Your Concrete Will Crack. Plan for It.
Don’t prevent cracks. Guide them.
You’re reading Playbooks & Priorities, a newsletter about working, parenting, and working parenthood.
Four years ago, I expanded our patio. Like many first-time homeowners, I found a contractor through word-of-mouth. Minimal vetting, a few photos—seemed good enough. How hard could concrete be?
He poured it that spring. One glorious summer, we had a perfect patio: smooth, pristine, exactly what we wanted. Then winter hit. By the next summer, our beautiful patio had become a spider's web of cracks. Every line mocked the money we’d spent. I’d have been better off stuffing that cash under a mattress.
This past summer, fed up, we tore it out. During the quote for the replacement, John from Seasonal Concepts mentioned “control joints.” He noted the indents in the concrete.
“Why?” I asked.
“The concrete is going to crack,” he said, matter-of-factly. “You need to give it space to crack.”
His explanation was both obvious and revolutionary: If you don’t tell concrete where to crack with those planned expansion joints, it will crack anywhere it pleases. And it rarely pleases you.
Life's Unseen Fault Lines
That conversation stuck. It’s a perfect metaphor for so much of life. We plan as if failure isn’t an option, as if our carefully laid plans will remain pristine forever. We optimize for the best case, then act shocked when reality throws in its own expansion joints in all the wrong places.
My first contractor assumed that good concrete doesn’t crack. John understood all concrete cracks.
The real question is: Do you plan for it, or let it surprise you?
This isn’t just about construction. It’s the fundamental difference between brittle and resilient systems. When launching a business, we project steady growth. We don't factor in a key employee quitting, a major client pivoting, or a global pandemic derailing everything. The concrete will crack, but we leave no space. We plot linear career paths, ignoring industry disruption, economic downturns, or our own evolving interests. We build rigid concrete slabs instead of flexible systems with built-in breaking points.
We design perfect organizations with clear org charts. We fail to anticipate communication breakdowns, informal power structures, or how a brilliant strategy will meet the chaos of implementation. Again, no expansion joints.
Embrace the Breakage
John's wisdom isn't pessimism. It's an acknowledgment: stress and change are inevitable. The smartest response is to plan for them, not pretend they won't happen.
In concrete, it’s control joints. In life, it means building buffers, redundancies, and graceful failure modes.
Finances: Emergency funds, diversified income.
Parenting: Extra clothes in the diaper bag, because blowouts will happen—inevitably at the worst public moment.
Software: Error handling and graceful degradation from day one. APIs will fail, databases will max out, and users will break everything imaginable.
Product: Roadmaps built on the assumption that half your ideas are wrong. Plan for rapid iteration and kill switches for duds.
Sales: A pipeline 2-3x your target. Deals collapse—budgets cut, champions leave, competitors swoop.
Business: Multiple revenue channels, loosely coupled systems.
Relationships: Difficult conversations before they're critical, and space for people to change.
The goal isn't to prevent all cracks—impossible. It's to ensure that when things crack (and they will), they don't destroy the whole structure.
Where Will Your Concrete Crack?
My patio's most expensive lesson wasn't about concrete. It was about the cost of ignoring known unknowns. I knew I was inexperienced. Knew I was hiring with minimal diligence. Knew projects go wrong. Yet I proceeded as if none of it applied to me. The second time, we didn’t buy better concrete. We hired a contractor who understood concrete cracks and designed the system accordingly.
Now, planning anything significant, I ask: Where is this concrete going to crack? What stress points can I predict, even if I can't prevent them? How can I design controlled failure points instead of letting random failures decimate the whole system?
Sometimes the most crucial question isn't, "How do I make this perfect?" but rather, "When this breaks, how do I want it to break?" Your concrete will crack. The only question is whether you’ll give it space to crack where you want it to, or let it crack where it wants to.
Leave space for the cracks.
The Extra Point
The Extra Point is a segment where I highlight a brand or product I’ve tried recently with an honest review. We’ll try it and see if it scores…
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