I Knew the Blueprint. But I Kept Changing It.

I spent 35 years working as a union electrician.

One thing you learn pretty quickly in construction is that you work from the blueprint.

You don’t just show up with a truck full of tools, start bending conduit, and hope it all works out. You need to know what you’re building. Where things go. What has to happen first. How your work affects the other trades.

And one of the most frustrating things on any jobsite is an owner who can’t stop changing the fucking plans.

You get the drawings. You order materials. You lay everything out. The crew starts working. Maybe you’ve already installed a bunch of it.

Then somebody decides they want something different. Move this. Change that. Tear this out. We’re going another direction.

Sometimes that’s necessary. Things change. You uncover something nobody anticipated.

But a lot of times, it’s just somebody who keeps having new ideas.

And every one of those ideas has a cost. Rework. Wasted material. Lost time. Confusion. A bunch of people working their asses off on something that might not even end up in the finished building.

I used to stand there and shake my head at owners like that. Thirty-five years of earning a living off a set of drawings, and you’d think I’d have absorbed the lesson.

Here’s the uncomfortable part.

Lately, I’ve realized I’ve been acting like that owner.

Not on somebody else’s jobsite.

In my own business — in my own life.

I Know Better. That’s What Bothers Me.

I’ve spent decades thinking about goals, problem-solving, and how to get from where you are to where you want to be. I’ve written about it and used it in my own life.

I know the importance of having a blueprint. I’ve built my whole working life on that truth.

But as I’ve been building my business, I’ve been carrying around this big vision in my head.

I can see all of it.

The community, the education, helping martial artists and school owners, creating things that might actually make people’s lives better.

And there’s nothing wrong with a big vision.

A man ought to have a reason for what he’s doing.

The problem is what I do with it.

I keep bouncing between that vision and the actual work that needs to happen right now.

I’ll be working on something important, and another possibility will drift through — maybe we should do this, maybe we should build that, maybe we should reorganize something first — and before I know it, I’ve spent another morning changing the blueprint.

Changing the plan feels like movement.

It feels productive.

It has all the texture of work — I’m thinking, I’m deciding, I’m imagining how it could come together.

For a few hours, I’m not a guy who’s stuck; I’m a guy with a fresh idea.

But then I look up and the actual building hasn’t gotten any closer. The next wall isn’t up. The next room isn’t wired. I’ve just redrawn the same picture from a slightly different angle.

I’m busy. I’m working hard. I’m learning things.

But am I building the next part of the building? Or am I just paying for another change order?

That’s been bothering me — and it’s been bothering me because I can’t claim I didn’t know better.

Two Conversations on the Mat

This past Sunday, I had two conversations after training jiu-jitsu that landed right on top of all this.

The first was with a purple belt who’s a hell of a lot bigger and stronger than I am.

While we were rolling and drilling, we were also talking and exploring.

We were talking about training, drilling, studying movement — all the things you do to get better at BJJ.

He’s putting in the work. But one of the questions that came up was what “getting better” actually means.

And that got me thinking.

It’s easy to say, “I want to get better at jiu-jitsu.”

Okay.

Better at what?

• Escaping bad positions?
• Staying safe?
• Taking someone’s back?
• Passing guard?
• Defending submissions?
• Being able to train another ten or twenty years without destroying your body?

Those are all different goals, and depending on which one you choose, your training looks very different.

The movements you drill, the positions you study, the way you spend your rounds — all of it shifts.

If you don’t define what you’re trying to improve, you can spend years putting in a lot of effort without knowing whether you’re moving in the right direction.

I’m not saying that’s what he’s doing.

I don’t know his full training plan, and I’m not going to pretend I do.

But the question stayed with me — because it sounded familiar.

Then came a second conversation, this one with a brown belt I’ve known for a while.

As we were exiting the gym, we were talking about his career and whether he wanted to go after bigger opportunities.

He’s smart and capable and doing well.

