Yesterday the Precision Solutions team gathered from all over the country to enjoy a baseball game between the Colorado Rockies and the San Francisco Giants. The game was awesome – Rockies won! But something happened after the game that, while unnoticed by most, it really impacted me.
Leaving the game in line with thousands of fans was at times a crush of humanity. Much of the time the crowd was easy enough to navigate but at a couple of places the group compressed as we filtered through some concrete barriers, purportedly to sift the group before crossing a small bridge. At one of these crosswalks, a young boy – maybe 5 or 6 years old – bounced from one side of a barrier to the other to try to cross to the other side. But there were too many people crushed into the area for him to get through the gaps. (I’m sure parents were somewhere nearby, but was I wasn’t really paying attention to anything but what happened next.)
After a couple quick bounces to the right, to the left, and back to the right, this kid had had enough. He wanted to keep moving forward and there was absolutely no room for him to squeeze by on the left or right. So being not quite as tall as the barrier itself, this dinky little kid reached up, grabbed the top of the barrier and pulled himself up to the top and over.
The immediate lesson that this brought to mind is that even if our problems are so big we can’t even see the other side, and we can’t see a way to get around, there’s nothing that says we can’t conquer it by taking a different – and possibly more difficult – approach. But the more I thought about it, the bigger lesson for me was here was a kid who didn’t even think twice about the size of the barrier. He had his mind set on the other side, and didn’t consider for a moment the ‘impossibility’ of the attempt. Furthermore, he never seemed to question that he had the strength to do it; he just did it. Finally, this kid didn’t know anyone was watching. He wasn’t doing it to amaze me or anyone else. He had a goal, he owned it, and he made it happen.
As we’ve been growing Precision Solutions, it seems a new wall comes up each time we knock down the old ones. I’m going to remember that dinky little kid as walls come into our path. If going around isn’t an option, I’ll reach up, grab the top of the barrier, and put that wall behind me.