“Watch the little things. A small leak will sink a great ship.” Benjamin Franklin

A message from Terry:  Disasters are impossible to ignore.  When someone botches a task they’ve been asked to handle, or the whole morning’s schedule collapses like a house of cards, everyone notices and rallies to pick up the pieces.

Ironically, little errors and omissions are harder to detect, and harder to repair. Big emergencies get our adrenaline pumping, priming us to jump in and DO something! By contrast, little bumps in the road are easy to shrug off. Or, if we notice them, we find ourselves feeling more annoyed than challenged. There isn’t anything heroic about fixing the little problems. Instead, we often manage to convince ourselves that they don’t really make much of a difference, or even that those mini-problems will fix themselves or disappear on their own, if we just ignore them long enough.

But thoughts like that encourage you to ignore one of the oldest and wisest proverbs of all: “A stitch in time saves nine.” If we spot the little flaws and errors, they can usually be corrected with a minimum of fuss, muss and bother. If we ignore them, it gives them a chance to thrive and grow until they become so big and disruptive that they demand our attention.

So let’s think small, for a change. Let’s fine-tune our antennae and whip out our magnifying glasses, then launch a full-out search for all of those little flaws and foibles that keep us from being our very best. Start a list and keep track of them, one by one, as you isolate each small problem, identify it, and find just the right solution for it.

This week, can you spot one mini-problem a day, and find a solution for it?