But interviewing and advancing in his field can demand an enormous amount of preparation and effort, and he isn’t sure climbing the next rung is worth everything it might cost him.

Now, my first reaction was something like, Dude, you’re young. This is the time to push.

That’s my own bias showing up.

Maybe he’s right to be comfortable where he is. Maybe he wants something different than I’d want at his age. That’s his decision, not mine — and honestly, it’s none of my business to resolve for him.

But here’s the part I found interesting.

He already knew about the Five Whys and the Five Hows — the kinds of questions you use to dig beneath the surface of a problem and figure out what you’re really trying to accomplish.

He had good tools for thinking through a decision. He had the questions. And it made me wonder whether he’d actually sat down and worked through them in his own life.

It’s an easy gap to fall into.

The questions are sitting right there in your head, and knowing them feels an awful lot like using them.

Then I had to turn that question around on myself.

Because I know all that stuff too.

And knowing it hasn’t stopped me from changing my own damn blueprint.

Knowing Isn’t Doing

Knowing what makes a good decision isn’t the same as making one.

Knowing you need to practice isn’t the same as practicing.

When I was working as an electrician, you couldn’t just keep discussing how to bend conduit.

Eventually somebody had to get the bender out and bend the pipe. And the damn pipe had to fit.

I think I forget that lesson when I’m doing intellectual work.

It’s easy to read another book.

Study another framework.

Ask another question.

Reorganize another plan.

It all feels productive. And sometimes it is.

But there’s a version of all that thinking that never touches reality.

You can use reading and planning and questioning as a place to hide — a way to keep improving your understanding without ever having to test whether any of it holds up.

The thinking isn’t the problem. Thinking is good. But thinking that never turns into a single concrete action starts to look a lot like avoidance wearing a costume.

I’m starting to recognize that in myself, and I don’t love what I’m seeing.

Get the Problem Out of Your Head

Here’s what I’ve noticed about a big problem or a complicated goal.

When it’s all inside your head, everything gets mixed together.

• What you want someday sits right next to what you want now.
• What you’re worried about is tangled up with what you’ve already done.
• What you think you should do is hard to tell apart from what somebody else suggested.
• What would be exciting feels just as important as what would actually be useful.

It becomes one huge knot, and here’s the sneaky part: every new idea you have just adds another strand.

So the knot gets bigger, and bigger, and you start to mistake activity for progress because you’re doing so much thinking.

I’ve lived in that knot. I bet you have too.

And here’s what I’ve learned about how it re-shapes a goal.

Say, for the sake of it, I’ve got a project in front of me.

In my head, it’s all one glowing thing — the outcome I want, the gap between here and there, the hard part in the middle, the exciting side ideas, the thing I’m afraid isn’t working.

I can hold all of that as a single feeling called “this is a lot,” and that feeling is real but it’s useless.

Feelings don’t tell you where to swing the hammer.

But something changes when you put it on paper.

Suddenly the mess has parts.

You can separate what you’re after from where you actually are.

You can identify what you think is the real constraint, separate it from ten interesting possibilities that can wait, and check your thinking against what’s actually happening.

You can ask which piece of work comes first.

And you can finally look at a decision and ask whether it even belongs in the building you’re trying to construct, or whether it’s just another pretty idea that wandered in off the street.

That’s what a blueprint does.

It doesn’t build the building for you.

It doesn’t guarantee your plan is right.

And it doesn’t mean you’re never allowed to change your mind.

What it gives you is a way to see the work instead of just feeling it.

The Two Kinds of Change

There are two kinds of change I keep confusing.

One kind of change is grounded in new information.

You put the plan against reality, reality pushes back, and you adjust.

The drawings don’t match the site.

A delivery didn’t show.

You uncovered something nobody anticipated.

That kind of change is wisdom, not weakness. You’d be a fool to keep building toward a plan the world has already outrun.

The other kind of change is grounded in something else entirely.

