Built for a Future You’ll Never See

The most important work often looks pointless for years. And some of the best work you’ll ever do will matter only after you’re gone.

Last year, I started practicing Western calligraphy. The first book I picked up was the Speedball Textbook, and what struck me most was not the lettering, but the story behind it.

In the early 1900s, William H. Gordon and Ross F. George were building something deeply practical.
Not a movement.
Not a trend.
Not an artistic revolution.

They focused on tools and education for real-world lettering—signage, advertising, commercial design. In 1915, they launched what would later become the Speedball Textbook: part catalog, part training system, part industry standard.

For decades, it stayed niche. Professionals used it. Teachers used it. Designers used it. But it never belonged to popular culture.

Then something unexpected happened.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the United States saw a massive revival of interest in calligraphy and handmade lettering. DIY culture. Counterculture. Art schools. Craft.

And suddenly, everything was already there.

The tools.
The methods.
The training materials.
A clear entry point for beginners.

The founders never saw this boom. But they had built the foundation that made it possible.

The Speedball Textbook is still published more than a hundred years later.

Another story was told to me by Alex Samotarev.

In the Russian North, the Izhma Airport was effectively closed in the 1990s. But one man stayed.

Sergey Sotnikov kept maintaining the runway. Clearing snow. Cutting grass. Keeping the basic infrastructure alive.

For years, almost no one needed it.

Then, in 2010, a passenger plane lost its electrical systems mid-flight. The crew searched for any usable runway.

They found Izhma.

The runway was short.
The landing was rough.
The aircraft ran off the strip into the forest.

But around 80 people survived—because someone had been maintaining a runway nobody was using.

For years.

The Same Pattern

One textbook.
One runway.

Both built and maintained without guarantees.
Both waiting for a future no one could predict.

Neither story is really about calligraphy or aviation.

They are about stewardship.
About building systems, not moments.
About taking care of something that might only matter years—or decades—later.

Many ideas and projects will outgrow us.

If we do the work well — if we build tools, knowledge, and infrastructure — the best ones may become bigger than our careers, bigger than our timelines, sometimes even bigger than our lives.

And that is not failure.

That is legacy.