“Greatness is in the agency of others.”
— Scott Galloway
This past Saturday, we hosted a reunion for everyone who helped transform Rosslyn’s icehouse over the last two years. This midday gathering was intended first and foremost as a way to thank everyone who contributed to the most recent and final historic rehabilitation of Rosslyn’s extant buildings. It was also an opportunity to show everyone the completed project (since most participated in discrete parts of the process and therefore hadn’t seen how everything ultimately came together) and to welcome everyone’s families — sort of an open house — to showcase and celebrate the fruits of collaboration.
What follows are a few thoughts that I had originally considered sharing during the Saturday luncheon. I envisioned a toast, thanking everyone individually for their dedication, recalling a few anecdotes, and braiding the collective accomplishments into the broader narrative of our eighteen years as Rosslyn’s stewards.
Susan advised me last Friday afternoon (and again on Saturday morning) to be brief. No rambling ruminations. No parade of thank you’s that might inadvertently overlook someone. No blah-blah-blah when everyone really just wanted to catch up, enjoy Papa Duke’s BBQ, and check out the completed icehouse.
I swallowed my pride, heeded her wise advice, and vowed to gather at least a few of my thoughts into a blog post.
And that, patient reader, brings me to today’s daily dispatch, the clever quotation at the top of this page, a conversation that I had with friend and Essex neighbor, Lee Maxey, in May 2023, and a pep talk I delivered to some of the icehouse rehab team the same day.
Pep Talk
Lee Maxey asked if I was familiar with Scott Galloway’s No Mercy / No Malice. I wasn’t. He suggested I read Galloway’s May 5, 2023 post, “Storytelling”. I did.
Scott Galloway’s words above came from that post. Here they are again. 
“Greatness is in the agency of others.”
— Scott Galloway
Sure, that resonates. Might have said it myself, I remember thinking at the time. 
It was still rolling around in the recesses of my cold cranium as I gathered the icehouse crew for a pep talk of sorts. Susan and I were heading to Santa Fe shortly, and I’d be shifting from in-person to virtual interaction with the team just as the project was entering an especially challenging stretch.
I talked about Rosslyn. A name. A home. A history. I talked about William Daniel Ross — son of Daniel Ross and Elizabeth Gilliland (daughter of William Gilliland who founded Willsboro, Essex, etc. circa 1765) — who built Rosslyn circa 1820-3.
Two centuries of Rosslyn history abridged down a couple of minutes and bookended with Susan and my tenure. In 2006 Susan and I purchased after losing one of my closest lifelong friends, Christopher Emmet Hallowell, and her father, John Carter Bacot. We were looking for a place to regroup. Reboot. Revitalize. Rehabilitate…
This brought me to adaptive reuse and repurposing. I riffed on reimagining and recycling, reinvention and repeatedly rebooting. I talked about transforming the old, outdated, and worn out into something new, relevant, useful, even beautiful.
And when it comes to adaptive reuse and repurposing, I gushed like a runaway train, it’s not just buildings and building materials. It’s also stories. The stories we tell. The stories we are. You see, I believe we are our stories. And we are in each other’s stories. That means you’re in mine, I told them. My personal story, my Essex story, my Rosslyn story.
I explained that the icehouse loft, then transitioning into the final phase of finish carpentry, is where I hoped to finish writing our Rosslyn story. So, in a sense, this icehouse rehabilitation is the final chapter. And to extend this notion a little further, I droned on, you are the team enabling this final rehabilitation. You are the grand finale, the culmination, the happily ever after. You’re the epilogue.
As I draw upon the experiences of this rehab, our many collaborators’ experiences, Susan and my experiences, our memories and anecdotes, successes and setbacks, as I sift through everything, untangling plots, and braiding it all into a new story, adapting and reusing everything that we’ve been through into something fresh and experimental, some sort of flex artwork-play amalgam — part property and buildings, part narrative memoir and lyric essay — I aspire to leave behind a little blip in the broader Rosslyn history, a whimsical chapter in the history of a home.
I realized after the fact that my pep talk of sorts had been as much self-directed as it was focused on the members of the team. I was striving for a morale boost for the team. I suspect I was mostly workshopping my own material.
Epilogue
What I yearned to communicate had something to do with my own urge to begin stepping away, to unwind my own hyper focused oversight of the project. To acknowledge with candor and humility what each and everyone of them had contributed to the story. To simply and succinctly articulate the collective achievement, to celebrate the accomplishments of their collaboration. Coming together with distinct experiences and diverse skillsets to advance as one toward a common goal.
Collaboration in’t the plug-and-play gizmo we make it out to be. It’s hard work. Immensely rewarding, but challenging. Collaboration demands much of the contributors. Skills. Expertise. Commitment. Followthrough. Respect for one another. Humility. Ambition. Confidence in the potential for a sum greater than its constituent parts… And it requires a willingness to bridle ego in service to the team, a commitment to second personal pride to the potential for collective accomplishment.
Like I said, it’s hard work. But when everything falls into place, the rewards transcend productivity and accomplishment, which are ample and impressive. The ultimate reward is in the doing, in the collaboration itself. Teamwork, well executed, is immensely satisfying in and of itself. (Source: Collaboration & Incubation)
This might have sufficed. This and Scott Galloway’s even simpler, even more succinct words.
Nota bene: Yes, Susan is sage!
What do you think?