Domino is a tile-shaped board game with one to six spots on each side (sometimes called pips). The tiles are arranged end to end in long lines. When the first domino is tipped over, it triggers the rest of the line to fall in a chain reaction. People can create complex designs by stacking dominoes in this way.
In the games, players score points by laying their tiles on the table so that their exposed ends match the endings of adjacent opposing player’s tiles – for example, one player’s two-point tiles touching another player’s three-point tiles. In addition, doubles may be counted as one or two, and blanks as zero or 14. The player who scores the most points in a given number of rounds wins the game.
Lily Hevesh started playing with dominoes at age 9 when her grandparents gave her a 28-piece set. She loved arranging the dominoes in straight or curved lines and then flicking them over to watch their chain reactions. Now, Hevesh is a professional domino artist who has more than 2 million YouTube subscribers and creates spectacular domino installations for events like movie premieres and Katy Perry’s latest album release. She also teaches others how to use the physical phenomenon of gravity to create intricate domino art.
When Hevesh starts an installation, she first tests each section on its own to make sure it works properly. Then she builds up the largest 3-D sections before adding flat arrangements and finally putting in the dominoes themselves. When the final display is ready, it can take several nail-biting minutes for all the dominoes to fall as a result of the chain reaction. Hevesh credits one physical phenomenon in particular for making her amazing creations possible: gravity. This force pulls a knocked-over domino toward Earth, causing it to crash into the next domino in the line, and so on.
While the domino effect is a great analogy for a series of events that have cascading consequences, it’s also a useful metaphor for business. When you’re looking to achieve a big goal, it’s important to break the process down into good dominoes that will have a positive ripple effect in the future. These good dominoes are often challenging, take a significant amount of time to complete, and require you to focus fully on them.
In business, these dominoes might be something like creating a strategic plan or implementing an employee training program. When you pick the right dominoes, the impact can be much greater than you expect. So the next time you start a project, think of how you can break it down into good dominoes that will help you reach your goals more quickly and effectively. And remember to kick off the process by picking the right dominoes to get the ball rolling. Good luck!