Happy Sunday, thank you so much for opening this week’s newsletter and Happy Father’s Day to any fathers reading this today!

Before we get into it today, I want to shoutout my own father, who inspires me to work hard for what I want and who has always shown me an example of what it looks like to be a good man. Thank you for everything that you are and all that you do, Pops. Sending you a hug and lots of love ❤️ .

One small announcement

As you already know, whenever I write to you on here, I do my best to be open and transparent, so that you can trust me and the words that I share with you week after week.

In the spirit of that transparency, I wanted to let you know that starting with this week’s newsletter, I’ll be including ads in the newsletter.

To help me out in pushing this newsletter to the next level, I’d really appreciate it if you click the links in the ads (because they pay me a fixed amount per unique click), so that I can get compensated in some way for the work that I put into this newsletter week after week.

I don’t anticipate the ads having a negative impact on your experience with my newsletter, so thank you in advance for supporting #TheLifeofJLOWE in the small ways that you can!

How do you build your house?

This past week, I was listening to a Ted Talk that was pretty reminiscent of a past newsletter I sent, which talked about “How do you define success?” and the question that the speaker posed was “How do you build your house?”

Let me preface this by saying I have never built a house in my life, and I take this question more as a thought experiment, but for those of you reading this that do own a house, maybe it will resonate even more for you given your home-building experience.

The question stuck out to me, because essentially, when it comes time to build a house, more commonly than not, we build our houses in the way that everyone around us builds their houses.

Whether its the style of roofing, how we landscape the front yard, the Nest system that we install at the front door, the furniture that we decorate with or the appliances that we install, most of those things come from external inspiration and internalising what we liked about other people’s houses to incorporate into our own.

Building how we were taught

We live in a society.

As simple as that sounds, it’s true. You’re probably thinking to yourself “Duh, Justin?”

But living in a society means that our behaviour is learnt. How we respond to certain situations, how we approach certain situations and how we perceive various situations is all learnt.

How we build our house is something that’s learnt.

If everyone around me is building a house with 4 walls and a roof, and all I’ve ever seen my whole life is houses with 4 walls and a roof, when I get older, guess what?

You guessed it - I’m going to build my house with 4 walls and a roof.

Point #1 - Learn more, expand your horizons

The only way I would know not to build my house with 4 walls and a roof is if I went somewhere else, and saw that someone else had built their house in a different way. The only way that I would know that I can build my house in a different way is if I learn that building my house in a different way is possible.

More than that, the only way that I can build my house in a different way is to know that it’s even possible to build it in a different way. In fact, expanding your horizons doesn’t mean just learning new ways in which other people built their house, but rather learning that it’s possible to get creative with how to build it.

Throughout my life, I’ve been able to travel, meet people from across the world, and have conversations with people from wildly different backgrounds from my own. As a result, I’ve recognised that there are many many ways to approach every single issue that exists.

By expanding your horizons you might even recognize that the root issue was not to learn how to build a house, but rather that you required shelter from the external environment. Building a house was the widely accepted solution. When you think about it, though, requiring shelter doesn’t even necessarily require you to build a house in the first place.

So now, not only have we recognised that there’s multiple ways to build a house, we’ve recognised that building a house in a new way may be necessary not just for the sake of building a house differently, but rather for the sake of solving the root issue that required us to even consider building a house in the first place.

Let’s take a breath

Okay. I know that was a lot. Even for me, writing this, it got just a bit confusing.

Let’s level set - in summary:

1. You can build a house any way you want, but you’d only know that if you saw different ways in which houses can be built.

2. Building a house provides shelter. But building a house isn’t the only solution to needing shelter. So by seeing how other people have solved that problem, we’ve uncovered the root issue that building a house solves. This means that we can now get creative with solving that problem (aka, providing shelter in a different way)

Point #2: You can unlearn how to build a house

In the same way that we learn various things throughout our life, it’s equally as important that we can unlearn certain behaviours that no longer serve us as we get older.

If your house has 4 walls and a roof, but you realize that hey, the material you built the walls with isn’t sturdy enough, by all means, install new walls. The climate, soil conditions and environment that your house will experience is different from every single other house that you’ll encounter.

So if you built your house how you were taught to build it, but then one day realize that the way you built it won’t hold up, or even more simply - isn’t to your liking anymore - deconstruct it, and renovate it with the new knowledge that you gained by seeing other houses. Or get creative with it, and do your own thing - solve the problem in your own way.

It’s your house after all.

Conclusion

You are your house.

^{You probably saw that coming, haha} 😄 

The truth is, though, that as we go through life, it’s easy to forget that we live in a society that socializes us to behave in certain ways, and react in certain ways. It’s easy to forget that we were taught how to build our house.

For me, growing up has meant recognising that I can appreciate the things that I’ve learnt and been taught, whether in school or by my parents or whoever else, but as I build my own life and have my own experiences, some of the things that I was taught will no longer serve me in the ways they once did. This can mean how I react to certain situations, how I think about certain situations and even mean how I view the world on a whole.

It means that as we get older, we need to recognize that the solutions to problems that we’ve been handed our entire lives, aren’t necessarily solutions that will work for us.

It means sometimes, as life comes at us, we’re going to have to get creative with the solutions that we come up with.

It means that we might have to unlearn certain behaviours, put down certain attitudes and pre-conceived notions, and re-train ourselves intentionally to be better than what we were taught.

It means that as we build ourselves, we have to be acutely aware of the fact that we were, at some point in our lives, being built by someone else. Whoever or whatever it was that built us cannot be the architect of who we are forever, and so the only way to create the life that we want for ourselves is to become the architect of our own lives.

The only way to truly build your own house - to build yourself - is to learn, unlearn, and repeat. Renovate. Tear down walls and then put them back up how you want them. Be the architect, the construction worker, the supervisory manager and the interior decorator of your own life.

It’s yours. And it will never be anyone else’s.

Until next Sunday,

Justin