I’m sure that you’ve heard or read this story but it is a reminder of how we neglect our own backyards, be it our customer base, our team members, our skills and talents, our partners, our families or our communities.
Let me paraphrase the story for you.
There was a guy in South Africa who had a farm. It was a rotten farm, hard to work, bad pasture, hard to plough because of rocks everywhere and all that sort of stuff. After working at it for years, he finally walked off the property. He just gave it away.
He went looking for diamonds and never found any… died a very poor and broken man.
The guy that took the farm over started clearing the rocks so he could properly prepare the pasture for farming. As he worked he discovered that one of the rocks looked a bit unusual so he put it on his mantelpiece.
A bit later he had a visitor who noticed the rock on the mantelpiece. “Let me take a look at that rock”, said the visitor, who happened to know something about diamonds.
Yes, you’ve guessed it!
That rock turned out to be a diamond and, even more remarkably, the whole property was literally covered in diamonds. Those “rocks” on the farm were diamonds.
The farmer had diamonds in his own backyard.
And most of us have diamonds in the backyard. But we race off in a million directions looking for diamonds everywhere. Yet, if we stayed at home and stuck to our knitting, we would have found the diamonds in our own back yards. (Sorry about the mixed metaphors!)
What and where are the acres of diamonds in your backyard?
Let’s give credit to the man who originally told the story and read about him and see it in full here.
Recent Comments