This week in The Legibility Letter:
● The Suez plan: 1879, de Lesseps took to Panama what had worked at Suez — the jungle wasn’t desert, the river washed away months of work in an afternoon, 22,000 people died (your experience doesn’t tell you which part of it belonged to the place)
● From the inside: the plan tells you where to walk, the preconditions decide whether the ground holds you or gives way (when something costs too much, it usually isn’t discipline you’re missing, it’s the preconditions)
● A quote we like: Buxton got it right — you don’t find time, you make it (and “I don’t have time” was never true, you decided something else came first)
The Suez plan
Ferdinand de Lesseps was the man who had built the Suez Canal. In 1879 he set out to do the same in Panama.
In the ten years the project lasted, he set foot in Panama only twice: once to open the works and once to reassure the investors.
He ran the rest from Paris.
Seventy-eight votes to eight
In May 1879 a congress of 136 delegates meeting in Paris voted 78 to 8 for a sea-level canal across Panama. No locks, just a continuous trench from ocean to ocean. De Lesseps, then 73, was in the chair.
Suez had been exactly that: flat desert, dry sand, sea on one side and sea on the other. It had worked.
Panama was jungle, a mountain range to cut through and a river, the Chagres, that burst its banks every rainy season and carried off months of work in an afternoon. At the same congress a French engineer proposed a canal with locks and dams to control the river. They turned it down.
And there was something Suez had never had: yellow fever and malaria. In 1883 disease killed 400 workers, and at the worst point more than 500 were dying a month.
In 1887 de Lesseps accepted locks. It was too late. In February 1889 the company went into liquidation, with some 22,000 dead and 800,000 small French investors ruined. He was convicted of fraud at 88.
Your experience doesn’t tell you which part of it belonged to the place.
Three moves
De Lesseps wasn’t incompetent, and everything he knew was right for Suez. His problem was that he had no way of telling which part of what he knew was about canals and which part was about Egypt.
Almost every business makes a move like this.
The shop that opens online convinced it’s the same thing, just on the internet, and finds that nobody walks past any more. Every customer costs money, and some of what they buy comes back.
The consultant who hires a first salesperson expecting results in the first month, and finds they’ve never managed anyone who sells, and that managing is a different trade.
The business that grows from two people to ten expecting everything to carry on as before, and finds that nobody knows anything that isn’t written down.
In all three the work looks the same. And in all three, the first problem is one that didn’t exist in the old place.
The trap
The lesson isn’t to stay put. Suez was new once too, and the Americans did end up building Panama, but they did it differently.
Before digging in earnest, a doctor called William Gorgas spent two years killing mosquitoes, and the chief engineer built locks and an artificial lake instead of a trench.
They treated Panama as a different job, and the problem Suez had never had was the one they solved first.
De Lesseps’s mistake wasn’t going. It was going with a plan whose only proof was that it had worked before.
Write down the move you’re about to make: the new channel, the first hire, the jump in size. And next to it, the problem that didn’t exist before. Not the same problem made harder: the one with no equivalent.
That problem goes first. If you can’t find one, you’re still in Suez.
Preconditions
I’ve always been fascinated by how easy certain results become once you’ve spent time creating the preconditions first.
Most people with a goal do the same thing. They set the target and make a plan to reach it. Every question is about the steps: what comes first, what comes next, in what order, how fast. It’s how nearly all of us learnt to go after what we want.
Over the years I’ve found a far more interesting question, and it comes before the plan: what preconditions have to exist for this to work?
I saw it clearly while writing my book LEVERAGE. Writing two or three hours a day wasn’t something I could manage just by deciding to. Without changing the underlying conditions, it would have been a daily fight against everything competing for my time and attention.
To free up the time, the business had to be redesigned. Some lines of business were cut. My dealings with other people were kept to a minimum. Only once those conditions were in place did writing come naturally.
I’m seeing exactly the same thing now as I get ready to train seriously again. Over the years I went from demanding athletic training to maintenance mode. I still wanted to train, but without free time or mental bandwidth, training at that level simply wasn’t possible.
Today the conditions are different. I start work around one in the afternoon and my working day is four hours long. And getting going again feels almost effortless.
Same person, same goal. Only the conditions changed.
No number of goals would get me to the physical level I want if the preconditions weren’t there. There’d be constant friction. And if I did get there, it would cost enormous mental effort, willpower spent every day just to stay on track.
I think there’s something here almost nobody sees. When something costs too much, when every step means pushing against an invisible resistance, we tend to read it as a lack of discipline.
So we demand more of ourselves and blame ourselves for not being consistent enough. But often the friction isn’t telling us anything about our discipline. It’s telling us we skipped the preconditions.
The plan tells you where to walk, but the preconditions decide whether the ground holds you up or gives way with every step.
So before you ask which steps you’ll take, ask what already has to be in place for those steps to feel natural. What time you need to free up. Which commitments you have to let go of. Which part of your life or business needs redesigning so that what you want stops being a struggle.
When the preconditions exist, effort changes character. It stops being a battle against circumstances and becomes the result of having prepared the ground.
Before you plan the route, design the conditions that make it easy.
Edward
““You will never find time for anything. If you want time you must make it.”
— Charles Buxton
I like this quote because it takes apart one of the most universal things we say, one I think every one of us hides behind more often than we’d like to admit: “I don’t have time.”
We say “I can’t find the time” as if time were something you look for, lose, and occasionally stumble across.
What Buxton does is correct the verb: you don’t find time, you make it. And making it means taking it from something else.
“I don’t have time” nearly always means “it isn’t my priority”. And that’s harder to admit.
I’ve used “I don’t have time” as a shield. To avoid what was important but uncomfortable, while I still found time for what was urgent and comfortable. The time was there. What was missing was the decision to give it to what really mattered.
That’s why I think “taking time” is the more honest phrase. You don’t find it tucked into a corner of the day. You take it, deliberately, from something you’ve decided is worth less.
“I don’t have time” was never true. You just decided something else came first.