There are some days that I really love my job. I am currently in a run of days that are generally some of my best experiences in production, the Germany Leadership Summit. It happens every other year, and I have had the pleasure of leading these trips since 2005. I can’t even believe it.
I am usually more tired during these trips than for any other production that I get to be a part of, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything. To build something from nothing and then watch thousands of German-speaking people singing familiar songs in a language I don’t understand will never get old to me.
In the first few days of our experience, we are pretty much just getting stuff done: banging truss together, running hundreds of meters (yes, meters) of cable, hanging projectors, and line arrays…pretty much building the environment.
Taken as a whole, it is a TON of work. It is so much, that it can almost seem insurmountable. However, in reality, the whole thing is made up of small, doable parts. Unwinding a cable, rigging a motor, aiming a projector. With the team I get to work with, these tasks are pretty straightforward, if not beneath their abilities. Yet here we find ourselves spending the majority of our time doing these things.
What I love so much about this team, is that while their talents are amazing, they are not too good to dive in and do whatever needs to get done. The other day, a teammate reminded me of a phrase that we used to say a lot: “Here to serve!” This phrase exemplifies the attitude of this production team.
We have a ton of little things to do, and we are going to kill it on each one of these. No detail is too small to not do our very best with. Especially on an event of this scale, the details all add up to something huge. Each tiny thing adds up to the whole. So if we are only doing an OK job along the way, that could potentially add up to disaster. Why take a chance that one small shortcut will come back to bite us later. Let’s do it right the first time.
As we step into this event, we are striving to do our very best, even in (especially in) the smallest detail.
