Everything is like this. Big projects and small. Early in my career I learned what a Gantt chart was: a visual project management tool, typically displayed as a horizontal bar chart, that illustrates a project's schedule over time. The HR chart for opening a casino is more than 500 items spread over 2 years. The rest of the charts made up 50 times more. As big as the project looked, in this format it was a plan for hundreds of people doing thousands of individual tasks made up of many thousand sub tasks. Until we went through the exercise(s) of breaking it down into bite sized pieces, it was almost too much to get our heads around. But we felt pretty good – not to mention confident, when the plan was laid out like that. And by the time we began implementing those tasks, we were confident and prepared. First time we did that was the Mirage, and it transformed Vegas and gaming. Whether its putting things together at work or people together in life, having the discipline to plan how things go together is the best way to get things done. Whatever you’re working on – big or small, focus on the little things and you’ll feel good about how things work out today.
Howard Zinn (1922 – 2010): American historian and World War II veteran. He was chair of the history and social sciences department at Spelman College, and a political science professor at Boston University.
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