Your Credentials Are Not Your Ceiling: How Belief Built One of the World's Greatest Domes

I peeked out the tiny window on the top floor of our 15th-century Airbnb and saw the Santa Maria del Fiore from a distance. At the time, I didn’t even know the mystery behind it.

For nearly 125 years, the Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence sat unfinished. A massive, gaping hole of sky where the dome was supposed to be. The dream was to build the largest dome in the world, except no one knew how to do it. The standard construction method meant the bricks would collapse under their own weight before the structure could support itself.

The leaders of Florence started the project anyway, trusting that God would provide the person to complete it. For over a century, the greatest architects and engineers in the world looked at that open ceiling and had nothing. It was considered impossible.

Then Filippo Brunelleschi, a goldsmith and sculptor, walked in.

Brunelleschi had never built a building in his life, much less the world’s largest cathedral dome. By every conventional measure, he was not qualified. And yet he stood in front of the commission and said: I know how to do this. I am the one.

Did he know for certain it would work? No, he didn’t. But he believed he was the only one with the method that would work.

How did someone have that level of confidence without the experience?

Without even being an architect?

He didn’t believe his background was a limitation. He didn’t inherit the city’s story about what was and wasn’t possible.

He held a picture of the finished dome. What he believed about himself was larger than 100 years of failed experts and the consensus of an entire city.

The method he developed was impossibly elegant. Herringbone brickwork. Instead of laying bricks in the standard way, which would cause the weight to collapse inward, he laid them at an angle.

The herringbone pattern redirected the weight circularly. The dome held itself up.

For centuries after it was built, no one, even modern architects and engineers, could fully explain how he did it. It was considered a great mystery.

He even falsified sections of the masonry on the surface so that anyone who tried to replicate his method would fail. It took researchers until 1983 to begin unlocking how he actually pulled it off.

I stood at the foot of that dome for a long time.

I kept thinking about the people standing under their own impossible ceiling right now, held there by stories that sound like:

We’ve always done it this way.

That’s not what we’re known for.

We tried that before.

That’s not realistic for an organization our size.

Those are old messages. Old bricks laid in the standard way. And the standard way, as Brunelleschi knew, will cause the whole thing to collapse inward.

Don’t believe them.

Who do you want to be in this moment?

Believe in that.

Walk into the room with what you know about yourself and how you think differently.

That’s the herringbone.

To your audacity,

Sarah 

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