Everyone is attuned to a particular kind of mistake. People have “pet peeves” that they’re more prone to notice, be bothered by, and seek to correct. Fundamentally there’s nothing wrong with trying to make your corner of the world better, but correcting your particular style of mistake can quickly become a sort of addiction if you aren’t careful.
The problem is that people very rarely step back and establish “detail thresholds” for certain kinds of projects. Let’s say your particular pet peeve is when people use horizontal brushstrokes when painting instead of vertical ones. Minor in the grand scheme of things, but maybe it’s technically better to use vertical ones so all else being equal, you know that’s what you should do. Okay, so far nothing inherently wrong with the little quirk.
But now let’s say that you’re a major project leader for a huge real estate project. You’re in charge of the construction of a dozen six-story apartment buildings, and you have tight budgets and deadlines. If you spend any time or effort going from room to room during the painting process and tell individual workers to use vertical brush strokes instead of horizontal ones, you’re insane.
At that level of responsibility, you need to focus on aspects of the project that will have a large impact on the final outcome. Brush direction falls well below that “detail threshold,” but people don’t generally take the time to establish that concept at all. They look for problems, which is good – but they don’t rank those problems based on impact, but often based on their personal preferences.
Finding and correcting mistakes is not a free or effortless process. Based on the scope of the project and your level of responsibility, many mistakes will simply fall below the threshold where the marginal benefit of correcting them is worth that effort.
Before starting any project, take the time to think generally about that. Ask yourself what kind of impact on the project would be worth your time to address? A sinkhole that threatens the structural integrity of an entire building is well above the “mistake margin.” The wrong wattage of light bulbs in the supply closet isn’t.
Ask it like this: “For any given problem, what happens if I don’t correct it?” This isn’t about being okay with mistakes – it’s about prioritizing the ones with the biggest effect. What would actually happen if the painters used horizontal brush strokes? There’s the tiniest possible chance of a fringe scenario where a potential tenant, who also happens to be a painter, is exactly on the fence about whether to rent an apartment or not and notices the slightly worse paint job and decides not to rent the place, and as a result, it takes an extra few days to find a tenant for one apartment. Maybe a 1% chance of that happening, and even if it did, it wouldn’t change a thing about the final profitability of the project.
Don’t get addicted to a particular kind of mistake. Find the big rocks to move and move them.
The Opportunity Machine 