How many lawyers does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Three - one to get the ladder, one to fall off the ladder, one to sue the ladder company. There are a million different versions of this joke of how many [insert stereotype here] does it take to screw in a lightbulb, but this basic premise of a group of people working together to get the light working actually illustrates a very true principle - many hands make light work. Or to put a slightly different twist on it, many hands make the light work. Just think of all of the different hands working together to get a lightbulb in our house to glow. Take the bulb itself. A glassblower had to make the actual bulb, but that glassblower depended on a whole group of people gathering the sand, transporting it, removing impurities. Other people had to build and operate the furnace. Someone mined the ore that then got refined by someone else to then get twisted into wire by someone else for the filament. The same goes for the metal in the terminals and sockets. People packaged and distributed the lightbulg. Others stocked it and sold it at the grocery store. Then there were contractors and electricians who wired up our home for us to be able to use electric lights. Plus all of the hundreds of people that worked on the production and distribution of the materials that the electricians used. And then all of the people involved in producing the electricity that lights the bulb. Coal miners and oil rig workers and telephone line operators and city zoning boards that secured property easements for the utility companies and the list could go on and on. We could keep extending out the areas of influence pretty much forever. I mean, that glassblower had to eat somewhere while he was making those lightbulbs. And if he ordered a burger, then the beef had to come from a cow that was cared for by other people. And they had to get their feed from somewhere. And the farmer who sold them the feed had to get their fertilizer from somewhere else. If we took the time we could probably prove that the combined effort of the whole human race could get traced to the lighting of a single lightbulb. If we have a chance to let our light shine, let us have the humility to recognize that our light can only shine because many hands have worked together to make the light work. And if we’re in a place in life where it feels like we are not contributing and there is no light for us to shine, then let us embrace the fact that as long as we keep doing our part, then wherever a light shines, it can in some way be traced back to our efforts.
