Years ago in 2011 I was in a small Missouri town that got wiped off the face of the world by a tornado.
Like every other weather situation I got to the basement, laughed a bit, said this one too will blow over and it’s not that big of a deal. Missouri gets tornadoes, you grow up with them, and you learn to be casual about the sirens because most of the time nothing happens.
Then we started to hear it.
That low thrumming, a pressure building in the room, the atmosphere getting heavier as you hear what sounds like a freight train bearing down on you. The air gets thicker, almost suffocating, and that howling? Well from that day on that’s how you know. Once you’ve heard that sound and felt that shift you will never forget for the rest of your life, and you will never again laugh at sirens.
The house we were in survived. Mostly. The upstairs was a mess of shattered windows and all manner of debris plastered everywhere, carpet ruined, and who knew what else. We were the lucky ones.
What was outside was something else entirely. As far as the eye could see? Nothing.
Everything was gone. Flattened, torn apart, ripped asunder, chairs embedded in walls, trampolines rolling around like a tumbleweed and that eerie quiet that makes you feel like the world just ended.
What Do You Do?
What does someone do in such a situation? What can someone even do against that much destruction?
This is the question I think about a lot, and not just in the context of tornadoes.
You look at the scale of the problem and it’s paralyzing. There is no individual action that fixes this. There is no plan that accounts for everything. The damage is done and it is enormous and you are one person standing in the middle of it.
So what do you do?
You do what you can.
We walked back inside. I grabbed my boots, my work jacket, and a chainsaw while my brother grabbed his medical kit. We weren’t going to fix everything. Of course not. But what we knew in that moment is it was time to get to work and do something anyways.
We spent a lot of that evening going door to door, checking on folks, helping to clear paths, whatever we could. Everywhere around us there were more people coming together with whatever they could muster, trying to help. Nobody had a master plan. Nobody was coordinating from the top. People just showed up with what they had and started.
It didn’t matter if we could fix everything. We could fix something.
The Lesson That Stuck
That experience still shapes a lot of the way I look at things today, especially in leadership.
There’s a failure mode I see in senior engineers and leaders where the scale of a problem becomes an excuse for inaction. The system is too big. The migration is too complex. The organizational dysfunction is too entrenched. And so nothing happens, because no one can see a path to fixing all of it.
But that’s not actually the standard. The standard is: can you fix something? Can you make one path clearer, unblock one team, write one document that gives people the context they need to move? Can you grab whatever tool you have and start?
The people who show up in those moments, who choose to contribute despite not having all the answers, are the ones who end up making the biggest difference. Not because they’re smarter or more capable, but because they started. And starting gives other people permission to start too.
Showing Up
I don’t always have the solutions. I don’t always know how things will end. But I’ve learned that showing up and doing the work, even imperfect work, even partial work, matters more than waiting for the perfect plan.
When people come together to do the necessary work, when they choose to contribute despite insurmountable obstacles, that’s when you see the strength of what a team can actually be. That’s the potential of humanity.
I choose to believe in that potential. I choose to do the work. And when something needs to be done I’d rather be the person who grabbed the chainsaw than the person who stood in the basement waiting for someone else to go first.