Etched in Stone
Seeing “Ford” Carved Above a Columbus Street Made Me Wonder if Fear of Failure Is Why We Build Everything Temporary Now
Riding through Columbus a couple months ago, something stopped me in my tracks.
Not a flashy billboard.
Not some giant LED wall screaming for attention.
Not another plastic sign hanging off a building waiting to be replaced in five years.
It was stone.
An old building with the classic Ford logo carved directly into it high above the street. Not painted on. Not screwed in place. Not temporary.
Etched into the building itself.
And I stopped there longer than I probably should have thinking about that.
Because somebody made a decision, decades ago, to permanently tie their name to that structure. They believed enough in what they were building to carve it into rock for generations to see.
Think about that level of confidence.
Or maybe courage is the better word.
Today everything feels temporary.
Temporary branding.
Temporary jobs.
Temporary loyalty.
Temporary attention spans.
Temporary dreams.
We throw vinyl stickers over windows.
Hang glowing signs.
Rebrand every four years.
Tear buildings down instead of maintaining them.
Launch projects quietly because if they fail maybe nobody notices.
But those old builders?
They put their names in stone.
And that got me wondering something uncomfortable.
Did we stop building permanent things because we became afraid of permanent failure?
Because let’s be honest here.
What if Ford failed?
What if the company collapsed two years later? What if people laughed at them? What if the investment crashed and burned?
Then every single day for the next 80 years somebody would still walk past that building and see the name.
That’s a different level of commitment than posting a motivational quote online.
That’s risk.
Real risk.
And maybe that’s part of why so many people never fully commit to their ideas now. We want escape routes. We want the ability to quietly delete the website, change the logo, pivot the brand, erase the evidence, pretend it never happened.
But history doesn’t remember people who carefully avoided embarrassment.
It remembers the people willing to carve something into stone before they had guarantees.
That doesn’t mean every idea succeeds.
Some fail hard.
Some deserve to.
But I think there’s something broken in a culture where nobody wants to publicly stand beside what they build anymore.
Even our goals have become temporary.
Lose weight fast.
Get rich fast.
Go viral fast.
Build a following fast.
Nothing feels rooted.
Nothing feels built to outlive us.
And maybe that’s why those old buildings hit different.
They remind us there was a time when people built things expecting their grandchildren to walk past them someday.
Not just consumers. Family.
Not just traffic. Legacy.
I don’t know.
Maybe I’m overthinking an old Ford logo carved into a building in Columbus.
But I don’t think so.
Because I keep coming back to this question: