We’ve been programmed to expect big things, instantly, all the time. We love the story of an ‘overnight success’. We skip over the paragraph or two which talks about the 9 years of building or the 3 prior failed attempts. And so we are upset when our first try doesn’t work, goes slow, or doesn’t look like we want it to. We’ve been ‘told’ it’s easy. We didn’t expect hard work and rejection. And so we give up.

One of the reasons for the celebrity, the overnight success business story, the cult of the individual is that vision sells. Or so we’ve been told. Sell the vision and the people will follow. We sell certainty, even though nothing is ever certain. And we seek out the easy turn key solution to fix our problem in the short term. We have created a culture of fire fighters without fire prevention. We jump from one thing to the next to the next, repeating the same things.

Visions, goals, aspirations are good, necessary, and fabulous. But how do we teach ourselves, our kids, our culture to celebrate the little things? To see failure or things going slowly as something to celebrate because we are learning? To celebrate that one other person join you on the journey of a change you are seeking to create?

For me, the last few weeks have been frustrating as I wasn’t seeing the change I wanted. But then a colleague reminded me, I have yet to create the awareness of the need for change first. I skipped that step. Assumed people saw the world as I did. I wanted to jump to action, to the fun bit.

There is job security in being a fire fighter when people play with matches. And maybe people haven’t connected playing with matches to the fires they find themselves in all the time.

Do the hard work. Celebrate it. Celebrate the little things. Nothing big is ever built without many little parts.

Photo by Esri Esri