Life Is Like Buillding A House

Life is like building a house, you can't do without a foundation.

image: aspensnowmassrealtor.net

If there is only one thing I have learned from reading The Economist, it is that no one can be too smart to neglect the fundamentals. Even USA can't outsmart the fundamentals. And like Warren Buffett put it, "You can't get a baby in one month by impregnating nine women." Most things in life have no quick fix, you just have to put in the old-fashioned work and time, like building a house.

A lot of times we are tempted to think our lives will be much better than the ones of most of the people we see daily; we know we are more educated and smarter and should be getting more out of life than them. We think we can outsmart those around us to our own perpetual gain. We think we can take a shorter and cleverer route to success than the ones the people around us are taking. We think we can bargain better at the big things of life and always in our favour. But I have a perfect answer for you courtesy Abraham Lincoln; he said, "You can fool all the people sometime; you can fool some people all of the time; but you can't fool all the people all of the time." Simply put: You can't outsmart everyone every time. Even if you've got the cranial firepower of Albert Einstein and the zeal of Chris Rock.

Some things in life will always require a significant amount of time and effort. A child prodigy still need to attend a primary and secondary school like everyone to be able to make it to the university. No amount of smartness can put the knowledge you need to pass WAEC and JAMB in your head without you having to read like everyone else. No intelligent person learned how to drive perfectly on his first day behind the wheel. The learning curve is the same for everyone (whether you are perceived as brainless like majority of the danfo drivers or you are a university professor). You can't also be rich without any form of value exchange. No one is going to give you his money repeatedly just because you are intelligent. Even university professors work hard for their pay, providing value through teaching and research. And the hardest form of writing is a academic writing; a 10 page paper can cost you years of research, reading and validation.

Life is like building a house. There is always a foundation that will require hard and muddy labour. Houses may have all sorts of amazing shapes and design, but the foundations are fundamentally the same. Even real estate magazines that focus entirely on exceptional buildings and luxurious houses never show images of a foundation or talk about advancement in building foundations. And it's the same with life. Your intelligence and smartness is not meant to help you bypass the fundamentals. You shouldn't build a house without a foundation. If you want to be rich then you have to be able to create an exceptional value lots of people will be willing to pay for. If you want to learn French, your smartness won't get you a result that is even close to half of what a 4 year old living in France will achieve, you just have to learn like a child does. If you want to stay in business you don't need more than you already have, you only need to let your expenses be less than your revenue. For all the major things in life you just have to do the fundamentals and build the required foundation. And like the Bible says, the real intelligence is in building a strong foundation that will withstand future storms. A wise man will build his house on a rock putting in the exceptionally hard work required while a foolish man will build his house on the sand concerned more about the outer edifice and quick results. And as is the nature of nature itself, a storm comes someday and only the one on the rock stands and remaining standing through many more storms. The wise man always work harder in the beginning because life is like building a house and the foundation matters the most.