“If you cannot do great things, do small things in a great way.” – Napoleon Hill
We tend to think that in order to do something great, it has to be a big thing. Big things look different to different people. To you it might be a little thing, but to someone else it might be huge. Being great doesn’t mean getting a statue created in your honor soon. Being great means doing the best you can with the position you are in. If you can’t do anything great with the position you are in now, how can you do something great with a better position? We have to steward what we have in order to be blessed with more opportunity later.
When we visited IJmuiden during our European trip, we checked out a couple of lighthouses near the port. The Low Lighthouse of IJmuiden (locally known as the Lage vuurtoren van IJmuiden or “Little Lighthouse”) is a historic, 24-meter-tall cast-iron tower located along the coast at Seinpostweg 19 in IJmuiden, Netherlands. Designed by prominent architect Quirinus Harder and built in 1878, it serves as a critical maritime marker. Together with its taller counterpart, the IJmuiden High Lighthouse (35 meters), it forms a pair of leading lights that guide large cargo and cruise vessels safely from the North Sea into the North Sea Canal. The smaller lighthouse used to be taller but had to be made shorter because it needed a broader base. The top sections were taken off and are used as a separate lighthouse on the island of Vlieland.
My favorite photo in this post is the one where the little lighthouse and the big lighthouse are in the same frame. Do you have a favorite? Let me know in the comments.
