 We are here to talk to you about accomplishing monumental feats. You often look around and you see these big things that people accomplish in the world and these incredible things that they get done. Some of them are really grand, some are really beautiful, and it's human nature to look around and just wonder how these things got built, how they got brought into existence, and we picture these kind of magical people behind them. And we wonder what their secrets are, how they got it all done, what kind of tricks they're using that let them accomplish these things that us normal mortals don't seem to be able to do. And as we've gone through the world and we start encountering people who are doing these larger and larger projects and accomplishing these larger things, there's one thing that we've actually found that seems to be consistent among all of them, and it's no great secret, it's no kind of magical trick that they're doing. The simple thing that we found is that people who do successful things and who accomplish big things put in a huge amount of time to get them done. And that's it, as far as we can tell, that's the secret. A ridiculous, ridiculous amount of hard work and hours and the more and the deeper that we've gotten into exploring our own pursuits and getting to meet people who have done themselves bigger and bigger things in the world. You know, we're not sure exactly why some people get things done, but again, the conclusion that we're coming to is that every single person that we've met so far that we've just been blown away by what they've done in the world, it all comes as a result of just putting in ridiculous amounts of hours. And this concept, actually, is not a new one. This goes back quite a ways, actually. So, you may have heard this before, this is Thomas Edison, of course. Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. What does this tell us? Possibly that Thomas Edison is good at stealing excellent ideas that came well before he was around. This is Kate Sandborn. She said even earlier that talent is perspiration. And by the way, what Thomas Edison is credited for is adding the little percentages onto the saying. So that was kind of his, he mathematicized it, I guess. Very innovative, yeah. Even before that, we have, I know of no genius, but the genius of hard work, that's a self-portrait, by the way, from the fellow who said that, a nice artist, Turner. Before that, we have the Count des profan. Genius is only a greater aptitude for patients. And well before him, digging into kind of the etymology of this saying, it seems to have just been in common parlance for centuries, well before anyone was actually credited with having written it. So this is kind of a generally understood idea. But when we're living through life, it's easy to forget that. And you know, this is a concept that we found time and time again in our own pursuits. We've mentioned this before, but this art program that we ran when we first got started is an excellent example of this. In and of itself, we had artists in Portland, we gave them two free floats and asked them to just create a piece of artwork afterwards, which sounds really exciting. It sounds like a great idea. Whenever we tell that to people, that's the response we get. They're like, wow, what an inspired idea to have. But what you don't realize is that the only thing that actually makes this a substance, that makes you look back on it and say, hey, that was great, is the work that actually got put into it to make it actually get done. It wasn't just the fact that we had an art program that we ran. That involved getting submissions from about 175 to 200 separate artists. It involved setting up the entire legal rights of the entire thing, filling out a contract and having everyone sign it. It involved sending thousands of emails over the course of running this to all of these different artists, reminding them of their floats, reminding them of all of their different things that they had to do, like sending us pictures, actually getting us the artwork, everything that went into that. It took hundreds of in-person meetings. It took actually collecting the artwork itself from all these different people, which is no small task trying to get artists to meet a deadline. We had to go through and actually take photos of all these pieces of artwork. We had to take all of those photos and format them into an actual book so that we'd have an actual book at the end of it. We then had to figure out how to print a book and start a self-publishing company and go through the entire process of figuring out binding and all of that kind of stuff. And at the end, we put it all together and sent it out on an art tour, all the way around two different float centers around the U.S. All of this took a huge amount of time. And if it wasn't for each one of those steps, if all we had done was sat around and just talked about how cool this fun art program would have been, nobody here would be talking about it or have any idea that it ever existed. It would just be an interesting idea, instead of being something that created 150 pieces of float artwork in the world and has created a program that's been replicated by float centers all over the world at this point. And again, it just comes down to things take a preposterous amount of time. You have this one good idea and you're like, oh, we'll float artists and make an art book. And hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours later, you're like, what did I get myself into? And