This week we are going to kick off a series inspired by Legos.  We’ll start by reflecting on building and the importance of both the details and big picture.

I have always been a fan of Legos.  When I was a little kid, I would play with the basic building blocks for hours making robots, houses, and airplanes.  When I was a teenager, I had a room filled with various Lego technic cars and motorcycles, Star Wars ships, and more.  You can imagine how excited I was when I received a super awesome Lego set for Christmas.  I put on some great music and went to work building.  The picture to the left is my work in progress.  I’m guessing you wouldn’t have been able to tell what it is on its own, because you are so zoomed into one section of the build.  Luckily for me, I had the picture on the box showing me the final product and the instructions that could get me there.  Finished product is the image on the right 😉

What does this have to do with anything?  This story is about taking time to understand how the details ladder up to the bigger picture.  It’s a great metaphor for pausing for a moment to step out of our small world to look at the larger world around us to ensure the details and big picture are connecting.  Do you ever get lost in your own small world?  I know I do.  Sometimes this happens at work.  I get so lost in the day-to-day details of keeping the train running that I don’t pause to look at a map to ensure the train is going in the right direction.  This happens in life outside of work too.  I get so lost in the day-to-day grind that I don’t realize that the things I’m doing every day in the moment may not be leading me to be the version of myself that I want to be.

This story is also a metaphor for being able to take a big picture vision and operationalize it.  If Lego didn’t break down the Batman portrait into steps, I would not have been able to build it.  How often have you had a large goal and not been able to figure out how to make it a reality?  That happens to me, and it’s usually been because I didn’t take enough time to translate my goals to specific actions.

The challenge: How are you leveraging and connecting the big pictures and the details? 

Have a jolly good day,

Andrew Embry