3 Takeaways From the Snowman

We got a few inches of snow here is Massachusetts.  One thing about the snow though was that it was perfect snowman snow.  Do you know what I mean?  The snow that just sticks.  It’s great for snowballs as well.  In the morning, Sara and I were out shoveling out the cars.  I think Sara got bored or something because she disappeared for a little while.  I thought nothing of it until I heard her ask for help.  I notice that she is trying to push a 3 foot snowball up the hill in the backyard.  So I got to help.  We then proceeded to push this snowball across the yard until we hit a problem, actually two problems.  We got caught on a rock and the sheer size of the snowball made it impossible to move, it was about 5 feet tall now.  We each preceded to start a couple of more snowballs on our own to make a snowman.  Unfortunately, our individual ones got too big for each of us and we had no way to move these things around to get them close enough to stack not even talking about how to stack them.  Needless to say, no snowman.  In my failures, I did learn 3 keys to building success.

1. Paths You don’t need to recreate the wheel.  In fact, Sara and I learned that it’s best to stay on the path we know, the grass.  What I mean by that is when we were rolling across the lawn we got clean snow.  As soon as we got off the grass we started picking up dirt, leaves and crap.  Yes we even picked up some dog crap ( we have dogs).  So that was pretty nasty but at least it was frozen.
2. Leverage There is a lot more to it than just you or me.  You need some leverage.  When these snowballs got big you can’t push from the top.  Sometimes you needed to push from different angles just to keep the thing moving.  Then as it got bigger we need to help each other.  So not only did I have to leverage the way in which I was trying to move this snowball but I also needed to leverage the help (relationship) I had in building the snowman.
3. Persistence This is were I failed.  You are going to run into obstacles and you can either overcome them or quit.  Now when our snowballs got to big to move we went looking for a sled and some ideas on how to move them.  Something happened too that really hurt.  I ran out of time.  I had to be somewhere so I couldn’t look for the sled and in fact couldn’t finish working on the snowman.  Life happens, be ready for it.

I guess we’ll have to wait for the next good snow to make Frosty come alive.

Tagged as: building, Business, lessons, snowman