Building The Tracks

“Signora, between Austria and Italy, there is a section of the Alps called the Semmering. … They built a train track over these Alps to connect Vienna and Venice. They built these tracks even before there was a train in existence that could make the trip. They built it because they knew some day, the train would come.”

When you read that story, about the train and the Alps, how does it make you feel?

Are you thinking, Why do I care about a train in Europe? I have three job interviews this week!

Are you more practical, like How fiscally irresponsible is that to build something that no one can use?

Or… are you more like me?

As you’ve probably already guessed, that little anecdote gives ME goosebumps the size of Montana hail, a lump in my throat, and every time I read it my boobies tingle a little—because that’s just the kind of inspiring, real life, stranger-than-fiction, magical nonsense that makes me excited to get up in the morning.

That passage is from a favorite movie of mine, Under the Tuscan Sun, which if you haven’t seen it or read the book, (which is marvelous) is about a woman going through a profound life change whose purpose, timeframe and final destination are completely unknown to her. Day after day, terrified and miserable as fuck, she just keeps putting one foot in front of the other.

Like we all do. Even people who aren’t steeped in faith find a way to carry on. Maybe they get it from stories about trains.

If you think about it from my very Pollyanna Perspective, every great work of art, creative endeavor, and scientific accomplishment started with some track building. I’ll take it a step further and insist that we all lay down tracks we can’t use until we flesh out our ideas from start to finish.

I do it every freaking day and so do you!

A dear friend of mine has gone back to school to get her degree. There’s no job lined up yet, no clientele or guarantee of employment waiting for her at the finish line. Nevertheless, I see her working her tail off—laying the tracks.

From the age of thirteen, Misty Copeland would practice up to eight hours a day, barely listening to the naysayers who insisted that she was too dark, too curvy and had started dancing too late to have a real career in ballet. She was too busy laying tracks for a position that did not exist before her—the first African-American principal ballerina for the American Ballet Theatre.

Steve Jobs imagined the smartphone, a technology so innovative that it didn’t exist before he thought of it. I’m sure plenty of intelligent, well-meaning people told him not to waste his time or money on what must have seemed like an insurmountable amount of track building. But he did it anyway.

He gave us something we never knew we needed—that now we can never imagine living without.

Like a train across the Alps.

What tracks are you laying right this minute for that thing you know will show up one day?

Carry on,
xox