What beaches and microscopes can teach us about plans, details and human nature
Or why your predictions will fail. And so will mine. And that’s OK.
What does it mean to look at the big picture?
Big pictures go side by side with big achievements. Ad execs look beyond copy tweaks to understand a key idea. Good managers go beyond solving recurring problems and try to prevent those in the first place. Leaders snub analogical thinking and focus instead on first principles.
Big pictures help us grasp broader perspectives, make sense of trends, and hopefully shape the future for the better. They’re the tools of the visionary. They’re essential if you want to shape a better future.
What about smaller pictures? What do they do?
What really matters at New Year’s Eve
Fireworks are big in any New Year’s Eve party, but they’re not the main reason we attend. We attend because of the people we are going with.
Just think about which photos stand the test of time the following year. What’s usually the top priority? Pictures of ourselves and pictures of those which are closer to us. In short, pictures of people. Fireworks might be there too, but they don’t make for a great story we tell over and over again.
Fireworks are often disguised as the party’s climax. But it’s really the heterogeneity of human moments that make a great party great. If fireworks are the party’s big picture, then human moments make for the smaller, more meaningful, pictures.
A series of tubes as seen through a microscope
What if we take small pictures to the extreme? Lately, the internet seems to be addicted to how things look when seen through a microscope. For example, butterfly wings. But other surprisingly common objects as well. Heck, even grains of sand look awesome.
Microscopes are perfect for decoding the apparent homogeneity of everyday things when seen through the naked eye. They provide the unseen equivalents of a human moment. Impossibly small pictures that shed new light on a seemingly predictable reality.
Details matter in that sense. They’re the difference between a seemingly predictable whole, and the edgy parts that make it interesting.
You can’t plan a beach
I’ve never liked the “where do you want to be in five years?” question. It’s not that it’s a difficult question (even through there’s no real right answer). It’s that it might be a wrong question.
Look at the horizon and the farther you try to see, the smaller and murkier things seem. Planning, after all, is guessing. And successful predictions are the product of subtle post-rationalization. That’s why Nate Silver wrote The Signal and the Noise and Daniel Kahneman proved with research that:
After a crisis we tell ourselves we understand why it happened and maintain the illusion that the world is understandable. In fact, we should accept the world is incomprehensible much of the time.
Big pictures are often visionary predictions. Well, most predictions fail.
So while vision demands that you ambitiously look at tomorrow, execution demands that you obsessively look at today. And that’s why a microscopic grain of sand matters so much.
You can’t plan a beach. It’s too overwhelming. But use the right lens and you might find great execution behind its grains of sand. Of course, big pictures, beaches and planning are important. But so is attention to the details right in front of us.
Some might call this mindfulness. I call it giving a damn about what you deliver every single day.
We can agree that a big beach makes for a nice picture. Far more surprising to me is how the right perspective over grains of sand can blow your mind.
