The little things

The little things take us either…

Towards Syntropy

Small acts of kindness and generosity repeated.

A few words on paper every single day for a year becomes a book.

One step at a time towards the life we yearn for.

A tiny consistent payment relieves a debt.

Curated habits cultivated to become mainframes of existence.

Speaking true, speaking steady, speaking brave.

Towards Entropy

Stepping over a charge between you and another when it is so little and seemingly insignificant.

Not holding another to account the very first time.

Ignoring the first small lie from anyone.

Ignoring the small lie we tell ourselves.

Thinking that we do not need profound connection, communication, context setting and agreements before we commence a project with others.

Eating or drinking that one small extra. Repeatedly.

Scrolling social media for 5 minutes which becomes 60.

Life begins with a little thing. A seed. We get to choose, every single day if we nurture it towards Entropy or Syntropy.

Which little things do we activate?

Do we choose to carry the burden of charged energy, malice, revenge, winning over…as a daily life condition?

Or is a choice of forgiveness, no matter how big the crime committed, the path of our freedom?

Is the choice to have the hard small conversation, the one we fear the most, when the charge is small? Or wait till it escalates into a tidal wave of emotion?

Do we want to spend our time cleaning up after we have stepped over the little things?

Do we want to get twisted in the metal of disagreements, misunderstanding, and violence, because we stepped over the first warning, the first decay, the first voice raised?

Do we say yes to our own pollution? Do we become victims to our own illusion of powerlessness? Not in one fell swoop, but one little micro agreement at a time?

Is a daily diet of sugar worth the disease in your not so distant future?

Inconsequential we might say.

Not worth consideration.

Unable to be changed.

Why bother?

This is the place of our own diminishment. This is how we get a world of lies, corruption, hypocrisy. On our watch, through our failure to act or speak.

It is past time we, little individuals like you and me, took responsibility for a world we agreed to.

Look the beast in the eye. “I” contributed to this through my silence and my failure to act on the little things.

Only when we acknowledge we have contributed can we become leaders of change, no longer caught in the helpless, hopeless, victim trap.

This week I was working with a team bringing an idea to life. While everything they were doing was business-as-usual, the entire conversation had landmines of future explosion littered everywhere.

Not attending to the little things.

The basics of Syntropic World were stepped over — you can read more about these here in the Ebook, “How to create a Syntropic Enterprise”

The little things…These become the big things that either bring us towards entropy or syntropy.

Why are we gathered to do the thing we are gathered to do? What is the purpose? Not as some amorphous, hard to pin down thing, but stated as clearly as the chemistry of water: H2O. All ambiguity stripped out.

We are here to do ‘X”, for this purpose. Everyone on the team answers the question of purpose in the same way. If we are going North everyone knows we are going North, and why North is the direction. Everyone is equally enrolled in North and the purpose of our choosing North.

How are we doing this? What is the Source Idea animating action? The Source Idea being the idea at the point of arrival that had someone say YES, we are doing THIS!

What is the Pattern Integrity of the Source Idea? The values, particularities, non-negotiable elements, textures, branding? Everyone working on the thing knows the Pattern Integrity — not as some cute rote learning jumble of words, but because it is embedded and entwined in every single act, every decision, every design, every colour and style of everything done.

Who is the steward of the idea? Or stewards? The idea arrived for whom, when, and in what colours and flavours?

What is the lineage of the idea? No idea is ours alone. Just as the idea and the steward are two not one. Do we honour lineage or do we own it as if it is a possession? In so doing we eliminate all the significant contributions that have come before. Like colonial squatters, we take, stake, claim and in so doing diminish and disrespect the gorgeous contributions that made this idea and time possible.

How do we agree to be together, working to bring the idea to life? How do we stay in the conversation of the relationship? Stay in the conversation of money, ownership, value, equity, income, provisioning, input, offering, expectation of return and reward?

These are the little things. I write about them often. Speak about them daily. Repeat them again and again. You might have heard me on this many times.

Attending to the little things we get big things. Attending to kindness we get kindness. Attending to integrity we get integrity.

Attending to care of the precious human relationships that are holding the shape for our idea to be born as healthily as possible, we get synergy.

Either this, or spending our days fixing, worrying, leaking energy to manage dysfunction.

Attend to the little things towards Syntropy.

One small step at a time, build a life worth living, a business worth loving. Relationships that nourish and mature as we mature through bringing our little idea into the world.

This is how we change the world, little things done with exquisite integrity, repeated every single day.