The Bricklayer

I recently ran across a remarkable man, and it happened in the strangest of ways.

A close friend forwarded me an email… it was for a Zoom call run by someone I’d never heard of featuring a guest speaker—another person I’d never heard of. But something caught my eye. This mystery speaker had been dubbed “The Real Life Wizard of Oz” by Forbes magazine. As “The Tin Man,” I had no choice but to investigate.

A quick Google search revealed this guy to be a dream concierge for the world’s richest people. That’s right, when the uber-wealthy want a dream to come true, they call this guy.

He just wrote a book called “Bluefishing: The Art of Making Things Happen” that I devoured in a week, and he has built a business making the impossible possible. Wanna have a private lunch at the foot of the statue of David with Andrea Bocelli singing to you? He can make that happen. He has.

His name’s Steve Sims, and he’s a bricklayer.

His story of going from literally laying bricks for a living (for years) in London to becoming the secret weapon of billionaires is fascinating, and I think a secret lies in his humble beginnings.

Another Google search revealed that the average bricklayer can lay between 300-500 bricks a day. Knowing this guy, I’m guessing he was on the high end of that scale. Then I did another search, “how many bricks in the Empire State Building?” The estimate is 10 million. Now let’s do some math. If you lay 500 bricks a day, that’s 182,500 bricks a year. Which means technically, one man could build the Empire State Building in just shy of 55 years.

Yes, I know I’m leaving out the glass and the steel portion of the Empire State Building, but if that’s where your mind’s going, you’re missing the point ☺

The point is: with enough vision and enough commitment, we can achieve the incredible. You could build the Empire State Building. However, no matter how sexy that outcome looks, it means that every day you’re laying bricks.

If you lay bricks for 55 years, you’ll get REALLY good at it. I promise you that. Never doubt your competency. With enough practice, you can get great at damn near anything. The question is, are you willing to lay bricks every day?