A lot of the work I do in the world, professionally and personally, involves transformation. People, organizations, sometimes even cultures or communities. It's heady work and pretty exciting stuff for a guy like me.

One of the questions that often arises is people will ask me: When does this happen? How does this happen? Because in a lot of ways it’s impossible to predict, I've come up with analogies. My favorite one is the apothecary scale.

Some people may refer it to as the “scales of justice,” when in fact, it was originally used and designed to weigh drugs. If you've ever played with an apothecary scale, you realize that you may have put a lot of feathers on one side before you finally get a little bit of movement. With each feather you continue to add, the greater the movement you get. Then the cool thing about the apothecary scale is there comes this moment where you put one more feather on, and you suddenly get this disproportionate shift.  Of course, people at that point go (surprised), "Wow, that's amazing. How did that happen?" And the answer is it took hundreds, if not thousands, of featherweight actions.

There's a really funny parallel to this. One of my favorite movies is “Groundhog Day”. That's the movie with Bill Murray, who's got to repeat the day in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania repeatedly.  Some enterprising Buddhist decided that they would try and figure out just how many lives it took for his character to be transformed. They estimated it was 80,000 lifetimes.

Imagine 80,000 feathers before you finally get everything transformed and changed completely. I know that sounds like an impossible, crazy task, but the reality is, that's the only way the transformation comes.

Start working with those featherweight actions. It's surprising what they can do over time. And maybe, just maybe, you'll get a chance to see a really cool thing occur.