we're not saying that there aren't more efficient ways to work. There are definitely ways to cut down on the time that it takes you to do certain tasks. You know, you're not going to try to move a giant pile of sand by hand. We definitely have tools to accomplish this. What we are saying though is that these tools alone are often not enough. So that said, we thought that we'd spend just a second talking about some of the work hacking tricks that we find really valuable. And there's this misconception with the idea of work hacking, I think. And we're so intrigued as a culture with the idea of productivity and shaving off more minutes from our work time and making the absolute most of everything we throw in. And I think that we have this illusion that if we just get good enough at those tricks of the trade, that somehow we'll be able to accomplish a hundred hours of work in five hours or in two hours. Or maybe we don't have to work at all and the work just kind of completes itself. And that's just not how it happens. What happens is you get more efficient at doing work, which means you can accomplish more work in the world, but it still takes the same amount of time, which is a preposterous amount. That being said, there are a few tricks we wanted to share with you of just the things that really help us be as productive as we can be. One of those is just actually learning while you work. It's a big one that we enjoy doing, listening to podcasts as you're doing your float center construction and things like that. And above that, actually listening to podcasts at double speed, which means you can listen to twice as many. If you're ever wondering why we talk so fast, it's because we have business people rambling in our ears at twice the speed they're supposed to all the time. We also have programs on our computers that allow us to type in a short code that fills out paragraphs of text for us. If any of you were staying at the dorms this year and you got an email from me, I typed in three letters to generate that entire email that got sent out to you because I had to send hundreds and hundreds of them to individual people. So there are tools that can help you make things like that faster. Another thing that we found is just to avoid multitasking. And more and more studies come out all the time just saying how much multitasking, aside from not being a good way to work, is actually just not even possible. The human brain doesn't multitask. It switches really swiftly between different tasks. And each of those tasks that it switches between has a little bit of buffer time. So as you're going between task to task to task, you're losing some of your effort and some of your cognition and some of your time in the switching part. So what we advise people to do really, and what we try to do ourselves is to chunk our tasks together. You know, as much as possible work on things at three hours at a time. Turn off your distractions, get rid of those. When we're working on our talk, we try not to, despite having so much conference stuff going around that we have to plan, work on anything but the talk for a few hours stretch at a time. And dividing your time up like that instead of in 15 increments goes a long way as well. Just forcing your way through things is another really great way of getting stuff done. I can't even tell you how many times I've had to basically call people nonstop until they answer me. If you've ever been on the unfortunate end of having something that I need from you on a strict deadline, I basically start calling people once a day, and if they don't answer me, I start going to twice a day, and if they don't answer, I've gotten up to the point of calling someone every hour on the hour until they pick up the phone. And it absolutely works. No one can ignore the eighth phone call that day from you. Yeah, you start filling up their voicemails every single day and eventually they call you back. It's too inconvenient. One great thing that we've always done is just being comfortable knowing that you can learn how to become an expert on something. It's actually easier than you think. Like with the art book that we did, we had to figure out how to get that book printed. And I sat down one day and I was like, okay, I don't know anything about how to print a book or anything about that. And so I just looked up a bunch of printers on the internet, and I went through and I just started calling them one by one. And the very first person I called, I had no idea what I was talking about. I was like, I'm really sorry, I got to print this thing and like, do you guys have paper there? And they started explaining things to me. They're like, okay, what type of glue do you want for your binding? And I was like, oh, I don't know. What type of glues do you have? And I would call the next person and I knew a little bit more. And by the time I called the sixth person on the list, I would just call them up and be like, hey, don't give me that cheap non-heated glue that you're going to put on the spot. And I know all about that kind of stuff, buddy. And within a few hours, I was just a master at book printing at this point. Another one, of course, floating. As long as we have float tanks and we're talking about ways to make your time more productive and more useful, hopping in the float tank, absolutely, is a really good one. When we're under construction, we get a little desperate. I try to get in at least once a week. And really, I feel like I'm really on my game with my work and my regular life