When you’re constructing a home or an office building, the first thing you have to build is the foundation. Everything else will be built on top of that, so you have to start there. If you’re impatient or cheap, and you don’t lay down a strong foundation, the building will never be sound.
Now, as obvious and irrefutable as this principle is in the realm of construction, we routinely ignore it in many other areas of life. This principle – that you must begin with a strong foundation – applies to education, career, personal development, and our society as a whole.
Education
Our school system regularly pushes students forward faster than it should. If you earn a 70% in a math course, we advance you to the next course, even though you’re missing 30% of the content that will form the foundation of next year’s math curriculum. As Sal Khan brilliantly observed, this is like building the second story of the house when the first floor is only partially complete, just because the schedule says you should. Oh, and if you’re doing well in math, we’ll probably encourage you to skip a year or two, which is rarely a good idea.
We should instead normalize slowing down. Repeating a year in math should not be shameful. Skipping a year in math should be much more rare. And nearly all students need to spend more time patching holes in their knowledge.
Even more important is minding the physiological and psychological foundation of learning. Many students lack access to healthy food, both at home and at school, and this hurts their ability to succeed. School districts that implement free, healthy meals for students see dramatic improvements in grades, test scores, and behavior.1,2 Many students struggle with unaddressed mental health issues, and our academic culture exacerbates those issues by instilling competition-oriented, perfectionistic mindsets rather than cultivating growth mindsets and independent self-esteem.
Career
Many young people are advised to “follow their passion” when choosing a career. Older people, too, sometimes abandon one career for another in the name of following their passion. And there’s nothing wrong with this so long as there is an understanding that passion does not automatically translate to profession.
If you love to do something, it doesn’t mean you’re good enough to get paid to do it. It also might not be something the world needs from you. If you want to turn your passion into a career, you have to patiently work your way to the center of the Ikigai diagram.
You should not expect to land your dream job unless you’ve already built a foundation of expertise. This means practicing continuous learning, pursuing mastery, and engaging in deep work.
Another way people neglect the foundation when it comes to their careers is by neglecting self-care. If you’re a workaholic in the pursuit of wealth and career success, your lack of stress recovery is going to catch up with you eventually. What good will all that money and status do for you if you die of a stroke at 55?
Remember, your brain is your #1 asset, and you can’t live without your body. Your mind and your body are the foundation of everything you do. You have to take good care of them.
Personal Development
It’s also common to be impatient when working on self-improvement. This is understandable. If you have many problems in your life or many areas of weakness, of course you want them all fixed right now. Unfortunately, that’s not how personal growth works. But that doesn’t stop self-help gurus and fad-diet peddlers from preying on our impatience by promising “rapid, effortless weight loss” or that you can “radically changing your whole life in an instant!”
You can radically change your life for the better, but it actually takes a long time. You have to be patient and persistent. And whatever change you’re trying to make, you have to start with the foundation.
If you want to become a meditator, don’t start with a 10-day retreat. Don’t even start with 20 minutes a day. Start with three minutes and build up gradually, like I did. If you want to exercise regularly, don’t do too much too fast or you’ll get injured. Gradually build up a foundation of strength and endurance. Give your body time to adapt. Consistency is the foundation of any habit, and it must always come before intensity.3
A calendar chain for my new pushup habit.
Our Environment
Some people argue that we can’t afford to protect the environment if doing so would slow down the economy. I’m not sure whether or not preserving our environment would actually hurt the economy since creating a sustainable society might create more jobs than it would cost, but I am sure that we can’t have an economy without a hospitable planet to live on.
What good is a fancy house or a luxury car when your town gets wiped out by a hurricane or a wildfire? If we run out of water to drink or functional farmland to grow food, will the size of your retirement account matter? What exactly will you spend your money on when our society crumbles due to ecological collapse?
We don’t have to choose between the economy and the environment. That’s a false choice. We have to secure our environment in order to secure our economy. Ignoring the ecological crises facing our planet is terrible economic policy because we can’t have an economy without the ecological foundation on which it rests.
The higher you want to go, the deeper you have to dig.
Brian Johnson likes to share a metaphor about personal development and skyscrapers. To build a house, you don’t have to dig a very deep foundation, but to build a skyscraper, you have to build a very deep foundation. The rule is simple: The higher you want to build, the deeper the foundation has to be.4
And the same is true in life. As individuals, we rush forward, trying to get ahead in life, while neglecting the fundamentals of a healthy mind and body. If you want to do great things in your life, you’ll need a very strong foundation of self-care. Make it the first priority of the day, every day.
And as a species, humanity is trying to build our collective skyscraper higher and higher, while simultaneously eroding the foundation on which it rests. This is plainly a recipe for disaster.5
Fixing the Foundation
Actually, let’s imagine you’re a project manager in charge of constructing a skyscraper. The project is 2/3 complete, and your team is about to begin building the top levels. But then your lead civil engineers tell you there’s trouble with the foundation. You have to divert resources away from building the top levels and fix the foundation, or the whole building will collapse. But you ignore them because you’re eager to keep building up.
If you can see that such a project manager would be out of their mind, then I hope you can see why our collective behavior right now is even more insane.
In our own lives, we neglect the lower levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs at our peril. And collectively, we risk disaster by neglecting the ecological foundation of our society.
If you understand the foundation has to come first, take action, starting with the fundamentals in your own life – your physical and mental health. And then, from that firm ground, take action to secure our world’s collective foundation.
Vote for people who believe in science and who are willing to act. Vote with the actions you take and vote with your dollars. Sign up for your energy provider’s green power option (most providers have one). Puget Sound Energy, for example, has a green energy plan that costs only 10% more than standard but cuts over 99.9% of your carbon from electricity. Support charities that combat environmental degradation, like Humans For Abundance, which pays farmers in Ecuador to replant the rainforest. There are countless ways to lead by example, from shopping less to buying recycled toilet paper to not eating beef, and every step in the right direction counts.
We can fix the foundation of our world. It’s not too late. But it must be our top priority because the foundation has to come first.
1 Frisvold DE. Nutrition and Cognitive Achievement: An Evaluation of the School Breakfast Program. J Public Econ. 2015 Apr 1;124:91-104. doi: 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2014.12.003. PMID: 25918449; PMCID: PMC4408552.
2 Anderson, Melinda D. “Do Healthy Lunches Improve Student Test Scores?” The Atlantic. March 22, 2017.
3 Inspired by the ideas of James Clear, such as this.
4 Johnson, Brian. “Digging Foundations.” Optimize Plus One.
5 “Rate of Environmental Damage Increasing Across Planet but Still Time to Reverse Worst Impacts.” United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.