Big Picture and all the Small Details

I'm old enough to remember listening to American Top 40 with Casey Kasem. His signoff was always significant to me "Keep your feet on the ground, but keep reaching for the stars." It's a big tangential but related to this post. Because when you look down at your feet, it's not very far away, it's right beneath you. You can see the detail. When you reach for the stars though, it's expansive, limitless, and requires a telescope to see the details.

I told my wife the other day, after a particularly bad decision I made. Please regularly ask me these two questions:

1) Are you keeping the Big Picture in mind?
2) Do you know all the Small Details?

As it has been said, "You need to know where you are going, to figure out how you are going to get there." I'm good at the Big Picture. Projecting, framing, conceptualizing. I'm also pretty good at Small Details. The minutae, the legalese, the things that can trip you up. But I'm sometimes not so good at keeping those two in balance, and context. I can easily get lost in the visioneering, or bogged down in the small details. So I'm happy that I have a wife who will keep me accountable to these two questions, which really help me make decisions, and proceed with my everyday.

After all, its the daily decisions we make that have a cumulative effect of our life's outcome, in technicolor dynamic real-time.

So ask yourself these two questions today.