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Thought for the Day: Acquiring Your Olam HaBah in a Moment Takes a Lifetime of Work

The mishha in Avos says to be as careful with "light" mitzvos as "important" mitzvos, because you don't know how the reward is calculated. There are several different explanations of the lessons one is meant to learn from this mishna, but the unifying theme is that we just don't know how the final דין וחשבון/accountability will be computed. I had an amazing experience at work today that brought this mishna to life for me like never before.

We had our quarterly group meeting today, attended also by the heads of our internal customers. (The group I work for by and large provides software tools that allow that group to do the work our external/paying customers need done.) The head of that group showed a slide of all the wonderful things we had done for them over the last year. The list included very large features, some required months of effort and as many as a dozen people involved. People had been given special recognition awards for some of those projects. On the list were two projects I had worked on. One project, while I was the technical lead, there were another couple of developers and it took us several weeks. I asked if it really made a big difference to our (external) customers and he enthusiastically replied in the affirmative. It was saving our customer time, money, and aggravation. That was nice to hear.

The other project, though, I did by myself. It took about four hours; maybe eight hours when you include all the meetings to iron out the details. It was not really on our list of priorities, but I was about to go on vacation and I figured I could get it done and deployed to production before I left. Low risk, easy coding. What we call in the industry "low hanging fruit". Given the context of the other items on the list, though, I was shocked to see it there. So I asked about it: "You know, I am surprised to see that on the list. It really only took me about four hours." They went on to tell me how important it was to them, how much their customers liked it, and how even the legal department liked it. In fact, the manager told me that he had been given a charge to save a half a million dollars that year, and my (little) feature had saved the $200,000!

So... in one day's work this year, I provided a benefit to my company that more than justified my cost. I am still a bit stunned how much impact it made. But, in truth, it didn't take me just four hours. It took me 65 years of preparation, which enabled me to make the right decisions and to be able to write the literally half dozen lines of actual code. As we come to the end of 5783 and prepare to meet our King and sign of for, the Good Lord Willing, another year -- it's good to keep in mind that we really don't know what are big, important mitzvos and which are "little" mitzvos. But it is not just that the mitzvos themselves have value, they also prepare us and train us to be able to do more mitzvos on ever grander scales.

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