when I get in two to three times a week. And it's so easy when you're a float center and when you're around it to, I think, fall off of that habit. And I really encourage all of you, especially as you're getting into starting a float tank center, to not drop the habit of what you do for a living, to not drop the passion that got you into it and to try to float as much as you can. If I could, I would be getting in every day a week and I really try to get in two or three days. And again, all of this stuff, they do help you get work done faster. But none of this means that we're sitting around working for about five hours a week and getting everything we need to get done. This means we can be more productive with our time and we can spend the time that we are working doing bigger things and things that we wouldn't even be able to do if I had to write every single one of those emails by hand. Yep, fundamentally, things still just take a ridiculous amount of time. So, this right here is the Washington Monument. A 555-foot-tall stone obelisk in the middle of Washington, D.C. It was built to commemorate the first president of the United States and at the time it was completed it was the tallest man-made structure in the world. Plans for the Washington Monument started in 1783 when the Continental Congress voted in a bill to build a monument to honor what was then the general of the Revolutionary Army, George Washington. But the thing with George Washington and why everyone really liked him at the time was because he was this kind of representation of everything that was fighting against the Revolutionary Army. They were fighting against this monarchy and here comes this guy who was building a republic and it's something to put the power into the people's hands and George Washington had this incredible humility. The fact that after the Revolutionary War was done that he gave his post up and didn't immediately just become an emperor himself was astounding to people and that was really what people used him as this kind of idol for someone who was very humble and that was what they were really looking to represent. So they hit this interesting challenge when they wanted to build a monument to represent humility. This ended up being a really difficult task and they actually debated it over and over again for many years in Congress. There were proposals to just build an equestrian statue. It was one idea, just totally classic George Washington sitting on a horse. They're like, how about we just do the same thing everyone does, like put him on a horse? But people didn't really like that, it just kind of seemed like something bigger needed to be done. Another proposal was just for a giant tome with an engraving on it that said, stranger, read it, citizens imitate his example. So there were ideas just kind of all over the place ranging for this monument and there were lots of debates back and forth on how grand this should be, what it should look like, basically what are we going to do to create this as a symbol? And eventually what happened is they really just couldn't figure it out and those debates pretty much just kind of petered out until no one was really working on this project anymore. And then George Washington died and they were like, oh shit, we better get that monument thing under control, like we waited long enough that he passed away. So on December 24th of 1799 Congress passed a unanimous resolution for a tome to be erected for George Washington at the Capitol despite the fact that he wanted to be buried at Mount Vernon. So debate became even more heated as this part carried on. The Federalists wanted to build a giant pyramid, 100 foot pyramid commemorating him. Yeah, just wanted a strong image of Washington to represent our country. Here's another, this is one of the kind of prototype drawings of it if the Washington monument was that I just crack up thinking about it. And Republicans didn't want the kind like idols so they didn't want an actual image of Washington to be shown. They wanted something more representative. Another person suggested another type of book to represent him, one that was not a statue but in which people could actually sign their names and everyone could write kind of their own message and write what is heart dictated and that would represent Washington because Washington is kind of in all of us. And eventually they couldn't come to an agreement, they couldn't figure it out and it just kind of petered out again. That takes us up to 1833 which is the 100 year anniversary of George Washington's birth when again everyone's like, oh shit, really gotta build that monument, like this is getting pretty bad guys. So in 1833 an actual group of citizens in Washington DC decided to take this whole thing upon themselves. They formed the Washington National Monument Society and they raised private funds with the explicit goal of creating a Washington monument. In 1836 they started inviting designs and said that the monument should cost no less than one million dollars. They really wanted it to be a grand grand thing that they were building. In fact they wanted to build the highest edifice in the world and the most stupendous and magnificent monument ever erected to man. There were a few other people on the committee who had slightly different ideas. George Washington's adopted son, George Washington Parker Custis actually proposed people just coming from all over America and throwing in their labor together to just kind of get a monument up and running in a few