Are You A Builder Or A Bulldozer?

It’s easy to tear things down. I learnt as a young boy that there’s little effort and lots of joy to wrecking things. But building something takes time and hard work.

It is easy to criticise and get the attention for being vocal. It’s hard to build behind the scenes, or deal with situations offline, rather than publicly point the finger.

There are some people – film critics, politicians, journalists - whose job is to criticise. They do it because because it is their responsibility, and they do it with accountability.

But online we find little accountability.

We find people who enjoy criticising without being accountable. They have freedom at the expense of the others who are busy, not bulldozing, but building. These critics are never found rolling up their sleeves to fix the problems that they are so vocal about.

These guys are more impressive then the people who get lost in Without A Trace. Other than a username, you’ve got no way of finding who they are, and they’ve got the joy that nothing they say will effect their work, their relationships and their reputation.

Meanwhile, the rest of us have put everything out there, and made everything public as we build.

Building isn’t a public affair

Behind the scenes, under scaffolding, inside the building. Bulldozing attracts attention, but building is an inside job. There’s no room for glamour here. I was mystified for a long time why people didn’t privately email me or call when they had a criticism - because this way, we can work on it together and get it fixed, which is surely their goal? But many don’t want to make things right, they just want to get the kudos for pointing out what was wrong.

I think we need to commit to becoming more personal offline. We all have phones – and guess what – they make phone calls as well as email and tweet. Lets start picking them up and talking to each other, and start building together.

I’ll be quite honest – I don’t take criticism too well – but I’m getting better. But what I don’t do is bulldoze. If you are doing something I think is out of line, I’ll call you and help you resolve it.

Does this mean we don’t criticise?

No, it doesn’t. We need bulldozing. Old buildings and thinking needs to come down.

But I think it does mean that as a community we should become smart about who we retweet, respond to, and give voice to. These people without names and bios that I mention above enjoy too much free reign, while they bulldoze the efforts of those who are building – and too many just blindly retweet them.

As a community, we need to stop giving voice to those who are not accountable.

And more importantly, we need to develop deep relationships with those people who can speak into our lives and bring criticise and direction. The ones that, because we trust them, give them the room in our lives to bring the bulldozer and break down what needs to go. These are the ones who will roll up their sleeves.

So, who’s building?