Build Your Cathedral

What’s a reasonable timescale for ambition?

One very consistent week of work? Maybe one year of focused working? A decade of pursuing a singular goal? Fifty years to master your craft? How about one hundred years…what happens then?

The world we live in is asking us more than ever to compress our ambition to shorter timescales. Our goals are fittingly more short term, driven by speed and efficiency rather than vision. It feels like an almost revolutionary mindset at this point to purposefully begin projects and ideas that are much, much bigger than ourselves. So big perhaps, they could even outlive us.

That seems preposterous to begin something you won’t be alive to finish. Irresponsible, even.

What does it do to our ambition, our ideas for ourselves, when we stretch them over a timescale almost unimaginable?

Cathedral logic

In the gothic and medieval times, it was not uncommon for a Cathedral to take anywhere between 50-300 years to finish. The Cologne Cathedral in Germany took over 600 years to finish. Cathedral building was by it’s technical and spiritual nature extraordinarily ambitious. The people working on them often knew they would not see their completion. And yet they still worked on it day to day.

And there were unforeseen circumstances which contributed greatly to the time length of completion. Lack of funding, resources, plague, war. All of these external forces at times elongated the length of time it would take to finish these enormous projects.

When we plan a project, the timescale we give it, is often time we spend doing it. This is known as Parkinsons law: Work expands to fill the time available for its completion. But what if we reversed this, and asked: what if our ambitions expand to fill the time we imagine giving them?

What would imagining a project taking 30 years do to your ambition?

Imagine a photographer who chooses to shoot a local park over one month. With multiple visits, they come across an array of different weather and characters and scenes. But imagine now taking two years to shoot that same park. Suddenly the scope of the project has grown immensely. They could shoot the same people over multiple years. Perhaps a building disappears. A section of the park is remodelled and refreshed. Maybe a once in a lifetime shot of winter snow happens. Whatever it is, the increased timescale has created a chance for more things to happen. And the project has become about capturing a place over time, which is fundamentally different to a singular month of shoot.

That’s just one example, but when we bring forward a vision so grand it might take decades, or longer, it does something to our imagination. You begin thinking of ideas and projects that would only come about when engaging with this level of timescale. Some projects will just need a smaller amount of time which is completely acceptable. Some, may demand us to access more unique and interesting ideas, and for that we can use time as part of our thinking

Big is small

Cathedral logic introduces the concept that timescale affects the size of our ambition. We could call it Thinking Long. So it’s all well and good to imagine something big, but how to get there?

Even with the wild set backs that cathedrals faced, whether funding or architects dying, the returning task to continue the project was simple (even if building them was incredibly complex in reality). Someone still had to lay stones, design glass or generally do whatever was needed to keep building going. The ambition may have been extraordinary, but the actions to get there are anything but.

Buildings by nature give us a simple example, but searching for the daily, simple actions you can take towards your own ideas, and understanding which of those actually move a project forward, is crucial once having set a grand vision. People in general do not seem to break down a project into constituent pieces, which is ironic as these small actions are what actually achieve grand visions. But perhaps what’s useful in thinking long is that the idea/project/vision becomes so large, stretched by time, that we are forced to figured out in the now what moves a project forward. And in doing that, would achieve much more over the same timescale.

Stretch your ambitions with time

There’s more to say on this topic for another essay. But returning to the original question: whats a reasonable timescale for ambition?

It’s hard to say. It could be weeks, months or years. But if you consider the possibility that the timescale you’re thinking in is limiting the ambition you’re capable of imagining, there’s a good chance you’ll end up somewhere more differentiated and unknown.

What might you dare to attempt if you gave yourself thirty years?

Thank you for reading Operating Self.

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