days. Basically kind of really early crowd sourcing to try to get the Washington monument built. But the actual guy in charge of the project was really stuck on this really giant grand vision and pretty much shot that down immediately. They didn't end up choosing a design until 1845. This is now 12 years later than when this organization formed to basically do this and when they did accept the design it was by Robert Mills and it was incredibly grand in scale. This is an actual description of what it was like. So and I'll go to a little more detailed view. So Mills proposed Columnade Building was 250 feet in diameter with 30-door columns each 12 feet in diameter and 45 feet high The coat of arms of each state was ornamental on the frieze above the columns and within the Columnade 30 alcoves were reserved for the statues that would form a pantheon of revolutionary war heroes. On the outside of the monument the awesome scale continued. Topping the Columnade off the roof or grand terrace 700 foot in circumference which featured a statue of George Washington wearing a toga and driving a war chariot pulled by six horses and then rising from the center of the grand terrace just behind Mills Imperial Washington was the obelisk itself. So everyone was like, yeah, sounds like a pretty good idea. Let's build that thing. That sounds great. And they actually at this point managed to start construction on it. The very first brick was laid on July 4th, 1848. Keep in mind that at this point we are 65 years from the very first proposal to build a Washington monument. They spent 65 years just planning. Just trying to figure it out. Just trying to even come up with a design that everyone could agree on. And this is a really easy trap to fall into. It's something that people fall into all the time before you actually try to go do a big project. You really get stuck in this idea of everything needing to be extremely perfect and having to spend all this time making sure not a single thing you do could be wrong or not be exactly the image and symbol that you're trying to get out to people. What ends up happening is that it really just delays what you're doing. It can actually just delay you indefinitely. There's lots of people who have these ideas and get so stuck in that planning stage that they never even start the project that they wanted to work on. The truth is that if you are trying to make your plans perfect and get everything right before you ever start them, you will never start. You will never start them and launch them against the massiveness of the environment and the total chaos of the world around us and your plans are going to fall apart anyway. So another moral to take away from this is just get your stuff out there early. Get it out there fast so that you can get feedback from the environment and so that you haven't spent what was it, 30 some years at this point? 65 years. Getting to the point where now you get to find out that you can start making mistakes. When we opened our shop, we actually went into construction with a plan of opening five weeks later. Everyone at this point seems to know exactly that that was an indication that we had no idea what we were doing. And there were hundreds and hundreds of things that we did wrong. If you come out to our apprenticeship or our workshops, we're always very happy to share those with people. One of them was that we put in black rubber floors as our mats, which if you run a float center, the idea of having black floors should sound totally preposterous to you. We had no idea that we needed to have towel storage. And so we bought a bunch of towels and we're like, oh. Okay. All right. We didn't have a receipt printer when we first opened up. And even when we got one a couple weeks later, we just couldn't get it to work. So people would come in and be like, can I have a printed receipt? And we're like, oh, yes. And we'd print them out a giant 8.5 by 11 sheet of paper that just had the text huge. We tried to fold it into their wallet. The very first float that we did did not even have a door on the room that people would go into. I just found out that our first floater was coming in 30 minutes and I could not get the door on. It wasn't working. And I found a giant piece of rubber and I got some push pins and I just slapped it up on the door. And the guy came and I just kind of held the flat back for him and I was like, listen. I won't come in here. I promise. Enjoy your float. And he got out and he loved it. He didn't care. He did not care at all. So even when you do launch things in the world and they are not quite complete and they're not how you'd want them ideally, people are really forgiving and they do let you grow with them. And that's an important lesson to take away too. The year is now 1855. There are 150 feet of this obelisk built. Plans are moving along until a quasi-political, anti-Catholic, anti-immigration party called the Know-Nothings stormed the construction site and violently seized control of the construction of the Washington Monument. And by the way, the Know-Nothings also used to be called the Native American Party because they were so anti-immigration and they were some of the first immigrants to come over, so no more. They switched that to nativists, I guess. That's a little feedback. So this is the representative, by the way. This is Citizen Know-Nothing. It's kind of their role model who they'd follow. So they ended up violently seizing that ground because the Pope had sent in a stone block from Rome as one of