Build A Life Of Purpose: Cara Brookins And Rusty Guinn on JUST PRESS RECORD

When Cara Brookins thought life was spiraling out of control, as her living situation got progressively worse (and worse, and worse), she did the only logical thing a parent of 4 young children could do to help them reconstruct their lives before all hope is was irrefutably lost. She asked them, “Do you want to build a house?”

And, because they were kids, they gave her some mix of the “that sounds like a lot of work” and “what exactly do you mean, build a house” looks. Inspiring kids to do manual labor can feel a lot like herding cats, after all. But then she uttered the most magical phrase to any teen/teen-in-waiting in currently cramped quarters, “If we build it, you can have your own room.”

That’s how, fifteen years ago (circa 2009), Cara got 4 kids to head to YouTube, look up how to do everything from dig a foundation to pour cement counter tops, scribble it all onto post-it notes, and take their newfound internet skills to a job site to figure it out for reals. Within 9 months, they had built Inkwell Manor. It stands strong to this day.

When I read about the whole story in her international bestseller, Rise: How A House Built A Family, I kept finding flashing between wanting to cry in empathetic ache and wanting to celebrate in sympathetic joy. I ended up telling my wife about her story over dinner, and how this mix of the tangible and the symbolic, of building communities with our people, for our people, and in service to the higher purpose of lifting up other people, how it echoed everything we’ve been talking about in our own house for the past several years. I was inspired. It was a story I wanted to not just take in, but share.

It takes a village. Tangibly, in the work you do together, but also symbolically, in the names you give things. Mix these experiences together and you make a culture. Stretch it over time and you’ll write a history. Cast it over generations and a small group can change the world.

Plus, Cara’s story reminded me of another story—from Rusty Guinn that I’d picked up when I interviewed him for The Intentional Investor.

Rusty picked up his family, relocated to Connecticut, even though he swore he’d never do it, to buy and restore an apple orchard with his wife and kids. They didn’t use YouTube exclusively, but they did use AI to figure out which apple varieties would work best in combination for future purposes. They didn’t stop with tech either. The family reached deep into the soil around their own roots, from Rusty’s Texas upbringing to his wife’s extreme “I can figure it out” awareness, all to bind and intertwine themselves into a new New England community while branching out into a new chapter of life.

Rusty’s attachment to the tangible, to finding connectivity in working with his hands after a career focused solely on working with his brain, started expanding his mind too. His upcoming book, Outsourcing Consciousness: How Social Networks are Making Us Lose Our Minds (no pre-order yet, but here’s a sneak peak of the first and second chapters!), focuses on what modern technology has not just added, but taken away from us.

Most importantly, given Cara and Rusty’s experiences in connecting their family’s lives back to tangible values—with and without modern technologies—I knew they could teach all of us some lessons about how to make more meaning in our own lives as well as our community’s.

Here they are, meeting for the first time ever, unpacking each other’s stories in all the revelatory detail you could hope for if you were eavesdropping on two interesting people at the local bar, it’s Cara Brookins and Rusty Guinn on Just Press Record!