I noticed something neat on the way to a photo shoot this morning. Our snowstorm has just about all melted away but there were still these huge icicles hanging off the cliffs. Now this is not particularly rare, it happens every time it snows and many times when it only rains in the winter. But it is kinda remarkable.
ok, so not the best quality images out there – give me a break these were shot from the car going 68, er, I mean 55 mph. I wasn’t the one driving, BTW.
The reason I say it is remarkable is because of how it begins. Little bitty raindrops! And the other reason is their lasting power – long after all snow is gone these massive ice daggers are still around.
How often remarkable things in our lives are built just a small piece at a time.
Take good habits, for example. You don’t just create a good habit out of the blue one day, it’s developed through the small step of a good decision over and over again. Pretty soon all of those good decisions become something remarkable. Something that’s long lasting. (Bad habits work the same way, BTW).
Or marketing. Great marketing doesn’t (usually) just happen overnight, you know, you wake up and everybody knows who you are. It’s little things over and over again. The easy way would be sink a bunch of money into an ad campaign and hope you get some results. Easy come easy go. Long lasting marketing success comes a little at a time, one relationship at a time, one happy client at a time, one successful message at a time. Yes, it’s hard – it’s the constant “drip” of small successes, just like drops of rain all put together make the giant icicles. But when you do it right, it lasts long after all the “snow” is gone! I think of the fly by night wannabe’s as the snow – easy come easy go. Not who I want to be. You?
And raising kids. You don’t sit down one day and blast your kids with all the good parenting under the sun and then ignore them the rest of the time, and hope it sticks! It’s the daily grind of one good experience after another that sticks, that lasts. Notice I said good experience, not necessarily pleasant experience. It’s the showing them, and teaching them, the correcting them, and making sacrifices for them, and loving them over and over that molds them into the great people they will be.
I guess my point is you don’t build something great at once, it’s all the little things put together that really make something remarkable!