details

On the Diary of a CEO podcast, Tim Rover, who worked with Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant amongst others, said that the people who succeed are the ones who obsess with the tiniest of details. They don’t want to get 1% better, because at this point they maybe don’t even have that margin of progress. They want to get 0.001% better.

And I agree, to a certain extent: if you want to get better at anything, at some point you are going to have to look in the corners, where no one else is looking. But if you are just starting or if you don’t know where you want to go, you can’t go to the details yet, you need to start with the bigger picture. Once you’ve got that, then go down and down and down in the details.

Because when you are starting something new, when you are just getting curious about something, the details will only overwhelm or frustrate you. I have been there. Get the bigger picture first. Then you might decide that you don’t even like that project, that sport, that subject, and that’s fine. So you move on to the next project/sport/subject, with your curiosity as your guide, until you arrive at a point where you are so obsessed with that you feel compelled to go into the tiny details.