Kay:

Hey there, Questers! Thank goodness it’s Thursday. You’re getting closer to the weekend and we’re back with episode 414. We have a quote for you today from Justin Sewell and he says, “A few harmless flakes working together can unleash an avalanche of destruction.”

Shi:

This is some really intense imagery going on here, but no surprise that we’re getting intense imagery spoken word from somebody who is an accomplished voice-over artist and audiobook narrator, producer, and he’s even published science fiction of his own. So, Justin knows a thing or two about putting words together in order to invoke an emotion. That’s exactly what he’s doing here. Now, when we first hear destruction, it’s easy to go: “Ooh, Yeah! Red flag, red flag!” But if we think about it from a few different angles, we can see the power and the wisdom behind this quote here.

Kay:

Well, what I love about this quote and the power and wisdom is that it comes in tiny pieces aka the flakes! Now, what I think could help in this quote is, he says: “A few harmless, snowflakes working together can unleash an avalanche of destruction,” but I know he wants you to also think about some of those flakes in your life. But in this case, let’s think about an individual snowflake. Think about the harmful power of the individual snowflake. You can’t even make it sound threatening because snowflakes are beautiful and they’re unique and they’re icy and they go away if you just touch them and they’re so sweet. But if you put a million of those suckers together and you throw them at the top of a mountain and then you shake the mountain a little bit, anything in those snowflakes path is going bye-bye.

Shi:

Like he says, “a few harmless flakes”, just as Kay iterated there. You touch it, it melts, it dies. It’s on its own. It is completely harmless, and it also isn’t very impactful. But when it works together, not all of those snowflakes are distributed evenly over time for the next 15 hours. No storm usually comes in an hour or a half-hour, sometimes it’s a few hours. Or if they all went in different directions if it’s snowed up and sideways and down they wouldn’t be coordinated in a way that could produce what he is alluding to here as an avalanche or that giant ski run or that big load of snow that feeds the water into the river that helps keep the entire valley irrigated for the summer. A few harmless flakes will be harmless on their own, but working together, coming together they can create something that is so much bigger than the singular flake.

Kay:

Let’s think about this in terms of your habits. Does eating the extra cupcake on Saturday night, this one Saturday, is that going to throw off your habit-train of eating healthfully for the rest of your life? No, but would choosing that cupcake every other night of the week for a month have an effect on your health journey and goals? Probably. So, this is the idea of the snowflakes. The little, teeny, tiny micro habits, the atomic habits, if you will, from James Clear’s book that would add up over time, to create some extremely negative effects in your life.

Shi:

We think about how most of us want to build those micro habits and positive habits to help create some kind of positive change in our life. So, we do want to create an avalanche of destruction of our old habits or our sabotaging beliefs of our behaviors that are congruent with who we want to be. If we want to destroy that, we need to create an avalanche in order to do that and we do that through those few little harmless flakes, those few little choices building up over time in order to create something that can destroy the bad habit or the bad belief or the bad relationship or the bad feeling that you have that you want to get rid of.

Kay:

So, as a reminder of what Justin Sewell is telling us, “A few harmless flakes working together can unleash an avalanche of destruction.”

Shi:

Alright. Well, if that’s not enough for you to think on, we’ve got a Thoughtful Thursday Quest for you today. We want you to take five minutes to reflect on the fact that even the actions that feel insignificant can add up to create an avalanche of impact. Realizing this, what actions might you want to lean into more, and which might you want to avoid? Remember that many small habits add up to big significance. Are you ready? Avalanche with us now.

Kay & Shi:

Let’s quest!