My wife and I took a honeymoon to Santa Barbara (we ended up staying). Somewhere along the Pacific coast, we stopped to admire the view. We got back to the car, I grabbed a drink from the back, and my wife sat in the passenger’s seat with the door open, putting lotion on her hands. She then swung her legs inside the car, closed the door, and without a further thought we drove away.
As we headed away from our vista, I noticed my wife was becoming increasingly agitated. “What’s wrong,” I asked. “Nothing,” she insisted. She let this go on for a few more minutes before she finally told the truth: she had lost her diamond engagement ring. She had set it on her lap to put lotion on her hands. It must have fallen off her lap when she got into the car.
We went back to where we parked, imaging the ring would still be there. It would be relatively easy to find such an obviously out-of-place object on the side of the road. We began to canvas the area where we parked, walking carefully up and down the road looking for a diamond ring.
That is when I learned an important life lesson:
Everything sparkles when you’re looking for a diamond.
Asphalt is full of glimmering pieces of stone. Small pieces of broken glass — a broken Snapple bottle, perhaps — the kind you would never notice — sparkle like a diamond. Even normal rocks in the dirt seem to have the size and shape and shimmer of a diamond.
Did I already walk past it? Did I walk right past a diamond? Better look harder, better notice and check anything that sparkles.
Well, we did end up finding it and it did sparkle a little. But what really helped us was using a scientific process. We did a little math and calculated that the ring must have been within a certain canvas area. We just kept combing the same area until we found the ring. It did not sparkle as much as some of the other things that had a better angle to the sun.
I share this story with my clients because it has an important and obvious moral. You need to to use a little common sense and science as you build your software and select the people to help you. If you go by what you see, you will spend time and energy on too many things that don’t matter. If we had kept chasing down every little sparkle, we would not have had the confidence to stay within our canvas area. We would have convinced ourselves that the brightest sparkles should be checked first.
