Small Things

All right, so here we are. It is the last Wednesday of July, and for Wednesday Workshop, I thought I would talk to you about a quote I read by Martin Luther King Jr. He said, “If I cannot do great things, I can do small things in a great way.” I really do like that an awful lot because I think that sometimes the way we get to greatness is by pursuing and being diligent and consistent in all of the small things.

If you want to be great, then you’ve got to practice the smaller stuff.

You have to do well at the smaller things. Sometimes it’s the small stuff that gets noticed the most. I’ve actually taught a whole class and PowerPoint wrapped around doing the small things. Looking at the small things. Noticing the small stuff. For all of us, as we’re doing security when it comes to working on a site and working with a client, it’s sometimes the smallest of things that get noticed the most.

I’ll give you an example. I’ll give you a couple of examples. Number one, I had a young man working in Seattle for us. This was a number of years ago. He was brand new to security. I taught him how to do it, I explained the why behind the how, and he’s walking down the stairwell. We’ve been on this client’s job site for about two weeks. And I get an email from the manager. Because this young man, while doing his stairway patrols like he was taught, he found puppy poo. Somebody’s dog didn’t make it to the bathroom, and so in the steps in the stairwell is dog poop.

He was carrying a plastic bag like I had taught him, and he picks up the puppy poo. And he bags it. He documents that he picked it up and threw it away. He didn’t think anything of it. And he went about his duties, continuing to work hard. The client called, and first, it was the maintenance supervisor. Next, it was the vice president of the corporation. Both of them said this: “We’ve never had a security company willing to pick up puppy poo.”

And I said, “Well get used to it because that’s how we work. That’s how we operate because we believe in being valuable because nothing less will do.”

So we moved on. That young man ended up getting a 50-cent raise. That young man also got two movie tickets to Regal Cinemas for him and a friend to go watch a movie because we reward people for doing even the small things and not expecting a big reward, but they get rewarded because we care about people who are looking out and being valuable because nothing else will do. It’s those small things, and I could go on and on and teach a whole class on this subject because we’ve had dozens of officers over the dozens of years do just that.

So as you’re moving through your Wednesday and the rest of this week, remember to be valuable because nothing else will do. And remember that even if you’re thinking to yourself, “Well, I don’t know if I’ll ever do anything great.” Well, if you do the small things in a great way, you might just find out that in the end, you have done something really great. We’ve had clients say that we have saved them hundreds of thousands of dollars by just noticing and paying attention to the small things. So keep doing the small thing in a great way, as Dr. Martin Luther King said, and you’ll find yourself, perhaps, maybe just maybe doing something great and not even realizing it.

All right, God bless you guys. I’ll see you next week. Remember, as I’ve said not to think five times almost in this video alone, our core purpose is to be valuable because nothing less will do. I’ll see you guys next week.