Want to Build A Castle? Stack a Few Stones Everyday
The above quote is 21 words long. Not very long at all. Could you write 21 words a day? How much time would it take you? I just wrote the above 23 words in less than a minute. If you could take 10 minutes a day to write 80 words a day for 365 days in a row, you could complete a 30,000 word novella or short self-help book (like my book, UNFINISHED).
The average pop song consists of two verses, three choruses, a bridge and an outro. If you wrote one section (pick a verse, chorus, etc.) a day for 60 days, you would have enough material for a full album (10 songs total).
You get what I’m saying. Small, daily habits create a large body of work. Everyone understands this concept, but few follow through with it. The ones that do, however, build castles.
Burgos is a city in northern Spain adorned with structures that have stood for 3,000 years. Among these structures are large churches, monasteries, and the type of structure most synonymous with fairytales: castles. The castles in Burgos are every bit fantastical from foundation to steeple point. When you think of the work it takes to create a castle, you can only imagine how much manpower and how many years it takes to erect a structure truly fit for royalty. But if you were to visit Cebolleros, a small community in the suburbs of Burgos, the story is something completely out of the ordinary.
If you Google Cebolleros, you won’t get many points of interest as a tourist. In fact, one thing dominates the first 100 Google images in a search: Castillo de las Cuevas. In 1977, a welder in the local factory by the name of Serafín Villarán decided to pursue a dream to build his very own castle. At the age of 42, he bought a piece of land and set to the task of building a five-story castle without any real knowledge of architecture. Castillo de las Cuevas (Castle of Caves) was built over a 20-year period by Serafín stone by stone. If you weren’t privy to the background of this castle, you would draw the conclusion that this castle was created in the same fashion as the over 2,500 castles still standing in Spain–by years of brutal labor with large teams of carpenters, carters, ditchers, master masons, woodworkers and stonecutters. But that wasn’t the case with Serafín.
Photo Credit: Javi Rodriguez Godoy
Serafín had immense determination to complete such an audacious project, and we have to imagine that he understood a very fundamental thought that could propel him forward– “If I stack these stones, one by one, on top of each other, in the right configuration, over time it will amount to my dream: a castle.”
Sadly, in 1998 Serafín died before the completion of the interior of Castillo de las Cuevas. But no one can take away from the fact that he fundamentally completed the castle from the exterior.
Building a castle sounds so much more exciting than ‘stone stacking’. If you asked me how to build your dream and I told you to stack stones for 20 years, you would probably call me names and consider me to have slave driver tendencies. But every big goal comes to a point of repeating a skill ad nauseam—It’s stone stacking.
Serafín Villarán not only inspired many by his ability to complete a castle virtually on his own, he also gave us a great blueprint as to the ‘how’ and ‘when’ of completing our personal projects. Here were his steps dissected:
1. Serafín Villarán Bought Land
To build his castle, Serafín knew he needed a place that would fit the following conditions: He needed to work undisturbed by the elements. His land had to be solid ground in which the castle could stand for hundreds of years. The land in Cebolleros proved ideal for both of these conditions.
Claiming Your Land (Working Undisturbed)
I have two young girls. If I chose to attempt writing my book in their presence, it wouldn’t happen. Young children don’t understand the difference of being in the room and being present, nor should they care. If you are in the room, you have entered into a contractual agreement to be their tea party buddy, their waiter, the monster to their super hero.
Your ‘elements’ may look different. Are your distractions are internet related? Carve out 2 times a week you leave the devices somewhere else in order to create. Delete the social media apps on your phone, turn the wifi off on your computer. Live in a noisy part of town? Find somewhere quiet to create. The space in which you create plays as much of a part in castle building as the building itself.
Working undisturbed means avoiding physical distractions, but also mental. I’ve found I’m much less productive when I’m listening to new music. Some say listening to new music can be inspiring; but in the moment of creating, I don’t need to be inspired. I need focus. This may be because I’m a musician and my brain tends to dissect new music, but I know successful non-musician friends also create in the same way.
Working on Solid Foundation
Pouring a strong foundation for finishing any creative project is a mixture of two words: ‘Time’ and ‘No’. When you talk to anyone who quit their project midway through, what’s their response 99% of the time?
“I just don’t have the time anymore.” Or, “Life just got too busy.”
I hear this excuse as, “I said yes to good things instead of great things.”
Set aside your sacred place and time to work on your project, and then anticipate interruptions. Resolve to say ‘no’ to things in life that will try to breach the walls of this sacred time and space. Somewhere along the way you have settled on your projects not really being that important. They are just a nice thing to finish someday. So we politely set them aside for other people’s priorities. Serafín couldn’t imagine not completing his castle, so he worked until the day he died to see it completed. Are you working toward finishing your goals so intensely that only death will stop you from completion? If not, find the time and start saying ‘no’ more.
2. Serafín Villarán Gathered His Stones (Working with What You Have)
As I mentioned, Serafín wasn’t a self-made millionaire or born into a large inheritance. So he had to work with what he had access to. What Serafín lacked in money, he made up for with resourcefulness. His castle was built largely with free natural resources in the form of stones from nearby rivers.
Every personal project will take a decent amount of resources, but it doesn’t mean you have to fund these resources outright. Many people quit at this step because completing their project can be “too expensive.” We live in the age of connections and crowd funding. Use it.
I released an EP in 2014 with some friends under the name The Science Class, which was fully funded by a Kickstarter campaign. This was, in every respect, a personal project. My wife and I were moving away and we knew this might be our last chance to write and record with some very dear friends. We had a batch of five songs that we personally loved and wanted to share with everyone. There wasn’t a theme or a complete sense of musical cohesion between the songs. The glue was under the surface of musical styles. We wrote and recorded these songs with great, lifelong friends. We were lucky enough to have a base of supporters that saw the value of completing these songs over trying to be famous. It’s one of the most meaningful projects I ever had the opportunity of completing. Don’t let the lack of funds be your excuse for not completing your project. We were shocked and humbled when complete strangers backed us with large sums of money, all because we asked.
3. Serafín learned where to place his stones.
Of course, Serafín didn’t place his stones directly on top of each other. This would have created a vertical wall and not the form of the keep, pinnacles, corbel etc. that define a castle form. Serafín had to experiment and gain knowledge of castle architecture. I would be just guessing as to how he went about this, but for you and me, the internet is beautiful resource. This also comes through experimentation.
Learning Where to Place Your Stones by… Placing Your Stones.
I wrote the first draft of my book without editing. I knew it wasn’t good, but for me, editing as I write slows me down and I begin second-guessing myself. I stacked stones on top of each other that didn’t form what I wanted them to form. However, I wouldn’t have known this until I stacked a few stones. It’s ok to learn where to stack your stones through the act of doing. Many times this is a better lesson than just planning for hours on end and not doing the work of building.
You may not have lofty dreams like Serafín, but his principles in building his very own castle will hold up in any personal project you take on. Just build your project one stone at a time.
For other tools and resources, you can purchase my book, UNFINISHED: A Guide to Dream, Complete and Repeat Your Life’s Work