Details create the big picture.
SANFORD I. WEILL
The more myopically, we inspect anything, the more it obfuscates the big picture.
How do you interpret all of the details?
By drilling down on anything in life…be it physical, emotional, conceptual, or other, we are able to study the myriad of countless tiny portions of all that makes up the bigger picture.
In this progression of potentially seemingly unrelated details, we are able to fabricate in our mind, the sum of all of the parts, as best as we might be able to calculate, leveraging our imagination and intellect, paired with our life experience.
When you are looking at something metaphorically from 80,000 feet, there is the perspective that one might be readily viewing all of the big picture perspective variables, but all it takes is the opportunity to descend progressively deeper into the subject matter, in order that hundreds, if not tens of thousands or even millions of minutia are collectively responsible for all that we are perceiving at the 80,000 foot level.
When we are able to distinguish the two perspectives, we are even more adept at surveilling all that we presume the subject matter contains and pairing that with reasonable expectations that we might produce in our estimation of all that we are perceiving.
This ability to separate macro and micro vantage points, and collectively assimilate them into a larger picture, is a huge component of what has given the human race the upper hand on planet earth.
For example, if you were looking at the nucleus of one carbon atom through an electron microscope, you would have a very interesting perspective of an ecosystem of positively and negatively charged elements, which collectively make up a single atom. Yet from this one vantage point, you might have no concept whatsoever that the atom was actually part of a greater whole, in the sense that it might be bonded with other atoms, and collectively make a molecule that will become the building block of life.
As we pull farther and farther from the minutia, and ultimately discover that we are looking at a cell within some sort of an organism, then pulling even further back, the identity of the organism would be readily defined.
When you look at problems, they feel overwhelming and ultimately defeating in their massive perspective and impact. Perhaps the most valuable resource you have is your ability to go myopic into the problem, and find one piece of the problem that you might potentially be capable of addressing at this moment in time, with the hope and expectation that when you are capable of addressing that particular variable, it will make additional variables in the equation more addressable than they might have been, had you not started at one small segment of the situation.
If you are looking to build a dream, and the dream is in and of itself, so massive as to dwarf your imagination, the same solution applies to accomplishing your vision.
God is in the details. –Buckminster Fuller
Happy Thursday!
Brian Weiner 