Being The Flower Girl

Imagine that you spend every morning in a field, in a park, picking wild flowers. You are careful to choose only the most beautiful ones, and the ones that look like they will live and keep their beauty a long time after being picked.

Then, in the afternoon, as other people hurry home from work, you stand on a busy street corner giving the flowers away. Not in a creepy, crazy way, but in a way that spreads happiness and warmth. Day in, day out, you go to the same park and the same street corner. You do the same things in the same places.

What would happen?

Not only would you learn a lot about both flowers and people, but it wouldn’t take very long before you’d be known as The Flower Girl (or Guy).

And that – being The Flower Girl – is a thing of real value.

Who do people turn to when they want flowers? Some may, of course, go pick their own bouquets, but many would ask The Flower Girl. Who do people ask if they need information about flowers? Smart people would ask The Flower Girl.

It would be difficult to ruin it, and make your fans turn their backs on you, but it’s entirely possible. The best way to ruin it, of course, would be to focus your attention on something other than flowers – like hamburgers, or profit – and let the flowers suffer. Soon enough you’d loose your Flower Girl title to someone who really cared about flowers.

It seems so easy and so obvious, doesn’t it? How come, then, so many seemingly smart people get it wrong?