their ancient temples and of course being anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant, Pope sent that block in. Nine of them went at night, took the block, ran off with it, smashed it to pieces, and then took over control of the Washington site themselves just to run it. They also rigged the election of the National Monument Society so that they could control it and take over the entire project. And they spent the next three years trying to raise funds to complete the project and over the course of those three years they raised $51.66. And then the Civil War happened. And basically all of this fell apart at this point. It just kind of fell right back into sitting and nobody working on it and this monument just kind of stagnating again. And it wasn't until the actual 100-year anniversary of the United States. So now we're in 1876. The centennial is happening. It's been 21 years that the monument is just sitting there, a third built in the middle of the capital of the United States of America. We're all getting ready to plan this 100-year party and everyone's going, man, we should really build that monument. It's really starting to get embarrassing. And so Congress decreed in the name of the people of the United States at the beginning of the second century of the national existence to assume and direct the completion finally of the Washington Monument. And then the monument goes and takes another stab at actually hitting the planning portion of its process. What lessons do we take away from this? What are we supposed to learn from this fact that the Washington Monument has been unable to get past? I mean it's bad enough that it didn't get started but to get started one-third of the way up and then just hang out there? This is probably the worst monument that you could build to someone who you appreciate. It's just a half-assed, half-complete one. The lesson that we take away is Hofstadter's law which is it always takes longer than you expect even when you take into account Hofstadter's law. And there's some good lessons here about bringing things to completion, about setting milestones for yourself that if you're not able to complete something that is the grandest project that human beings have ever done in commemoration of another human being that maybe you make it so that those chunks as they go along can reach a state of completion by themselves and then you can add on more and more grand elements instead of building a giant obelisk that you're only able to make your way one-third up. This has happened to us time and time again. We, when we first opened all those five years ago, decided to buy a few desks from IKEA. It was the day we were opening, by the way. Just to have something in place, we needed something that people could walk into and made us look like a real business. So we bought these desks with a plan of replacing them very quickly. It is five years later now and these desks are still in our space. It took us a pill about three months ago to finally switch out our main desks away from these into an actual nice kind of finished thing that we had always envisioned many, many years ago. Even how our name float on was just a placeholder name. We couldn't think of a good float center name, so we're like, well, let's just call ourselves float on until we think of something better. And sure enough, that just hung out. So the things that you put there as placeholders, the things that you get partially in place, oftentimes end up being what you have permanently in place and suddenly you just have a third-built monument hanging out there for a ridiculously long period of time. Things can go wrong all the time. Things that you can't ever plan for. There's no way to predict all of the hurdles that you're going to encounter when you set out to do something on a large scale. And if you spend all that time trying to make sure every single thing is going to go right, none of those problems are actually going to come up and a whole set of things that you never even thought about are going to be what goes wrong for you. So one day, we were going to clean our black rubber floors because we were worried about water getting underneath. We wanted to make sure they weren't getting mildewy or anything under there. We tore them up and we took them outside to wash them off and just spray them down so that we could put them back in the room. We got them outside, we washed them all off. We went back into the center to get the room all clean. We finished leaching down the floor. We went back out around to the side of our building and our floors were gone. Someone had taken them and we had no idea who. And this is the kind of stuff that comes up when you think that you know how long it's going to take to do something. Someone comes and steals your floors and you find out that a garbage company had come thought that it was refutes and was now on the way to Oregon City to drop it off and deliver it and you have to chase after them in your car. Catch up with them, get the floors back and bring them back to your center so that you can finish putting them back in the room so your floaters can float in the morning. So it takes an incredible amount of time to get anything done. And just to give you guys an example of this, we have actually spent the last year in preparation for this conference keeping track of actually the amount of hours that took us to plan this very event. So I just want to run you through kind of what this looks like. This thing that you're all sitting at right