Should We Treat Our Work Like It Belongs To Someone Else?
A few years ago, I worked for a sports marketing company that produced college basketball games. One of my jobs was to design and create the images and logos that went on the basketball court during those games (technically, I did not do any designing or creating but I was in charge of the people who were actually skilled enough to do those things).
One year I messed up big time! Actually, it was a small mess up that would have been big to someone else.
Comcast was the title sponsor for one of the events. As part of their partnership, their logo was allowed to be on the court for the game. This was something they paid a lot of money for, so I arranged for their logo to be printed on an 8-foot long sticker that would be visible to a nationally televised audience.
I arrived at the arena the day before the game to make sure the Comcast court sticker was looking sharp. What I found felt like a sharp pain in my gut!
I took one look at the Comcast logo on the court and I knew it was the wrong logo.
At one point leading up to this game, Comcast had changed its logo. They made it very clear to me that they wanted the new logo on all the marketing materials surrounding our event.
No problem. I made sure this happened on everything we did for months, but somehow I had messed up when I created the design for the court. I had sent the wrong Comcast logo to the printer.
Before I go any further, let’s take a look at those two Comcast logos. The one on top is the old logo and the one on the bottom is the new one that Comcast wanted to use. See if you can spot any differences.
They look nearly identical, right? If you look closely, you can see that they “s” and the “t” are slightly changed in the second one. Very slightly.
You can see how my mistake might be excusable. You need 20/20 vision to see that there is a difference between the two logos.
Fixing this was going to take a lot of money and cause lot of stress since I was not even sure it could be corrected in time. I’ll admit it, after seeing the wrong logo on the court, my first instinct was to look the other way. Who was going to be able to tell I had messed up? A person would have to be studying their TV screen with a magnifying glass to see that I had used the incorrect logo.
To me and the thousands of people watching at home this was a little thing. But I knew that this little thing was a big deal to Comcast. So, even though I could have gotten away with it, I knew the right move was to have the old logo taken off the court and replaced by the correct logo.
The new logo made it just in time and the game tipped with the “s” & “t” looking slightly different but very much correct. I’d love to say that Comcast called the next day and raved about how great the logo looked on the court. But that didn’t happen. They probably didn’t even watch the game.
I could have turned a blind eye to my screw up and no one would have been the wiser. It was such a little thing, but I knew that doing the little things was an important part of my job.
Why did I just tell this story? Did I do it to impress you with my ability to find people to print stickers? Nope. Am I getting paid for every mention of Comcast? I wish.
I shared this story to explain that many of us have no problem doing the little things when it relates to someone else’s work. I knew the correct logo was important to Comcast, so no matter how small it was to me and my work, it was big them and that was what was important. I bet you have a similar story.
But what about when it is related to our own work? Are we as likely to do the little things that may go unnoticed? I’ll admit it, if you replace the Comcast logo in my story with the logo from this website, I probably wouldn’t have gone to all the trouble to fix it.
We know about the importance of doing the little things for our own dreams. Whether it is spell checking our blog posts, polishing the frame on our artwork or checking the sound quality on our podcast, doing the little things can lead to big improvements to our work.
But the little things are also often tedious tasks that we don’t always feel like doing. If we didn’t do those things, we are the only ones that might know. When we are the only one that holds us accountable, it is easy to look the other way. And that is exactly what we do. Even if you wouldn’t do the same if we were working for someone else.
Maybe sometimes it is best to treat our dreams like we are working for someone else.
Photo credit: Flickr