I had an unusual thought this morning over coffee and checking emails.  Having just spent months creating, writing, and working with a team of people to develop a new website for the American Society of Estate Liquidators® at www.ASELonline.com, I am keenly aware how each individual member of the team worked together, as a vital piece of the whole, in order to come up with a successful end result.  One person specializes in strategic writing, design, flow, another had graphic abilities, another technical, and more.  It was a vision I had, but this team came together to find a way to create it.

It really takes an entire team to make a project succeed, like exposing the back of an antique mantle clock and viewing how all the gears and cogs work together in sync.  I’ve always secretly wondered how the gears all worked together.  As imperfect humans, with myself at the top of the list, we do make mistakes.  Sometimes, many mistakes.  We may not communicate clearly to the teammates working on another part of the project.  Our brains work differently, and yet, we expect our teammates to understand what we mean, as if they can read our minds.

While each of us has our own vision for their portion, when you put all the parts together, it usually needs to be tweaked until the best version is attained for the whole project.  Such is life … always a work in progress and always with the help of others.

Why is it that we tend to only think about our part of the team?  We concentrate so heavily on what is our responsibility that we fail to see what the others are doing and the tremendous efforts they make.  No single part or component would work successfully without the others, just like the gears in that mantle clock.

Developing the website taught me two things:

• each of us has special gifts and talents, and
• when put together with other people’s gifts and talents, we can create something marvelous.

But our part alone is just a piece laying there, a simple gear that won’t turn because there are no other gears or cogs to drive it into motion.  The lone piece would simply not work unless put together with someone else’s piece.

Our vision towards almost anything in life really needs to be extended to include the value and work of someone else’s skills and ability to see and imagine.  This is difficult to master.  When  working together, each brings to the table something that we can’t contribute by ourselves.

Last week I was in an estate documenting for an appraisal.  When the heir saw me in front of the mantle examining the mantle clock, they quickly approached to tell me how old and valuable it was.  “It is certainly old,” I said, “but there is a problem.  It doesn’t work because some of the gears have fallen off and are missing.  If the clock doesn’t work, even due to a tiny piece missing, the value will fall significantly.”

Little did I realize that a few days later, that statement would apply directly to me.  I came to understand how our special team became my gears and cogs, driving me forward toward a long-dreamed vision.  Sometimes all it takes is one tiny little piece to make it all work flawlessly.

©2015 The Estate Lady®