here, you know what the final product is. There was a huge amount of time that went into this. I had to do various things myself to get this ready including updating the website. I'm just going to kind of tally up hours as I list these out for you. We had to obviously gather all the speakers, all the information from all those speakers. We had to reserve all the locations for the parties. We had to get all the ticketing system up and running. We had to get all of the hotels set up. We had to figure out all the videos and AV. We had to get all the Friday activities all figured out. We had to get all the tote bags ordered and everything like that. We had to get the coffee mugs. I had to print and cut and alphabetize those name tags. We put all the podcasts together and everything together that I personally have done this year totals up to 1,256 hours. That is the equivalent. If you were to take this and break it into 8-hour days, 5 days a week like a normal job, 7.2 months worth of work. And that's just me. So what else goes on to all this? Well, I obviously did not do this alone so I had other people help me design this very stage. We had to organize the lunches. We had to organize the coffee. We had to put together parties. We had to put together that CPO training that we were doing. We had to design the programs and print the programs. We had to print all the posters. We had to put together the entire float center workshop and do that entire thing. We had to actually prepare this very talk right here. When you total all the time that the people that float on have spent putting this together that actually brings us to this. 2,839 hours. This just begins. So now we hit the stage where we have 2 days of setup actually in this theater just to be able to get all of this happening. In those 2 days of setup before our workshop started we had 34 people here helping us get this all set together. Over the course of 2,8-hour days you multiply their hours together that's 544 hours spent just in setup. From there we go into the workshop and it took people to run that entire thing and make sure everything was going smoothly. There were 37 people here helping to do that. It took a slightly longer days. So if you add all that together we're at 814 hours just to get the workshop to run. And then of course we hit the actual main float conference where 300 more people show up and it takes 62 people here to run this entire event that you're seeing right now. So if you take the time that they're spending here over the next couple days and add that that is 1,302 hours. So let's total all of that up together and we're at 5,499 hours to put this conference together if you were to take all that time and turn it into a regular workdays we're talking about 2.6 years worth of time. So that's crazy You know and even the simple parts of things that you think are going to be easy that you have a good idea and you're like oh just do that like for instance planning a balloon drop turns out to be just incredibly time consuming just to get everything planned and ordered and get everything ready to go for the balloon drop it was about nine and a half hours combined of Ashkahn and Ice Time getting all of that ready From here it took 11 hours of man hours just to blow up the balloons to actually fill the balloon drop to get it all ready to go Then it took about 15 minutes last night after everyone left the theater to sneak it downstairs and when you weren't looking and there were still some people in the hallway we ran it across and hid it in here so you guys couldn't see it about one and a half hours worth of stage hand time to actually get that thing all strung up hung, make sure that it wasn't hopefully just going to start popping randomly or drop before we walk out on stage and that takes us to about 30 minutes of adding the balloon drop into this presentation and gathering all the photos and making sure that it looks good for you guys which leaves us with about 22 and three quarters hours that it took just to get that balloon drop to happen at the beginning of the presentation So over at the Washington Monument site the debate continues we now have a congressional committee meeting to bring this project to a close really trying to bring it out and now the debate has actually moved away from what the symbolic nature of this monument to be no one really cares about that anymore Instead what everyone cares about now is the actual aesthetics what is this thing really going to look like what type of pillars should we use what type of finishing should we use at this point that we're supposed to become the Washington Monument So much more ornamental than we ended up with So then this fellow Thomas Casey who was an engineer with the army came in and he was actually brought on they couldn't decide on the design of all of those crazy ones they just could not ultimately decide on anything but they were like we gotta start actually building this thing So they brought Casey in to start the initial just work and building it and he was absolutely forbidden to design anything the design would be handed down from the committee itself not coming from Casey and so that actually worked out really well for him because he was a minimalist engineer and so his whole belief in design was complete lack of design and getting it down to as simple elements as he possibly can so when they told him that he wasn't allowed to design anything I picture him just kind of maniacally in the bathroom going yes it's all according to plan and so we