President Kennedy on a visit to NASA asked a sweeper what he was doing. The sweeper said, “Sir, I’m going to put a man on the moon!”
I asked my friend who is a very successful executive at one of the world’s top management consulting firms what she was doing. She said “Oh, I’m doing the same crap again – making power point slides and creating excel sheets.”
Now i’m not President Kennedy and my friend is certainly not a sweeper (albeit a weeper!). A lot of us are guilty of disparaging our own work. We look at others with envy and ourselves with disgust.
But the following cannot be emphasised enough. Every single person counts. You count. I count. All of us count. However small and insignificant it might seem. Just like the butterfly’s wing flaps that could have implications for a tornado someplace else. And if someone cannot appreciate this, then it is their problem.
And while small is important, It doesn’t mean that we should always stay that way and never aim high. Quite the contrary. We should keep the loftiest goals possible. And do everything possible to attain them.
Let us not entertain thoughts like “Oh, but no one is indispensable, so I’m replaceable”, or “the show will anyway go on, so I have no value” etc. etc. etc. Because that logic is used for putting a ceiling on someone’s ego. Not here in the pursuit of success!