This week’s natural disasters in Texas and Oklahoma remind us about the power of true kindness and thoughtfulness. I watch the videos of countless neighbors helping each other search for loved ones and family memories from a pile of rubble. That it is not about the color of your skin, your sexual orientation or if your democrat or republican. It’s about being human. Loving one another. And doing something “little” everyday.
Recently, I read “The Power of Small:Why Little Things Make All the Difference”. This was a great book enforcing one of my biggest pet peeves, do something nice for someone whenever you can.
The book gives some great examples on how small can make a big difference. Let me share one of the stories:
• Don traveled to Morocco and was sadden by how many of their disabled poor had mobility issues and could never afford a wheel chair, like you’d get here. These people were dragging themselves across the street to do daily chores to survive. Don went home and came up with an idea for an inexpensive wheel-chair that could be made for only a few dollars and would give the disabled poor in third world countries the chance at mobility. Jim’s idea turned into Free Wheelchair Mission. To date he has donated over 670,000 chairs to eighty-six developing countries and hopes to reach twenty million. This is just one of thousands of stories of how small ideas can make a big difference.
Why am I telling you this. Because I believe small is really big. Doing little things in your community can make a huge impact on the world around you. And if everyone started making little changes, the world would be a much better place.
Gregg and I try to live by this motto. We spend a lot of our free time volunteering at a variety of places or doing fundraiser through the studio to help places like Children’s Home Society, Alachua County Humane Society and Habitat For Humanity. Our donation of a truck load of supplies like dish soap, towels and bleach, gives the Humane Society the chance to rescue one more animal before it meets it’s demise. And to us, that is important. Jeter, our dog, is a rescue and we could not imagine life without our little guy.
So now you are saying, I don’t know where to start! Easy, peasy. Start by letting someone in to traffic at rush hour or by holding the door for a mother with 3 kids or by buying the homeless guy outside the resturaunt a sandwich to go and giving it to him when you leave. How do these things make a difference, well, the person you let in to rush hour traffic maybe a med student running 5 minutes late for their shift and by getting there on time, they saved a life on their rotation at the hospital.
Here is the thing you need to realize with small, a lot of the small things you do you don’t see the impact. You’ll never know that the med student saved a life. When you do small things, you need to know the impact is there.
But if impact is what you need, realize there is a lot of small you can do that you will see an impact. Volunteer at a hospital once a month, clean up a neighbors yard whose been sick, go work at your local soup kitchen. All these little things have impact you can see. And it matters, because a lot of LITTLE things will eventually make a BIG difference.
