Please Sweat the Small Things
Anyone who knows me, loosely or in detail, knows that I love Nebraska football. It may be true and an old saying, but I do bleed red.
The first game of the new season for Nebraska football started a week before almost every other school in the country against the University of Illinois---The effects of a pandemic and not being able to go play in Ireland. While there was great hope for a large jump in success this year over the past several years, the first game was by all accounts a disaster. Fumbles that were returned for touchdowns, catching punts in your own end zone for a safety, interceptions that were negated by dumb penalties, missed extra points, bad snaps not getting to the quarterback were all too often lapses that also served as reminders of the past few years. Nebraska lost 30 to 22.
While devastating from a football perspective, and also put into an appropriate sense a priority with a crazy world around us, I noted as I laid in bed thinking about the game that it was the small things that beat Nebraska. Basic 101 things. Snapping the ball correctly to the quarterback. Not fumbling. Stop getting dumb penalties. All of these are examples of simple mental errors that caused enormous damage to the efforts of the team.
Isn’t this the norm in any of our professional lives? Even our personal ones? It is the small things that really get you. The ones that “eat at you” affect our organizations from being successful. It’s a reminder that quality is more important than quantity. Getting it right a little more slowly is better than getting it wrong quickly. It’s the things we can control that make us most effective. In the end, if we do everything right and someone chooses to make a gift to another nonprofit, we’ve done our part. But it’s all those small mistakes that end up coming back to bite you. Next time you see a mistake on the football field or the basketball court or any other performance area, remind yourself that it’s possible that your small mistakes can be the difference between a win and loss in your world.
