A small ball in one of Enid Blyton’s novels about naughty kids leads to a big accident! That’s geometric progression in the negative direction! But a similar progression has now become the most precious treasure in the country of Spain!
This was a novel I read in my fifth grade called A Book of Naughty Children! Since that was a long (long!) time ago, I remember this story where a kid is told to not play with a ball on the street and he does! That leads to a load of crashes and accidents! It was like a horror story for me!
That is the power of Dominos!
In the novel The ONE THING by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan; the authors tell about the Domino effect!
They say that all great things have small beginnings. Every masterpiece has its first brushstroke, every building its first brick and every life its first breath.
Like every journey begins with a single step!
In a pictorial depiction in the novel it is shown how on its own, a domino isn’t much!
It’s about two inches tall and weighs about as much as a small box of matches. But with the domino comes a force. In fact, one domino has the capability of knocking down another one that is 1.5x its size. This seemingly infinitesimal ability compounds to produce incredible outcomes!
Then it is shown how one domino lying in the front albeit a little bigger can be toppled by the preceding one and the one getting toppled can topple a bigger one and so on! Even if the first domino is simply a two inch one; by progression it can topple much bigger ones! So much so that by the 18th step it can topple a domino which is as tall as the leaning tower of Pisa (it may not need much effort to fall though!) and by 25th it can even topple the Eiffel Tower! In fact by 51 the height of the domino it can topple is taller than the Mt Everest and by 57th it can reach the height so tall that it can reach the moon!
The concept thus is that the path to great achievement is often lined with steps that are aligned with one another. No matter how small the first step is, the power generated from that first activity compounds into something much greater!
So in the year 2004, Robert Weisberg of Temple University put together a case-study of Pablo Picasso’s masterpiece Guernica and found that even the greats don’t rely on “strokes of genius”!
On first inspection, it certainly looks like the result of a sudden flash of inspiration. However, Weisberg’s analysis identified core pieces of his painting in his previous work, suggesting the masterpiece was actually the culmination of long chain of dominos that were knocked over continuously throughout his career~
Instead of coming up with one idea after the other, Picasso began with a simple vision and pursued it from a small starting point. His first sketch began with the end in mind and formed an extremely rough outline of a woman, a horse, and a bull – his first domino. From there he continued to knock over domino after domino, focusing on the outline, each character and object individually and, with few exceptions, sequentially. After 45 sketches and nearly a month’s time, he had more or less created Guernica with no guesswork involved!
Guernica is a masterpiece now! The harrowing scene includes a gored horse, a screaming mother holding her dead baby, a dismembered soldier, a bull, and a terrified woman trapped in a burning building!
The massive oil-on-canvas mural measures 3.49 by 7.76 meters (11 ft 5 in by 25 ft 6 in)!
The painting, which hangs in the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid, became a universal symbol for peace and a condemnation of the devastation of modern warfare!
To think that it all began with a single domino or sketch! In fact even great actors career like Ananth Nag just began with a single act!
Now begin to lie down and domino to sleep!
Shubh ratri!
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