To all junior architects...

If you’re struggling with the start of your career, here’s a story for you:

One day, a traveler met three men working.

He approached the first man and asked him what he was doing. Angry and tired, he replied: "Can't you see? I am laying some bricks."

A few meters away, he asked the second man the same question, to which he replied with some indifference: "Can't you see? I am putting up a wall"

When he got to the third person with the same question, the man smiled happily and answered: "Can't you see? I am building a monument!"

What a beautiful parable! The three men were all doing the same thing. But the happiest one of them was the person who realized what the end goal was. How his work was contributing to something really big!

This story reminds me of our work, as architects. Not because it's about construction, but because when we are junior architects, we often feel that we lost all the freedom that we had in university. Right from the possibility of designing and controlling the whole project, we become suddenly part of a big team, doing oftentimes tiny little details...This tends to make us miserable because we forget to look at the big picture.

If you are a junior architect reading this, never forget that no matter what tiny details you are doing now...you are actually building a monument!

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