Guy Reams (00:00.59)
Today is day 189, scale yourself first.
So I first thought of this concept when I had an experience where I volunteered on a large community project to clean up a community park. It was fall, and the community park had these several large cottonwood trees. And the trees filled the whole park. And when the leaves fall off of a cottonwood tree, they go everywhere. And so this park every year would be full of leaves and required a massive community effort to clean up the park.
So a volunteer group would be organized and they would all get together and they would rake up all the leaves and dispose of them in a farmer's field that would then be turned into mulch. So the idea was that volunteer committee would get together, they'd get all the people together and they would do this big project and would take an entire weekend. And if they had time left over, they would do some other things.
Well, I showed up and everybody, what had happened is a farmer had donated his dump truck, a large dump truck, and a couple of other farmers had donated their front end loaders. So there was two big groups of people set up that surrounded each front end loader. And the front end loader would go down one side of the lock and the other front end loader would go down another sidewalk. And people would rake up a pile of leaves and then hand carry their leaves up and dump them into the front end loader.
And when the front of the litter was full, it would go back to the dump truck, dump the leaves, and come back to where the workers were. And this is the way they were doing it. Well, I first saw this. Now, what the organizers didn't know is I'm an expert at picking up cottonwood leaves. When I was a young boy, I lived near my grandparents. And oftentimes, I would go do work for them. And one of my primary tasks was to pick up cottonwood leaves.
Guy Reams (01:58.733)
My grandfather taught me what some of the laborers in the area were doing, which was to lay a sheet, a bed sheet on the ground, rake your leaves onto the bed sheet, then pick up all four corners of the bed sheet and then throw it over your shoulder like a sack and then carry it over to your trailer and dump the leaves into the trailer. This was the method of picking up cottonwood leaf. So while I was at this community park, I told the leaders, hey, we should get some bed sheets and lay them down and use those to carry leaves with.
instead of the front end loaders. They're like, whatever. They're like stupid, young, stupid kid. So we were going through this and I got more and more frustrated at how slow it was taking with these front end loaders. So there's this lady that lived nearby. So I asked her if she had an old bed sheet and she did. So she went and got me one and I laid it on the ground and I started raking the leaves in myself, bypassing the front end loaders, tying it up, throwing it over my shoulder and running to the dump truck.
bypassing the front end loaders completely and dumping it in there. Pretty soon, some people started noticing what I was doing and a couple of kids came over and started helping me rake all the leaves onto my sheet. I would throw it and run it. Next thing you know, a couple of kids wanted to run for me. So we would alternate who would run to the dump truck and it became kind of fun. Well, me and this small group of kids and a couple of other volunteers were making far more progress than any of the front end loader teams by themselves.
So slowly but surely what ended up happening is people started going to get sheets and tarps and other things, and they started also bypassing their front end loaders. Pretty soon everybody was working in two person teams to rake the leaves, carry the leaves over to the dump truck, and throw them in with these bed sheets. We actually ended up finishing the entire park in about four hours.
Never before at this community had they filled, had they cleaned all the leaves in less than an afternoon. Typically, it had taken two full days of work to clean up the leaves. So my innovation ended up revolutionizing the community park leaf pickup. Now, this lesson reminds me of a couple of important key points, which is the subject of this discussion today. A lot of us want to do good.
Guy Reams (04:22.637)
or they want to do great things or we want to help the world in some way. And so we're always trying to figure out how to do that. But how do you be good at scale? What are the key ingredients to be good at scale? Well, as it turns out, you can be evil or good at scale. Both of them require the same things. You require equal measure of working on your message, on your efficiency of your process, as well as evangelizing.
as well as having some really good tenants that would get people to follow along. All those things are true. But the number one thing that I've noticed that gets people to get something good to start happening at scale is for you to do it yourself. Which means that you can't really scale your ideas unless you scale yourself first. If you can scale yourself, then people will see what you're doing and they will start to believe the authenticity of your message.
and that will become infectious and attractive at the same time. People gravitate towards this and will automatically start to do what you're doing. It's very easy, eerie to watch, but leaders that adopt this are usually the leaders that tend to lead larger movements or larger projects at scale. So this is a hard lesson to learn because sometimes leaders think that they can pontificate on the idea without actually doing.
You have to do, now you don't have to do all the work, but you have to lead the charge. Otherwise, forget it. So doing good at scale starts with yourself. Scale yourself first if you really want to do anything at scale.