Are you a mosquito?

Looking for inspiration for today’s post, I found this quote from the late Anita Roddick, founder of the Body Shop: “If you think you’re too small to have an impact, try going to bed with a mosquito”. Conjures up quite an image, doesn’t it? Even in the UK, sometimes in the Summer when you’re trying to sleep, suddenly you hear that awful zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz!!! and you know it’s trying to get you. All it wants is to find a bit of skin to attack and suck out your blood. And even if you hide under the covers, it’s impossible to sleep because of the zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz!!! Of course, if the dratted thing actually manages to bite you, you’ll be awake all night scratching, looking for antihistamine and we haven’t even begun trying to swat it.

Now, those are the comparatively mild mannered mossies we have in temperate climates. Find yourself in Africa or Asia and it’s a different ball game entirely. Mosquitoes carry dengue fever and malaria, and protecting yourself adequately can be a life or death matter. They are tiny, and when splatted there is barely a smudge left, as if they’d never existed at all. But with their annoying zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz!!!, their nasty, sometimes deadly bites and their dogged persistence they can make our lives a misery, and they have a lot of power over us. Cause us to spend money (nets, malaria jabs, repellent), get out of bed, jump around, move from one place to another; amazing, when you think how small they are compared to us.

So if, like me, you sometimes feel that you are small and insignificant compared with the rest of the world, the industry you are trying to break into, or something you want to make a difference with, just imagine yourself as a mosquito. They keep going, believing that opportunities will arise, using every weapon at their disposal. They’re really, really good at being mosquitoes, and that makes them really, really effective even in the face of beings so very many times larger than they are. They may be minute, but they have the power of being uniquely themselves.

What can you do to be more yourself, to use your own unique gifts, to look for opportunities that are open to you because you are exactly as you are? Just as mosquitoes use their size, the one thing that may seem to be a disadvantage, to be effective, maybe there is something about you that looks like a disadvantage at the moment, but that could be your greatest asset.