The Importance of Little Things
I’m working on a programming project for the IT side of my business today and I was reminded of the importance of little things.
When I’m programming and something goes wrong, my tendency is to look for big things. For example, there was a problem in this program with handling time zone data. Time codes were coming out different processed through different systems. My first thought, which I followed, was to look for bad settings in the overall system, and then for subtle differences in the way different functions handled this data.
But no, none of the above was correct. The actual error was a one character problem in the way I was formatting some text—the simplest element of the code involved. Because I was looking for the big things, none of which were causing the problem, I wasted considerable time. Once I saw the actual problem, a couple of keystrokes fixed it.
Might this not apply to our lives at times? We’re looking for the big changes when we just need to change something small, but which will have a big result?
