For Want of a Nail
For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.
I can remember as a little boy, my mother reading this to me and attempting to explain what it truly meant. As a young boy I was unable to grasp its meaning. As I grow older and experience more of life, the significance of this simple tale seems to be taught to me over and over again. Perhaps it is a lesson that life demands of us, perhaps I am just human and fail to learn the lessons of my past.
Wikipedia has this so say about this piece. ‘The rhyme is thus a good illustration of the “The butterfly effect”, and ideas presented in chaos theory, involving sensitive dependence on initial conditions; the initial condition being the presence or absence of the horseshoe nail.’ I find this clinical explanation accurate and theoretically sound. In matters of the human heart, I have no words to express the depth of impact this small story has on me.
I lost a twitter follower today.
Now, those of you that have large twitter followings will say to me that you lose hundreds or even thousands of followers every day. I too advise people who ask me about this that as you crystalize your message and focus your direction, you are bound to lose twitter followers as you gain new ones. This loss, caused me to reflect and I have been lost in thought about it all day.
I shall call this twitter follower Misha, though that is not her name. She was one of my original 50 followers on twitter. I found her blog posts to be inspirational and her love for life and family without parallel. I learned that Misha had survived treatment of an illness that forever changed her physically. I came to believe that it also changed her spiritually and her posts touched innocent parts of me that had long been closed off. I have fought battles in life, in business, in relationships and in raising my children as all of us face. Misha faced these battles and had become an inspirational person. I had fought these battles and become a hard and distant person.
I came to twitter to do business and I never had any qualms about doing that. I wanted a large following and set out to accomplish just that. In 30 days I have achieved a growth of over 5,000 followers. I had written a website and started to push video tutorials. People were talking about what I had done and telling others of their phenomenal growth using my methods. I was patting myself on the back and tweeting around the clock, believing I had the next great twitter secret.
I got a DM a few days ago from Misha, saying I was causing too much activity in her timeline. She was on my special list of followers that I follow every day. People were starting to ask her to follow them and get in on the ‘follow for follow’ systems I was promoting. Misha simply stated that she liked her twitter following small and to please understand that it was nothing personal. This morning, Misha dropped me from her twitter followers, and I understood why she needed to do that. Still, this one follower has caused me to reflect upon why I am here and what I am doing.
A mentor of mine once said ‘Bobby, you need to figure out what you are doing well and keep doing it. You also need to figure out what you are doing poorly, and fix it.’ What I did well in the beginning of my thirty days on twitter was to reach out to people and engage them. I was myself, I was open, I was vulnerable and I listened. In the last few days I have felt the need to increase my tweets. To automate my quotes, my tips, my following of people and my unfollowing. I have become successful in the sense of numbers. Yet, with all of that, I think I just lost a shoe, because of the want of a nail. I want to make sure, that I examine what has happened so that the entire kingdom is not lost.
I would trade 1,000 of my followers that were bots, advertisers, people who talked at me about their product instead of listening to me for one Misha. I realized, I had become someone who talked at people and had stopped listening to them. In a way, I suppose that all I really need to be successful in twitter is to pay attention to the lessons my mother tried to teach me as a child. Be open, be yourself and know yourself. It is said that ‘what good is it for a man to gain the world and lose his soul’. To my twitter family – I am humbled by your support, by your love and it is you that made me the success that I am in twitter and not anything that I have done.
Thank you Misha for reminding me of what is important. Your presence shall be missed in my timeline.
Bob Cristello
