth vs. microwave results, the compounding power of small consistent acts, and how reliability creates psychological safety in leadership and relationships.

Plans evolve, and that’s healthy. Builders call them change orders; we call it growth. Be stubborn about goals but flexible about methods—move the wall, restructure the team, relearn how to listen, and make room for rest without confusing movement with progress. Above all, build for sustainability: leaders develop people, relationships nurture understanding, and individuals shape character that outlasts trends. You are the architect, your choices are the materials, your purpose is the blueprint, and your faith is the foundation. 

If this message hits home, share it with someone in their “under construction” season, then subscribe and leave a 5 star review to help more builders find the TCMMY Inspiration Station.

Chapters

• 0:00 Framing The Building Metaphor
• 2:00 Vision First: Write Your Why
• 4:00 Foundations: Character, Humility, Discipline
• 8:20 Anchors, Storms, And Hidden Work
• 11:40 Slow Cooking Growth, Not Microwaving
• 15:30 Construction Phase And Costly Shortcuts

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:37

Welcome to the Inspiration Station, the show where we dive deep into personal growth, leadership, mindset, and purpose. I'm your host, Mr. U, and today we're talking about the building process. That long, sometimes messy but always meaningful journey towards something that lasts. I want to start you off, guys, with a thought today. I believe that everything great that stands today, everything great that stands today, from skyscrapers to strong marriages to strong leaders, were built. Not wished into being, not stumbled upon by accident, but they were actively and intentionally built, brick by brick, moment by moment, decision by decision. So whether you're building a dream, a team, or your own self-confidence, the principles of building are the same. And I want you to know that at the end of the episode in the show notes, you have information to find me. If you want to build community with me, you want to have discussions regarding what I do as a high performance coach, maybe perhaps help you through some uh mountains in your life. I'm happy to help you build something that lasts. So we'll definitely have great conversations on that front if you so desire. But before you ever lift a hammer, what do you need? Don't say a nail. You need a plan. In life, leadership, and love. That plan is your vision. Without it, you're just piling bricks with no direction. There's a quote that has an unknown origin, but it reads, if the vision is clear, the decisions get easy. If the vision is clear, the decisions get easy. Ask yourself these three questions. I want you to think about this. If you guys are taking notes, many of our listeners love to take notes and jot stuff down. I respect you guys so much for doing that. Some folks just hope they remember it, hope they recall it, but you take notes and you think about it, you ponder it, you pray about it, you jot it down, you write notes. I love that. You're the ones gonna change the world. So I appreciate you guys doing that. But ask yourself these three questions: what am I building towards? What am I building toward? Next question: Who am I becoming in the process of building? Who am I becoming in the process? And last question: What's the end goals? Why does it matter to me? I do my best to try to get these into the show notes for you. What am I building towards? Who am I becoming in the process? And what's the end goal and why does it matter to me? A funny truth, most of us start projects with Legos and no instructions. We just start snapping pieces together because it feels right, right? And halfway through, we realize we built a spaceship when we were trying to make a house. Here's a takeaway I want you to kind of grab hold of and jot this down. For all you guys that haven't picked up a pen yet or a piece of paper, please do so right now. This is a good time to do that. Write down your why. Write down your why. Your vision keeps you from building impulsively. If you're trying to build a house, a spaceship ain't gonna help you. If you're trying to build a spaceship, a house ain't gonna help you. Your vision keeps you from building impulsively. Give purpose to your process. Write your why down. Hopefully that makes sense. Now any builder knows the taller the structure, the deeper the foundation. I shared many times, I even ministered this uh several times last year in regards to the tragedy in Miami with the uh Seaside condominium crash. The builders in that case built a super tall structure, but the foundation wasn't strong. The taller the structure, the deeper the foundation. That's true for leadership, true for personal growth, true for spiritual growth as well. A weak foundation might look fine when the weather is calm, but when the storms come, cracks begin to show. That's why character and humility and discipline are really not areas that we can negotiate on. We can't compromise on it. They have to be non-negotiables for us. They just have to be. I'm gonna say it again for those in the back. Character, humility, and discipline have to be non-negotiables for us. No questions asked. I don't care what you're trying to build, the most, and you've seen this even in today's world. Turn your TV