Kay:

Hello there, Questers, it’s July 27th and this is episode 407. We have a simple quote for you today from a simple but incredibly accomplished fellow Mr. Henry Ford. Henry Ford was an American industrialist, business magnate, and founder of the Ford Motor Company. We are both proud Ford drivers, and chief developer of the assembly line technique of mass production, which changed the industrial age as we know it. Henry Ford tells us, “Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs.”

Shi:

Well, isn’t this just a little bite-size of a quote that gives us a mouthful of advice here? We’ve got 10 words and I look at this quote and at first, I kind of get angry at it because it’s so true and yet I allow myself to get so involved, worked up, intimidated by the immensity and enormity of projects and work and circumstances. I mean, you guys all know the pandemic year that we came through. Every individual had different, incredibly huge new life shifts happen for them through that and when we look at a quote like this in the face of that, if we could just remember to break things down into small jobs, into small steps, into small lists then it’s not particularly hard. Now it might be hurtful, and we always say, the squeeze still hurts. When life squeezes you, it still hurts but it’s not necessarily hard if we understand the small steps we have to take in order to make it better or get through it.

Kay:

One of the things that I love about this quote is that it’s coming from the guy who invented assembly lines.

Shi:

Yeah.

Kay:

So, think about an assembly line. An assembly line is put together in order to have one person take on one small part of the assembly and then the next person takes on the next small part. So, you only have one person in charge of one small part, but then you have 100 people all working together on a 100-part car and before you know it, it only takes you one day to build a car instead of five days for two people to build a car or whatever that looks like. So, the assembly line that was born from Henry Ford’s beautiful big brain really, I think the actual thing itself kind of comes down to this quote of dividing something really hard into smaller jobs.

Shi:

Well, it makes the quote so much more legitimate when you think about it in that way. Here’s a guy who didn’t just espouse this philosophical knowledge. This is precisely what he did.

Kay:

To change an industry.

Shi:

He invented an industry. It wasn’t even anything yet and people knew that this concept of the motor could get translated to a personal vehicle. But trying to take that off of the train track and into the course and buggy roads was so incredibly foreign and everyone in that day would have said, it’s not only hard, it’s impossible and Henry did it. He made it possible and he’s telling us here in this quote that we can do the same thing with anything in our life that looks insurmountable, that looks hard, that maybe isn’t even an industry yet but if you break it down into small jobs, you can achieve it.

Kay:

One of the places that Shila and I see this come into effect in a little bit of a poisonous way is when somebody looks at the entirety of a world problem and doesn’t see the world problem being solved in the timeline that might make them feel more comfortable. So, the words no one is doing anything about this problem start to come into play. Then, oftentimes, we find people going down just huge roads, trying to take on insurmountable projects because they want to solve a world problem which if they just looked at this particularly hard problem and divided it into small jobs, they could see maybe there’s a chance to end racism in my community. Maybe there’s a chance to help the homeless guy down the street. Maybe there’s a chance to lift some kids out of poverty two neighborhoods down, instead of focusing on the world problem at large and maybe getting overwhelmed in the process.

Shi:

Look, we’re with you. We want solutions for some of these major world problems and it hurts our hearts to see what’s going on. But the piece of advice here is to say that likely there are already initiatives going on. If you broke it down in small steps, if you were truly articulate with what those steps should be, you would start with a step of research and a step that would show you who is doing what. You do a state of the union because you were addressing it methodically. You’re not going to just whale on the wall of this is hard and it’s emotional and big. You’re going to divide it into small jobs and bring that logical brain to it. This is exactly the time to do those things and then you’ll find the right path for you, and you might see that there’s an opportunity for you to solve that problem right down your own road. So, to remind you of what Henry Ford tells us, “Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs.”

Kay:

Alrighty friends, today, we have a Tuesday Tip. We want you to divide and conquer. Today we want you to heed Henry Ford’s advice and chunk up a bigger to-do list item into smaller, more manageable tasks then check them off the list one by one, to see how that reorganization may help to free up some mental real estate and help you to focus better on items that matter the most. Are you ready? You know the words..

Kay & Shi:

Let’s quest!