Build, Don't Borrow

Here's the best way I can describe what was wrong. Imagine you love LEGOs. You own thousands of pieces: every shape, every color, every specialty brick. You've watched every master builder video. You've bought instruction books from the best builders in the world and followed them step by step. You can build incredible structures when someone else designs the plan.

Now someone hands you a blank table and says: 'Build something original. Build a structure that solves this specific problem for your specific situation.' And you freeze. You don't freeze because you lack pieces. You have more pieces than you'll ever need. You don't freeze because you haven't studied enough. You've studied more than most coaches. You freeze because you've never learned how the pieces fit together. You don't know why this brick goes here and not there. You wonder what keeps a structure standing or causes it to collapse. You're unsure which connections support weight and which are for looks.

So you do the only thing you know how to do: you start pirating. You grab a foundation from one instruction book, a wall design from another, and a roof from a third. You stitch them together and hope. The result is a Frankenstein. It might stand, it might not. But you can't tell someone why it works. And when a piece breaks, you can't fix it because you didn't build it from understanding. You built it from imitation.

That was my coaching. I had all the LEGOs. I watched all the best builders. I could follow anyone's instructions. … The worst part wasn't that it sometimes failed. The worst part was that when it worked, I couldn't tell you why. And when it didn't work, I couldn't identify what broke. I'd tear it down and start borrowing from someone else.