While doing my annual fall yard work, it dawned on me that there are certain spots in the lawn that I reseed every fall. Not wanting to replicate past failure, I decided to try something different. I decided to dig out the spot and refill it with topsoil instead of just loosening the soil that was there and reseeding. Guess what? Nearly every trouble spot had gravel 3-4 inches beneath the surface. The grass had no deep root system. It came up and looked beautiful in the fall and even the next spring. But the heat and stress of summer revealed its lack of depth.
Sometimes the design process can struggle with this same problem. A client doesn’t like an old marketing piece, but they use the same copy (with some additional verbiage of course) and want to twiddle with the design some. Or perhaps the designer pulls one of his favorites out of his bag of tricks and attempts to replicate an old success. But what about the rocks? Perhaps the copy is targeting the wrong demographic. Maybe the design look is dated. Maybe the designer is more interested in padding his portfolio than serving the needs of the client and his demographic. Perhaps the marketing piece is just an attempt to copy the success of “Competitor A” up the street. Real success comes when everyone comes to the table and starts fresh and strives to communicate with the design rather than just pretty things up.
Life can get like that. We see trouble areas and scratch the surface and throw a few solutions at the problem and wonder why the solution is short lived. To make real change we have to dig deeper. Perhaps we step back from some dead-end commitments. We change some negative relationships with others. We might need to seek for a deeper spiritual core rather than being blown around by what comes next in life. It is easier to just scatter a bit of seed and get temporary results than to do the much harder work of digging up the rocks and starting fresh.
What rocks are you ignoring today?
Photo credit: http://www.freeimages.com/photo/grass-1390625