Stacking Bricks: The Unsexy Secret to Building an Empire
The initial surge of the week has passed, and you’re in the thick of it—the daily grind of emails, tasks, and deadlines. In these quiet, focused hours, the sheer scale of your ambition can feel both exhilarating and crushingly heavy. You see the empire you want to build in your mind’s eye—the financial freedom, the impact, the life lived on your own terms—and the distance from here to there can feel impossibly vast.
Our culture is obsessed with the highlight reel. We’re bombarded with stories of “overnight success,” the mythical jackpot moment where a single idea explodes into a multi-million dollar venture. We see the polished end result, the triumphant CEO on the cover of a magazine, and we subconsciously believe that success is a giant, heroic leap across a chasm.
But that’s a lie. It’s a dangerous, paralyzing lie. Success doesn’t start with a jackpot moment—it starts with small, consistent, and often unglamorous steps.
It’s a simple, three-part formula:
Take one action.
Celebrate the tiny win.
Keep going.
Every great journey, every monumental empire, begins with just one move forward. Oprah didn’t become Oprah overnight. Jeff Bezos started Amazon in a garage, surrounded by boxes, not on a yacht surrounded by supermodels. Their stories, and every other story of true success, are not tales of a single, giant leap. They are epics of stacking bricks, one by one, day after day, until a fortress of achievement is built.
So if you're dreaming big but feeling stuck, overwhelmed by the sheer size of your vision, it’s time to stop looking at the mountain peak and start focusing on the single, small stone right in front of you. It’s time to do something today that your future self will high-five you for.
The Myth of the Giant Leap: Why "Go Big or Go Home" is Terrible Advice
The "overnight success" narrative is the most damaging myth in entrepreneurship. It creates a toxic "hero or zero" mentality. We believe we must launch the perfect business, the flawless product, the viral marketing campaign, all in one go. The pressure to make that first step a giant, earth-shattering leap is so immense that it paralyzes us. We freeze, caught in a state of "analysis paralysis," because the chasm between our current reality and our grand vision seems too wide to cross.
We compare our messy, uncertain Chapter 1 to someone else’s polished and edited Chapter 20. We see their success, but we don’t see the thousands of tiny, invisible steps they took to get there. We don’t see the clumsy first website, the awkward sales calls, the failed product ideas, the late nights spent learning a new skill. The media never shows us the boring parts.
What appears to the outside world as a sudden, giant leap is always, without exception, the result of consistent, repetitive, and often tedious action taken in private. It’s the final, visible brick being placed atop a massive foundation that was laid in obscurity.
The Momentum Equation: Action > Win > Motivation
For the woman who feels stuck, the most common refrain is, "I just need to get motivated." This is fundamentally backward. Motivation is not a prerequisite for action; it is the result of it. You cannot think your way into a state of motivation. You must act your way into it. This is the Momentum Equation, and it’s the engine that will drive you from stuck to unstoppable.
1. Action (The First Domino):
The laws of physics are clear: an object at rest stays at rest. The single hardest part of any great journey is the initial push. The good news? The size of that initial push is almost irrelevant. What matters is that it happens. Your goal is not to move the mountain today. Your goal is to move a single pebble. This small, manageable action is the first domino. It may seem insignificant, but its only job is to create just enough force to topple the next one.
2. The Tiny Win (The Dopamine Hit):
This is where the magic happens. When you complete a task, no matter how small, and you consciously acknowledge it as a win, your brain releases a hit of dopamine. This is a powerful neurotransmitter associated with pleasure and reward. It’s your brain’s way of saying, “Hey, that felt good! Let’s do that again.” This chemical reward creates a neurological craving for more achievement. Celebrating that you finally registered your domain name, or that you drafted one email to a potential client, isn't silly—it's a strategic way to hack your brain's reward system.
3. Motivation (The Fuel, Not the Spark):
That dopamine hit, that feeling of accomplishment from your tiny win, is motivation. It’s the fuel that makes taking the next, slightly bigger action feel easier. Action creates a win, which creates real, tangible motivation, which in turn fuels more action. This is the powerful, self-perpetuating cycle that the most successful people in the world have mastered. They don't wait for motivation to strike them like lightning; they generate it themselves, every single day, through small, deliberate actions.
What "Stacking Bricks" Looks Like in Real Life
So, what does this look like on a Tuesday afternoon when you’re feeling overwhelmed? It means radically downscaling your focus from the "empire" to the "brick."
- Dreaming of launching a six-figure coaching business? Your brick today is not “build a high-ticket program.” Your brick is to take 15 minutes and write down the three questions your friends always ask you for advice on. That’s the seed of your expertise. Brick laid.
- Dreaming of a global e-commerce brand?Your brick today is not “source a full product line.” Your brick is to spend 20 minutes scrolling Etsy to research one potential product category you’re passionate about. Brick laid.
- Dreaming of becoming a thought leader with a bestselling book?Your brick today is not “write a 50,000-word manuscript.” Your brick is to open a document and draft a 300-word social media post that shares your core message. Brick laid.
Each of these actions is small. Each is achievable. And each is a tangible step forward. Each one is a moment where your future self, the one running that empire, looks back and gives you a high-five for having the courage to start.
Your "End of Day" Action Challenge
Let’s make this real. Before you close your laptop for the day, I challenge you to lay one brick. Right now.
- Identify Your "First Brick": Look at your biggest, most intimidating goal. Ask yourself: "What is the absolutely smallest, most laughably simple action I can take in the next ten minutes that would move me 0.1% closer to that goal?" Is it registering the domain name? Creating a blank document and giving it a title? Sending one email?
- Execute Immediately. Don't add it to tomorrow's to-do list. The power is in the immediacy. This is about proving to yourself that you are a person who takes action, right now.
- Celebrate the Win. After you do it, don’t just move on. Close your eyes for ten seconds. Take a deep breath. And consciously acknowledge what you just did. Feel the small surge of pride. That feeling is the foundation for everything that comes next. You just built something. You just laid a brick.
Your journey to greatness? It’s already begun. It began the moment you decided to stop just dreaming and start doing. Greatness isn't a destination you miraculously arrive at. It's a structure you build with your own hands, one small, unsexy, and profoundly important brick at a time.
Go lay your first one.