on, pick up your phone and go into the news app. You'll see it. You see exactly what I'm talking about. Success will expose everything that the foundation you built wasn't strong enough for. I'm gonna say it again. I I definitely don't think you want to miss what I just said. Success will expose whatever the foundation is that it can't handle. If your foundation wasn't strong enough and deep enough and sturdy enough to hold the weight of what you're trying to build, the more you get successful, the more you grow in your success journey, all those things begin to come out. The storms come and the cracks begin to show. And at the beginning of the great fall, trust me when I tell you this. If you crave influence without integrity, your tower's gonna lean to the side, it's gonna start tilting over, especially in leadership. In relationships, this is a little bit different, but if love isn't grounded in honesty and communication, when the emotions begin to fade, it's gonna crumble. It begins to fade with time. You have kids, job responsibilities, family grows, you get less sleep, emotions start you know looking a little bit differently, and you gotta realize you know what? What do you have as a foundation to ground and keep you guys? Communication and honesty is key in that. Definitely the love commitment's important in there as well, but things begin to crumble if you don't have those things. In personal growth, if your growth doesn't have a purpose attached to it and it just becomes performance, that's why folks get burnt out. That's why folks get disillusioned. So I just want to just give you a quick takeaway. Don't rush the digging season. You may have to dig deeper to build your foundation. You will to scale higher to grow your building. Don't rush the digging process. Don't rush that season. That's the hidden work that you're doing. Probably reading, praying, taking time to heal, forgiving people who have wronged you, meditating on where your life is and where you want it to be, dreaming, journaling. That's where your real strength is built. Taking care of you. People call it self-care. Yeah, you can get your a manny and a petty, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the other kind of self-care. The one that has more of an eternal result. The hidden work, the healing, the forgiving, the praying, the reading, the meditation. I mean, honestly, have you ever tried to set a bookshelf up without using any anchors on the wall? Well, I'm just the only one, huh? Okay. It looks great for a few days. You put that one heavy book in there, and guess what happens? That whole bad boy comes tumbling down. That's how life works. We can't skip the anchoring process. Because what looks good for a little while, it definitely won't last. Honestly, nobody can build a masterpiece overnight. Unfortunately, we live in a microwave generation. We want all as quick right now. But true growth is kind of more of a crock pot style of growing. If that makes sense, you got if you can't cook and you never you don't spend no time in the kitchen, you might not have any idea what a crock pot even is. And I'm sorry to hear that. Google crock pot. So you can see what I'm talking about. But crock pot is where you want to cook something slow to maximize all of the flavor. You want to bring out the intensity of all of the ingredients so that all together they get to marry together in that crock pot. And when it's time for you take it out, the smells are incredible. Cooking is slow, steady, releasing and magnifying the flavor a hundred times. You can't get that in the microwave. You can try, but you never get it done. This is coming from a chef, but I'm telling you, even if you're not a chef, you still can't do it. Bill Gates says people overestimate what they can do in a week and underestimate what they can do in a year. I love that. Every small step compounds. Every consistent act builds muscle. Every act of discipline becomes a habit that shapes your destiny. In leadership, just showing up every day with integrity is how you can build trust, at least build a trust that lasts. In relationships, consistency matters. It creates a safe environment. In marriages, in friendships, in uh relationships in general. Consistency creates safety. You know that person is gonna be there, they're not gonna just up and just leave. Could you imagine if you got married to somebody and you knew in advance that they're gonna go to the store to get a pack of cigarettes and never come back? You're not gonna engage in that relationship. It's not safe. It's not smart. It means something when they come home at night. It means something when they show up for you when you need them most. So keep showing up. Even when no one's clapping for you. I think somebody needed to hear that today. Keep showing up even when no one claps for you. When no one celebrates you. That's the construction phase. If you've ever been in any part of construction, if you have it, ever had a house built and you walked in there to watch it while it's being built. It's dusty, it's noisy. You probably don't want to take a picture of it and put it on the gram. But it's absolutely important, vital, necessary. The construction phase means so much. If you don't take the time to get that right, you have a disaster on your hands. Case in point. I surprised my wife with what I guess I call it a Valentine's