It’s the change you make because the work is hard, or boring, or scary, or because some shiny new idea just walked by and promised to feel better than the thing you’re actually supposed to finish.

That’s the change order I used to roll my eyes at.

And the uncomfortable truth is that the second kind is a lot easier to spot in somebody else than it is in yourself.

When an owner kept moving walls on a job, I could see the cost of it in real time — the rework, the wasted material, the crew standing around confused.

When it’s happening in my own head, nobody’s running a timer on me. The wasted material is just hours, and hours are easy to spend quietly.

So I’ve had to learn to ask a simple question when a new idea shows up: Is this change because I learned something — or because I’m avoiding the work in front of me?

I don’t always like the answer.

The Next Piece of Work

Those conversations on the mat brought me back to my own work.

One was about defining improvement.

The other was about deciding whether the next opportunity was worth the cost.

I don’t know the answers for either man.

But I know how easy it is to circle a question instead of putting it on paper and choosing something to do about it.

I don’t need to redesign my entire business every time I discover another interesting possibility.

I need to identify the next part of the business that actually needs to work. Build it. Test it. Learn from it. Then decide what comes next.

Pretty fucking simple.

Not always easy. But simple.

⚔ The Dojo Drill: A Drill for Your Own Blueprint

If you’re feeling busy but not making the progress you want, try this.

Get a piece of paper.

Not another productivity app.

Not another elaborate system.

Just a piece of paper.

Answer four questions.

1. What am I actually trying to build, improve, or protect?

​Be SMART, be specific. Not “get better” or “be successful.” What does that actually mean to you?

2. What would real progress look like?

What could you observe, measure, demonstrate, or experience that would tell you you’re moving in the right direction?

3. What do I already know I should be doing?

This one might be uncomfortable, because sometimes the problem isn’t that we don’t know what to do. It’s that we keep finding other things to do instead.

4. What’s the next piece of work I can finish before changing the blueprint again?

Not the entire project. Not the five-year vision. What’s the next thing?

Here’s the part most people skip, so let me make it concrete.

Take whatever you wrote for question four, and make it small enough to actually finish.

Not “launch the business.”

Not “get in shape.”

Something you could start and complete in one sitting — make the phone call, write the one-page outline, schedule the appointment, install the shelf, send the email you’ve been sitting on.

Pick that one thing and work on it.

Change course if reality gives you a good reason—not just because another exciting idea shows up.

Because the drill isn’t really about getting the answers down. It’s about proving to yourself that the blueprint can still point at something real.

When you finish, take a look at what you wrote.

Maybe you’ll discover you haven’t actually decided what you want.

Maybe you’ll realize you’ve been chasing something that isn’t important anymore.

Or maybe, like me, you’ll discover that you already know what you’re supposed to be doing. You’ve just been changing the plans instead of doing the work.

I’m not writing this because I’ve mastered it.

I’m writing it because I’m wrestling with it right now.

And after 35 years in construction, it’s a little embarrassing to realize I’m making the same mistake I used to complain about on the jobsite.

But that’s another lesson, isn’t it?

It doesn’t matter how much experience you have. You can still forget to practice what you know.

The blueprint is supposed to guide the work. Not become another excuse to avoid doing it.

📚 Leader’s Library

​The Art of Learning — Josh Waitzkin​

Why?

Josh Waitzkin knows something about learning difficult skills.

As a young chess prodigy whose early life helped inspire Searching for Bobby Fischer, he developed an unusually deep understanding of competitive chess.

Later, he turned his attention to martial arts, becoming a world champion in Tai Chi Push Hands competition.

In The Art of Learning, Waitzkin explores what these seemingly different disciplines taught him about developing expertise.

P.S. Know a martial arts gym owner who’s stressed about money or student numbers?

Do them a favor: send them to The Leader's Dōjō, my website where I help owners get more students and keep them longer with simple systems.

One forward from you could change their gym: The Leader's Dōjō​

Chuck