Successful people understand the value of delving into then honouring the details.
Two-year-olds ignore the finer points of life and consequently require a mature person to dot the i’s and cross the t’s.
As the world becomes more casual, the details weaving together our social fabric seem to be coming undone.
Activist Harriet Stowe was adamant about the value of details: “To be really great in little things, to be truly noble and heroic in the insipid details of everyday life, is a virtue so rare as to be worthy of canonisation.”
There are few places more void of detail than social media. The culture of social media inspires the user to shorten, chop up and regurgitate partial information in favour of speed versus detail.
Often, I receive e-mails asking for career advice or mentoring requests, and I’m always puzzled by how little attention people pay to the details of the most important aspects of their life.
If you are sending out a CV or communicating to a potential business partner, why would you short-change yourself by creating blind spots in your stakeholder’s mind due to leaving out colourful details?
The great yoga proponent and spiritual teacher, Sivananda, said: “A mountain is composed of tiny grains of earth. The ocean is made up of tiny drops of water. Even so, life is but an endless series of little details, actions, speeches and thoughts. And the consequences whether good or bad of even the least of them are far-reaching.”
Publisher and author William Feather went further, even sounding an alarm: “Beware of the man who can’t be bothered with details,” he said.
The temptation only to focus on the big picture is always there. Artists and many creative professionals are prone to skipping around subtle specifics, particularly the details which lie outside the areas of their passion.
Where possible, delegate distracting details. Fortunately, there are people out there who love the things you despise.
Achieving your goals requires marrying “detailed living” and “bold visionary thinking”.
To develop a systematic personal posture to living your dreams which ignores the relationship between vision and detail is cheating yourself.
The author of Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Elbert Hubbard wrote: “Genius is the art of taking infinite pains. All great achievement has been characterised by extreme care, infinite painstaking, even to the minutest detail.”
As you build your personal brand, enjoy paying attention to the details that make up your brand’s story.
l Contact Timothy Webster at at info@timothymaurice.com
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