Build for Faces You Will Never See
JULY 20, 2026
The mountain creates the moment of recognition, but recognition alone does not change a life.
Ask yourself who you would build for whose face you will never see. The answer is going to change how you measure everything else.
There are weather stations in the Atacama Desert that have never recorded a drop of rain. The people who built their lives around them have been there for two thousand five hundred years.
The driest non-polar place on Earth. NASA tests Mars rovers in parts of it.
A people called the Likan Antai have made their home there since around 500 BCE. "Inhabitants of the land." That is what the name means in their language, Kunza. They built irrigation channels that still carry water. Some of their ceremonial sites are still in use. The high plateau where the most powerful telescope in the world now sits is called Chajnantor. The word is Kunza. It means "place of lift-off."
They named it that before anyone built a telescope.
In a few weeks I am taking a group of leaders there for an eight-day expedition. I have been thinking about why.
Before I go further, a clarification. I am not Likan Antai. I cannot speak for them. I am going as a guest, alongside local guides and shamans and a Quechua co-guide named Bruno who carries the relationships into the people there. What I am about to write is about what their presence has me asking. The teaching belongs to them.
The honest answer to why I am taking the group is that I want them to be confronted by a scale they have never operated in.
Most of the people who come on these expeditions are running businesses. Their planning horizon is somewhere between a quarter and three years. The work they do is graded against their own lifetime. They will exit a company. They will retire. They will look at what they have built and ask whether it was enough by their own measure.
That is not the question the Likan Antai inherited.
The Likan Antai inherited something that has been moving across generations for twenty five centuries. They have carried it through Incan conquest, Spanish colonization, and Chilean annexation. Their language was nearly lost. Their grandchildren are learning it back. The irrigation channel you use to grow food today was dug by someone fifteen generations ago for someone fifteen generations from now. The decisions whose results still show up today were ones whose payoff the people who made them would not personally see.
This is the part that should rearrange everything.
If you are only building for what you can see, you are not building. You are performing. You are accumulating evidence for your own self-image. The thing you call legacy is mostly a story your team will tell at your retirement party.
I am not saying this from above. I am saying it because I have been on that side of it, and in some ways I still am.
For most of my career, what I built was measured against me. My results. My income. My platform. My reach. I called it legacy for years. I should have called it self-promotion over a long time period.
The difference is whether anything I made would still matter to anyone after I stopped paying attention to it. That is the test almost nothing I have built would pass. It is the test almost nothing my clients have built would pass either.
The Likan Antai's irrigation channels would pass it. Their songs would pass it. Their relationship to the land they have called Chajnantor for thousands of years would pass it.
I don’t mean this to be a romantic point about ancient wisdom. It is a hard one about scale.
The frame they have inherited asks the question, "what survives me?" Most leaders today are operating inside a frame that asks the question, "what gets me to my next milestone?"
The answers those two questions produce are not the same.
One builds. One produces.
The trip is partly to walk people directly into the size of that gap.
The desert does some of the work without me. You stand in the Atacama and you understand that you are not the main thing happening here. Something has been there far longer than you. Something will be there far longer than you. The people who tend it have been holding the relationship for twenty five hundred years and they will keep holding it after you leave.
You start to ask, quietly, what you are tending.
If the answer is mostly yourself and your numbers and your reputation, you are going to have to do some real work to find an answer that goes further than that.
That is the work I am taking the group there to do.
I do not have any illusions about what eight days produces. Nobody is leaving Likan Antai. Nobody is leaving with a fully built generational practice. But you can leave with something else. The recognition that the frame you have been operating inside is too small. And once you see that, you cannot fully go back. The eighteen-month horizon stops making sense as the measure of a life.
You start asking better questions. What am I tending that I want to outlast me? Who would I be willing to build for whose face I will never see?
These are the questions the Atacama asks if you sit in it long enough.
The Likan Antai have been answering them for twenty five centuries.
I will arrive small. That is the right way to walk into a place like that...
Key idea:
If you are only building for what you can see, you are not building. You are performing. Most of what high-performers call legacy is just self-promotion in a longer time frame. Real legacy is what still matters after you stop paying attention to it. Almost nothing modern leadership produces would pass that test.
Take away:
Ask yourself who you would build for whose face you will never see. The answer is going to change how you measure everything else.
Build your movement:
Tell someone what you are building that you want to outlast you. Start measuring against that, not only against this quarter.