Builder

Dear wanderers of this strange, unpredictable planet, let us take a moment to meditate on what it means to be a builder and an entrepreneur—to be, in short, a professional dreamer. And let me tell you, it's not all sipping lattes and wearing hoodies while nodding sagely at PowerPoint slides.

No, being a builder is something more primal. Imagine, for a moment, the first builder—maybe some shaggy caveman in a world without hard hats, armed only with a hunk of rock and the profound desire to make something that hadn’t existed before. Maybe it was a fire pit or a rickety shelter. Maybe it was something as useless as a stick figure scratched in the dirt. But there it was: something, anything, where before there had been nothing. And then—here's the kicker—someone else came along and said, “Hey, that’s not half bad. I think I’ll build on that.” And bam, civilization was born.

And here you are now, centuries later, still scratching things in the dirt—except today, the dirt is digital, and the scratching is called "innovation." You’re an entrepreneur, an honest-to-God builder, trying to make the world spin a little smoother. And sometimes, my friends, the world feels like a rusted-out merry-go-round, refusing to budge no matter how hard you push.

But you push anyway, because you can't help it. There's something unreasonably hopeful about you, something annoyingly persistent, like a mosquito that refuses to quit. In a universe that’s mostly empty space and entropy, you’ve got the audacity to say, "Yeah, I think I'll make something that lasts." You take the nothing—the void, the silence, the unformed, indifferent goo of existence—and you smack it with a metaphorical hammer until something, anything, emerges. Most people see chaos and shrug. You see chaos and think, "Well, it’s time to build a new system to screw up this chaos, preferably in a way that makes a few bucks."

Entrepreneurship is optimism on steroids—optimism so stubborn it forgets there's even gravity to contend with. shinier, a little more sensible, or at least less stupid. Maybe you make money doing it; maybe you don’t. But you’re out there, itching to make your mark on a world that never asked for it, because somehow, deep down, you know that’s what makes life more than a sequence of meaningless Tuesdays.

So here’s to you, you nutty builders and entrepreneurs. You're not here to play it safe. You’re not here to punch the clock and sit in your comfort zone—a place, by the way, that’s only comfortable if you happen to enjoy the sensation of slowly calcifying while watching daytime television. You’re here to tear up the plans, make new ones, and then tear those up too, all in the hopes of making something better, something real. You’re here to gamble with the only currency we really have: time.

And, oh, how gloriously reckless that is. Because maybe—just maybe—you’ll leave something behind that outlasts you. Maybe a bridge, a company, a piece of software, or even just a crazy idea that someone else picks up when you’re gone, and says, “Hey, that’s not half bad.” And isn’t that the point? In a world so absurd it’s practically begging us to laugh, what could be better than leaving a little laughter of our own behind—and a few monuments to our restless, inconvenient dreams?

-sedale