|
Today's
Meditation:
I've known
many people who don't take the small jobs at all seriously
because they're, well, small. They mistake the scope
of the job for the importance of the job, and thus end up
making some pretty severe mistakes-- especially when
several small jobs add up to a larger job. Putting
the hoses away is a small job that is part of the larger
job of getting the home ready for winter, and it's very
easy for one of those jobs, if done poorly, to have a
drastic effect come winter.
I
like to try to give my best to everything that I do,
mostly because I've learned the lesson of what happens
when I don't do so. I've had to re-do too many jobs
in my life that I didn't do well enough the first time,
and I've had to fix damage done by my first poor job,
also. Fortunately, this hasn't happened tons of
times, but enough to help me learn the lesson I needed to
learn: take the small jobs seriously, and do them as
well as I can.
As
Dale says, when the small things are done well, the bigger
things tend to take care of themselves. I find that
I rarely have to do huge jobs when I take care of the
small things when they pop up-- as long as I take care of
them well. Some things can't be helped, of course--
sometimes the roof simply has to be replaced-- but
for the most part we can make our lives much easier in the
long run by taking care of small tasks in the short
run. If we don't let things build up into huge jobs,
then those huge jobs just never become necessary.
I
also like to do small jobs well because I like to take
pride in the work that I do-- even the small and seemingly
insignificant tasks. I worked part-time as a
handyman at a residence hall for several years, and when I
left the place was in much better shape than it had been
when I started. And that was mostly because of the
many small jobs that I had done over the years, and the
fact that I did my best to do them all well. I
didn't want people to notice how bad of shape the building
was in while I was working there, because I wanted to take
pride in my work-- no matter how small the jobs seemed to
be.
|
