Reading the Book Before I Built the Website

My brother-in-law wrote a book this year called The Energy Quadrant. I read the manuscript last fall, before a single word of it was public, and I believed in the principles from the first chapter.

Then my sister handed me the job of helping make those principles usable.

For JHD, that meant building the website, creating an assessment readers could take to find out where they actually stand on the topic, and setting up the follow-up system for what happens after they hit submit.

AI helped us move faster than we could have a few years ago. A lot faster. But, AI can only build pieces. Somebody still has to understand how those pieces fit together.

What information are we asking for? Where does it go? What happens next? What does the reader receive? That last part became very real when the assessment went live and its QR code went out into the world. People started taking it. I, on the other hand, was still finishing the email they were supposed to receive when they completed it.

All of this was happening while I was sitting in Roundtable, listening to a room full of people work through their own business challenges while quietly finishing someone else’s launch from my laptop.

I would love to tell you this was all carefully timed.

It was not.

But it worked.

The form worked. The system worked. The emails fired. Nobody on the other side knew how close some of it came to the wire.

So much of good work is exactly like that.

When it works, you barely notice the structure underneath it, which made me realize something about my own role at JHD.

Two technical problems hit different client websites this week. A few years ago, either one probably would have pulled me elbow-deep into code, very late at night and into the early morning, trying to solve everything myself.

This time, my team handled both.

That should probably feel completely normal by now, but it still catches me sometimes.

A lot of my energy at JHD has gone toward being the person who could step in and fix things. These days, I am becoming more interested in using that energy to build up the people and systems that make stepping in less necessary. And yes, there is satisfaction in being needed.

There is also a ceiling.

JHD can solve problems without me personally touching every one of them because we have spent years building a team that knows what to do.

Even though most people will never see the hundreds of small decisions that make it possible for someone to step away without everything wobbling, I think I’m appreciating those decisions more than I used to.

Building the system around the book made me think about my own energy, too: where I spend it, what still requires it, and what no longer should. More and more, I’m interested in what I can build that doesn’t need carrying forever.

Not because I want to become unnecessary.

Because I want the things we build to become strong enough to stand when I’m not the one holding them up.