Sometimes small things can be important; for example, that little rattle in your car’s engine could just be a loose piece of plastic, or it could be a sign your timing belt is about to snap. The key is having the higher-level perspective to make fast and accurate judgments on what the real risks are without getting bogged down in details.
Remember: One of the most important decisions you can make is who you ask questions of. Make sure they’re fully informed and believable. Find out who is responsible for whatever you are seeking to understand and then ask them. Listening to uninformed people is worse than having no answers at all. Don’t believe everything you hear. Opinions are a dime a dozen and nearly everyone will share theirs with you. Many will state them as if they are facts. Don’t mistake opinions for facts. Everything looks bigger up close. In all aspects of life, what’s happening today seems like a much bigger deal than it will appear in retrospect. That’s why it helps to step back to gain perspective and sometimes defer a decision until some time passes. New is overvalued relative to great. For example, when choosing which movie to watch or what book to read, are you drawn to proven classics or the newest big thing? In my opinion, it is smarter to choose the great over the new. Don’t over squeeze dots. A dot is just one piece of data from one moment in time; keep that in perspective as you synthesize. Just as you need to sort big from small and what’s happening in the moment from overall patterns, you need to know how much learning you can get out of any one dot without overweighing it.
Synthesize the situation through time. To see how the dots connect through time you must collect, analyze, and sort different types of information, which isn’t easy. For example, let’s imagine a day in which eight outcomes occur. Some are good, some bad. People who are good at pulling out such patterns of events are rare and essential, but as with most abilities, synthesizing through time is only partially innate; even if you’re not good at it, you can get better through practice. You’ll increase your chances of succeeding at it if you follow the next principle. Keep in mind both the rates of change and the levels of things, and the relationships between them. When determining an acceptable rate of improvement for something, it is its level in relation to the rate of change that matters. I often see people lose sight of this. They say “it’s getting better” without noticing how far below the bar it is and whether the rate of change will get it above the bar in an acceptable amount of time. If someone who has been getting grades of 30s and 40s on their tests raised their scores to 50s over the course of a few months it would be accurate to say that they are getting better, but they would still be woefully inadequate. Everything important in your life needs to be on a trajectory to be above the bar and headed toward excellent at an appropriate pace.