Dec. 2, 2025

🌴337. The $354M Upgrade

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Show Notes

This morning’s episode comes straight from my parked car, because of course I arrived super early for a workshop again. People assume it’s discipline. It’s actually trauma from living near a bridge that collapses into chaos two days out of five. When you’ve been trapped on a 15-minute drive that suddenly becomes a 60-minute crawl, you learn to get ahead of the nonsense.

But today my early arrival came with a twist. The $354 million bridge upgrade finally opened its new lanes this week. And watching it unfold over the last two years has genuinely impressed me. Not because the construction was quick. It wasn’t. It was because the disruption was almost nothing. They managed a massive project in a way that barely touched most people’s day-to-day lives. That’s elite-level execution.

It got me thinking about how often we convince ourselves that big goals must wreck our routines. Training for Everest Base Camp showed me the opposite. If you design the load, you can carry it.

Then there’s the other side of the bridge metaphor. Are we actually solving the traffic problem, or just pushing the bottleneck further down the road? And how often do we do that in life and business? Delay decisions. Avoid clarity. Say yes to things our future selves will resent. Pretend the problem will magically disappear if we inch it a few kilometres out of sight.

Sometimes the bravest move is pulling the issue into the present and asking the uncomfortable question: “If I had to do this today, would I say yes?”

Anyway, I'm off to find a coffee before the room opens. Enjoy the episode.

Show notes for every episode at https://podcast.leannehughes.com

P.S. Ready to take things up a level? Here are some ways I can help: