In June the Pope blessed the final tower of the Sagrada Família, 144 years after the first stone.

Headlines everywhere called it finished.

The main entrance Gaudí designed doesn't exist yet. Right now it's a set of base pillars. Estimate is the 2030s.

Start with the height. That tower makes it the tallest church in the world, and Gaudí deliberately stopped it just short of Montjuïc, the hill overlooking Barcelona. He thought nothing people built should stand taller than what God made. He had the tallest church on earth in his hands and capped it below a hill.

He never saw it. Gaudí gave 43 years to the project and watched exactly one of its 18 towers go up before a tram killed him in 1926.

He didn't even start it. The idea came from a bookseller. The first architect quit. Gaudí was the replacement.

Asked what would happen after he was gone:

"I know that the personal taste of the architects that follow me will influence the works, but that doesn't bother me: I think the Temple will benefit from it. Great temples have never been the work of just one architect."

He meant it, and it got tested. Ten years later his workshop burned in the Civil War and his models were smashed. His collaborators dug out the fragments and kept building from them.

And here's the part I can't stop thinking about.

The last piece, a staircase up to that missing entrance, would mean demolishing buildings where people live now. Some residents are suing. Their argument is that the staircase was never Gaudí's idea.

Nobody can settle it. The original plans burned in 1936.

A hundred years on, people are arguing about what he wanted with the evidence gone, exactly as he predicted. He just didn't get to see how uncomfortable that would be.

Everyone building right now is optimizing for the next quarter. Ship first. Own it. Get your name on it. I catch myself doing it too.

Gaudí ran the opposite play. Enormous ambition, no possessiveness. He designed something he knew he'd never see, left instructions for people he'd never meet, and told them in advance to make it their own.

Ambition, creativity, and humility make a potent mix. You mostly see the first two.

What would you build differently if you knew someone else would finish it?