Rock Tumbler:
What my favorite childhood toy taught me about life.
When I was a little boy, one of my favorite toys was a rock tumbler polishing kit.
The kit included a mechanized tumbling drum, some starter rocks and a couple of pouches of different polishing grits. It looked just like this one:
You took the rough and nasty looking rocks, added some water and then the polishing grit (most coarse first) and then let the rocks tumble for over 24 hours in a rotating drum that was louder than a diesel semi using the jake brake. You’d pull out the rocks, clean off the grit and then repeat the process with an finer grit. This process would happen 4 or 5 times and at the end you’d have the is incredibly beautiful polished rock.
I believe that learning to focus on your dreams, striving to leave average behind, is a process a whole lot like rock tumbling.
First you’ve got to deal with the coarse grit and really polish (grind) off the rough edges.
- Discover your passions.
- Simplify your Focus.
- Learn new skills.
- Build new relationships.
This is a noisy and sometimes painful process, but without the rough grind…no future polish is possible. It’s this stage of the process where it’s easy to quit because there’s a lot of resistance and not much visual progress (I’m right in the middle myself and it’s very tempting to quit right here). But the little boy in me remembers the finished product and that keeps me moving into the next steps…
After you’ve got your edges removed you continually have to refine each step of the process. Iterating over and over again to finally end up with that gemlike quality that is the dream that you’re chasing.
One of my arch-nemesis words comes into play in this part of the process: perseverance!
We’ve got to put the time in, let the process do it’s work and: keep. going. forward.
It’s not an easy process. However, like the average looking rock that went into the process, there’s a gemstone inside each of us waiting to be unleashed!
What are some coarse polish items that you can get started on this week?