Day. If it wasn't exactly Valentine's Day, but in that time frame. And I bought her a house. Some folks get flowers and chocolates. This crazy man got a house. And the guys that were doing the work on the house, I won't name the company, but you can probably guess, they didn't do a great job. They kind of rushed through things. I'm not saying they weren't skilled, but perhaps they weren't. Perhaps that was the company's B team. But they did the work on the house, and the house was fairly good-sized house, but they missed a lot of things and left a lot of things for us to figure out. So we had a long fight with getting that done. But the point of that is not to run down the builder, but the point of that is that the construction phase can't be rushed through. You can't overlook these details and just ignore them. You gotta take time to put in this work because it's gonna be weight, growth, heavy objects, people, children, life, meetings, parties, celebrations. A lot's gonna be going on inside this house. We need to make sure that it's built and it's stabilized. The year that my New York football giants won the Super Bowl most recently, which was about 16 years ago, I went crazy inside my man cave. I made a lot of noise, stomping, crying, shouting, clapping, slapping stuff, slapping the wall. Imagine if everything wasn't up to par, construction-wise. I could have started a domino effect that would have brought this whole house down if it wasn't built right. I'm just saying. There's an old saying about two bricklayers. When asked what they were doing, one said, I'm laying bricks. The other said, I'm building a cathedral. The difference wasn't in the task, it was in the vision. The vision matters. It's important that you pay attention to the building process. So we're getting close to the end here, but just to be clear, even with our house, the best put the best plan that you can have, they require course corrections in the middle of it. In the middle of the process. Builders call them change orders, but we just call it growth. This time we have to just pause and say, you know what? This wall just doesn't work here anymore. This picture can't be here, this plant can't be here anymore. This desk just doesn't look good anymore. And that's just in a house, but in your life, it's the same. You might have to restructure your team as a leader. You might have to relearn how to communicate better in relationships, in personal growth, and your personal development. You might have to say, you know what, I gotta pivot. Learn how to forgive myself. I've been in all three of these places multiple times, so I get this. There's a quote that's attributed to an unknown author, but it says, Be stubborn about your goals, but be flexible about your methods. I love this. I'll say it again for those in the back. Be stubborn about your goals, but be flexible about your methods. Rest and reflection are a big part of the building process. Even God Himself and all of his deity rested after creation. Don't confuse movement with progress. It's okay to rest when the time is appropriate. Just think about that. I mean, if you ever bought furniture from IKEA and you tried to assemble it without the instructions, didn't you have to take it all apart again? Because the door was on backwards? Of course. That's not failure. That's just feedback. That's just learning from your mistakes. See, if we often chase the idea of scaling and making things bigger and broader and wider, sometimes we want more money. We want more followers for our social media accounts. We want more recognition for our efforts and our projects. But the strongest builders always care more about sustainability than they do about trying to make it big. In my humble assessment, this is just my words, it's better to build slow and solid than fast and fragile. It's better to build slow and solid than fast and fragile. A great leader builds people, not platforms. A great relationship builds understanding and wisdom and not control. A great person builds character and not just comfort. Whatever you're building, make sure it aligns with your values, not just the ambitions you have in the moment. Those can always change, but hopefully your values stay the same. Hopefully. I want to leave you with this thought, and we're gonna get you out of here. You are the architect of your destiny. The materials are your choices. The blueprint is your purpose. The foundation, that's your faith. That's what you're building on top of. So if you got challenges or cracks in your faith, you got to handle that now before you add any weight, any new levels and floors onto this building. Address your faith. Keep building even when it's slow, even when no one notices it. Even when you feel like progress seems to be invisible right now. Because one day, somebody's gonna see what you built. Like I said in previous times, somebody's always watching you. They might be inspired to build too because of the great work that you've done, but you can't ignore the foundation. So I just wanted to say this to you before we get out of here. If this episode inspires you in any way, share it with somebody who's in their quote unquote under construction season. Leave a five-star review for us on Apple Podcasts. It helps the inspiration station grow and reach more builders just like you. Keep laying bricks, baby. Have a great day.