When I speak to young audiences, like the students at Future Business Leaders of America conferences, I exhort them to do one thing, no matter what path they decide to follow with their careers: build things. This doesn’t simply mean do engineering. They can build businesses, educational programs, a portfolio of publications, ideas, or really anything that other people can see and from which they can benefit.
I tell people this, and try to follow the advice myself, not only because I have seen firsthand that creating and building things is the best signal to others of your potential for employment, coworking, friendship, and more, but also because I think it is the right thing to do.
“Building things” comes with a caveat: build things that create value (this can also be summarized by telling people to go out there and create value, but I really like the idea of “building”). Lots of things can be built, but not all of them are good. There’s something to creating value that makes it the right thing objectively (meaning to all parties involved, not just the person building the thing which creates value).
When you build something that creates value, others are willing to exchange something with you for it. This can be their time, money, or their own labor. The fact that they are willing to give these things up for whatever you are providing means that the good or service you are providing is worth more to them than whatever they are exchanging for it. This makes the exchange mutually beneficial. You provide a service for something you deem more valuable than the service, and they provide the something for the service they deem more valuable. There’s net-positive value on both sides of the exchange. If this is repeated many times over, or if the good or service involved is large or complex enough, it may involve even more value-creation in the form of employment for people who want to see the good or service improved upon, contracts with outside groups, and spending and saving attached to these people.
This is nothing new to anybody who has sat through a single lecture of an economics class or has run any sort of business-like operation. Free exchange benefits both parties involved to create net-positive value. Trade is good.
Building things is good beyond that it benefits both parties involved if it is taken to the point of trade, though. Building things is good for the person doing it, too. (Again, this doesn’t necessarily mean opening up a business. It simply means creating things that others may find of value.)
There are skills and virtues which must be honed before one can successfully build a large project. If the project is risky, it may involve courage. If it involves many people, it may require charisma, or dispute-resolution. Strength may be called upon. The ways in which project-building calls upon virtues makes a strong case for it being virtuous itself, in a sort of secondary way. Yet I want to go further.
My argument for the virtue of building things can be summarized as such: talent is a terrible thing to waste.
While there are virtues within moving things around and doing services which don’t actually build or create value, there is a sort of loss in these cases. Seeing a bright or talented person go off to simply do the bidding of another engenders some pity.
Building something, on the other hand, not only requires that we hone and train our virtues, but puts ourselves to the test and to work in a way which, had the project not been undertaken, would have likely gone to waste.
Building valuable things is virtuous not simply because it makes everybody better off, and not simply because it takes virtues to build something successfully, but because not doing so is to waste potential. Knowingly wasting potential is not simply harmful to the community or market at large, but there is a sense in which it is disrespectful to oneself, one’s capacities, and one’s potential.
If you are a skilled pilot, go fly. If you are a skilled entrepreneur, go open a business. A skilled artist? Make art. Don’t let yourself be wasted.