I had a friend who loved to say “Don’t sweat the small stuff.” The problem is, it’s often the small stuff that makes you sweat.
Boeing spent $4 billion on a machine they thought would revolutionise air travel—the 737 Max. But a few lines of defective code led to two crashes, killing 346 people. The 737 Max became a $20 billion nightmare - all from one small oversight.
The magic of ‘Max’ was the manoeuvring characteristics augmentation system (MCAS) that 99% of pilots would never use. A tiny amount of computer code, relative to the massive scale of the plane itself, only cost a handful of dollars because Boeing outsourced the coding to save money. But a small oversight in the resulting code, later described as ‘unbelievably deficient’, led to multiple crashes, all their new planes being grounded, and five years of their stock tanking.
Similarly, NASA spent $327 million on the Mars Climate Orbiter in 1999. Mission control forgot to convert units from English to metric, and suddenly the orbiter was disintegrating over Mars. Years and years of painstaking work vaporised in minutes.
Big ambitious dreams are brought down by the smallest mistakes.
The shortcut to save time. The lack of sleep before an exam. We put off for later what seems unimportant now, and only remember when disaster strikes. Those tiny choices can compound into colossal failures.
Don’t let your efforts go to waste because you forgot to sweat the small stuff.
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