It’s Not About The Nail
I’ve watched this video many times:
I remember when I first watched it, I simply thought it was a classic example of how men and women communicate differently. What means one thing to a man can mean something completely different to a woman.
But then the more I thought about it, I realised that it is also about something that we all suffer from: not dealing with the obvious.
In the video, the woman wants to focus on all the problems that the nail is causing her. She doesn’t want to actually deal with the real issue – the nail itself.
She talks about feeling pressured, not sleeping well and having snagged sweaters. Yet she refuses to recognise that if she just removed the nail, all the other problems would disappear. She chooses to deal with the symptoms of the problem, rather than the problem itself.
The video is titled ‘It’s Not About the Nail’ when in fact it’s all about the nail.
This got me thinking…how many of us, have problems that we just wish we would go away and are constantly fire-fighting the issues that arise as a result of the problem instead of actually just dealing with the problem itself?
So the problem gets bigger and bigger until it becomes a crisis and, what could have been dealt with much more easily when it first occurred, now causes us great difficulty.
This is an age-old lesson that we all need reminding of:
Stop focusing on the things that aren’t important because it’s at the expense of the things that truly are.