actually took the initial pillar from the Washington Monument which they decided to still have that pillar as the main thing and that's already a third built so finishing it was kind of job number one and he just came on board and he's like I'm gonna finish that pillar and he started stripping all the decorations off of that too some little star you see up there little plaque on the side he starts making proposals to the committee and he's like hey I'm not supposed to design things but there are design elements on here can we just remove those things since I'm forbidden to do it and so he proposed something that was much more like what we see right now is the Washington Monument another interesting note about BC is that he was incredibly stubborn once he got brought on board for the project he came in he submitted his resume they hired him and then they started trying to tell him what to do and we're like okay we voted on this here's what we're gonna do for the designs and he'd be like no no I'm not gonna do it and he just pushing his own agenda and again whenever he run into barriers he fell back on their own guidelines and he's like I honestly don't think I'm even allowed to do that like I'm supposed to finish this pillar and just engineer it and I can't even have my hands in design which is really a tricky way to go about hanging someone by their own noose this entire time that he's continuing building this thing Congress is still meeting to accept applications figure out what this thing is gonna look like they're still looking for a designer and he's just like okay great this thing built higher and higher and higher you can actually see on this photo a third of the way up is where is where that obelisk sat for many many years there's actually a visual difference if you go to Washington DC you can still see it right there the difference between the limestone which they couldn't match from the first third and top two thirds of that obelisk they got it as close as you can now once you know that too you just can't help but see it I had no idea until we started studying the Washington monument now when I look I always see just that third base sitting there underneath so there's a picture of them actually finishing up his project of just the pillar which is really amazing and that got done in I lost my place in my notes 1885 1885 and at the time it was not only the tallest man made structure in the world I was also one of the most technologically advanced and instead of having design on the exterior Casey had actually put an entire humongous elevator on the inside of the Washington monument which a variation of that is still there today a funny little anecdote too the molding around the elevator on the door leading in he thought really hard to have the molding removed so the face of the Washington monument was just a giant flat slab you couldn't even tell that there was a door in it so it's kind of like secret elevator inside so 1783 to 1885 that is 102 years to build the Washington monument of those 16 of them were actually spent building anything the Statute of Liberty was Statute of Liberty was actually built just one year after this which is really crazy to think about those seem like very different time periods but one year after this project finished the Statute of Liberty finished as well this Washington monument started before we even had a first president to the United States and it didn't finish until we had the 21st president was in office and it actually concluded and it's still incredible it actually is still the tallest stone structure in the world yep freestanding it doesn't actually have any mortar in between so all of the blocks are actually just fit with gravity and friction on there which is really pretty amazing so still a very beautiful thing even after all this time so what do we take away from all of this what are the lessons that we learn well we think that Thomas Casey was successful because he focused on getting a monument built just on simply not on worrying about pleasing everyone not on trying to get the plans perfect not on building the greatest monument to another living being that's ever been built in the world it was that there's a third finished monument to a great man in our country and he just wanted to see it done to some kind of completion that would actually mean something he had no more resources than anyone else did this is all working through the government or these places with a lot of money it's not like he managed to just have more funding to allow him to be successful yeah so when you look around you at these different things that get completed when you see grand things like the Washington monument or really anything of beauty or of scope that impresses you just know that that's what went into it it was some person really taking ownership of that project and putting in the hours and not listening to the naysayers and just putting in the work that was necessary to get that done and this is a really great thing to realize because you know this determination and this capacity for hard work that's something that everyone in this room possesses the money the expertise these things can help but in and of themselves they simply fall short without that one piece of the equation the real key to accomplishing something of this significance in this world is being willing to put in the time to get it done thank you good good there we go clean this up for them as late as the hours that it's going to take to clean all this up too thank you guys