Builders vs. Improvers, Where to Live, & Sticky Ideas

Hello friends, and welcome to Life Reimagined, a free elixir designed to make your life more enjoyable. You can join thousands of other readers who receive a short Sunday email twice a month by subscribing below.

You can also follow me on Twitter if that's your thing.

Before we dive in, a few updates in case you missed them:

• Steph and I published a new episode on the podcast about how to decide where to live? It's one of the three most important decisions you will make, so it's worth checking out.

• Speaking of the podcast, we're doing an episode to answer questions from listeners. If you want help figuring out a tricky life situation or our thoughts on something, ask us anything here.

• I recently finished reading Made to Stick, a wonderful book about how to get more people interested in your ideas. You can see my notes and key takeaways here.

• I also published my notes for On the Shortness of Life by Seneca and Not Fade Away by Peter Barton in Foundations, a paid product with all of my book summaries.

This week, I'd like to talk about the difference between builders and improvers, a distinction that has been critical in my career.

Builders vs. Improvers

When my boss asked me to run paid ads on LinkedIn in 2016, I was sure I would be fired within a few weeks.

I was thirty minutes into my first marketing job, and I didn’t know the first lick about marketing. I had just spent a year as a professional order taker at a big investment bank in New York. I mastered the art of formatting spreadsheets without touching my mouse, but that wasn’t going to help me here. Neither was my degree in public policy.

I wondered why the hell they hired me.

My boss noticed me sweating. He told me to relax and began a masterclass in growth marketing. Standing in his ocean-view apartment in Colombia, he began to draw a marketing funnel with a red marker on his sliding glass window.

He taught me about leads, customer personas, sales cycles, and the unit economics of a profitable marketing campaign. We would have kept going, but sunset was coming and he wanted to play paddle tennis on the beach. He asked me to come with ideas the next day for the LinkedIn campaigns.

With that, my first day as a marketer ended. I still felt like I was going to get fired, but I wanted to learn as much as possible before that happened.

Over the next few weeks, I created a strategy to test paid ads on LinkedIn. I came up with a few dozen personas to target, designed ads, and wrote copy. I modeled out the opportunity and built dashboards to measure every aspect of the experiment.

My creative and analytical brain were firing on all cylinders. With how easy ad copy and design came to me, I realized for the first time that I might be creative.

Since everything I was doing was new to me, I had no idea what would work or not work. Neither did my boss. He had a sense that the channel might be good for the company, but he wanted me to figure that out. It was a uniquely terrifying and exhilarating moment in my career.

Just a few weeks earlier, my entire job was to take commands from people above me in the hierarchy at the bank. There was no room for creativity. You basically did what you were told for as long as they needed you.

Now I was living on the coast of Colombia with the full freedom to operate a budget and attempt to unlock a new channel for a growing company. I enjoyed the rush of no knowing whether my ideas would work.

Even if I got fired, at least I wasn’t a dull cubicle zombie anymore.

Within a few weeks, we were ready to launch. I prepared the campaigns and turned them on. The discomfort of spending real money on my own ideas kicked in. This was my sink or swim moment.

Only 20% of my ideas worked, but they worked really well. In my first month, I was bringing in low-cost, high-quality leads to the company. Over the next month, I grew the channel, running new experiments and optimizing the areas that were working.

Six weeks into my first marketing gig, I had unlocked many thousands of dollars in value to the company. It felt exhilarating. I wasn’t getting fired; I was being asked to launch new channels and to manage members of the team that had joined at the same time as me.

That first task taught me a lesson I’m lucky to have learned early on – I enjoyed building things from the ground up.

There was something satisfying about starting with a blank slate, designing experiments, and seeing if you had the chops to make an initiative work. I later launched a new marketing channel, and with success there, I took over the growth efforts for a full business unit.

As I expanded into new domains, the high from those initial marketing channels began to wear off. While I enjoyed getting them off the ground, I didn't enjoy optimizing a channel that was already working. The potential incremental gains from further optimization were less interesting than exploring and charting new territory.

Once I figured out how to make the system work, I wasn't interested in squeezing out the last gains. I wanted a new challenge. And so I worked hard to offload these marketing machines I had built onto someone who had the energy to keep them working. My time with them had ended.

What’s interesting is that this process of building, getting bored, and moving on has played out through the rest of my career.

I became the guy who could solve new problems across any domain. Even if I had no experience doing what I was asked to do, I would simply think about how we can tackle the issue at hand, design experiments to test my theses, and execute on the plan. The learnings I extracted from the execution phase informed me where to go next.

Little by little, I gained confidence in how you can solve any unfamiliar problem by following this same process. Even if the solutions or systems you built weren't perfect, they were often good enough to generate real value for a company.

I’ve since used this same playbook to scale a warehouse for an e-commerce company, grow the revenue of a highly-trafficked website, and build out a sales team for a nonprofit.

At least for me, the domain I worked in didn’t matter as much as the conditions under which I was working. I just needed a problem to figure out and the freedom to build a system. But once I did that, I was ready to hand-off the project to someone who could optimize what I had built.

These experiences taught me an important lesson – there’s a big difference between people who enjoy building a new system and people who enjoy improving an existing one.

Basically, there are two types of workers: builders and improvers. Builders get a system off the ground. Improvers optimize an existing system.

I fell into the builder camp. I enjoyed the sink or swim moment of seeing if I had what it took to make something work. That's the fun part, even if its riddled with uncertainty and doubt.

For other people, the builder phase is a terrifying and unwelcome burden. They’d rather improve something that's already working.

You need both people in a company.

It turns out that the builders are particularly valuable at startups that don't have well-defined processes. Improvers offer more value at companies that have more of the nuts and bolts already in place.

Being more of a builder led me to thrive as a generalist at early-stage startups and in my half-baked career as a writer and podcaster. In all of those contexts, I confronted new problems with unknown solutions and had the flexibility to build an initial system that worked.

The downside of this proclivity for building is that I lose interest in projects rather quickly, and that can mean that these projects don't reach their full potential if I don't find an improver to take over.

The same tradeoffs exist if you're an improver.

Improvers often specialize in certain niches and help companies transform fragile systems into more robust ones. But when they're asked to figure something out from a blank slate, they often falter.

The point here is that both "builders" and "improvers" are necessary.

And if you haven't figured out whether you're a builder or an improver, it's worthwhile to take the time to do so. That way, you can identify where you can thrive and best help a company.

If you’ve spent your career optimizing processes that you didn’t build, for example, you may find that you’re much happier being the person who gets something off the ground. The reverse is also true.

The only way to find out is to try both and see what works for you.

— Cal

If you liked this piece, make sure to subscribe by adding your email below!

🌎 Three other things you might enjoy

1. Doing Time Right: Everyone wants to get more done in less time. This course will show you exactly how to do that with the eliminate, automate, delegate, and iterate framework.

2. Foundations Looking for good books to read? Check out Foundations, a growing digital notebook with notes & lessons from 100+ timeless books.

3. Listen to the Podcast: Feel like school didn't prepare you for adulthood? The Sh*t You Don't Learn in School podcast exists to help make up for this societal failure.