A marriage ends because of a bag of granola. A billion-dollar company obsesses over the sound their packaging makes when opened (a.ka sonic branding). A cycling team paints their truck’s interior white to spot dust that might compromise performance… these aren’t stories about people with OCD – they’re about the small details that most of us are too busy, too important, or too lazy to care about.
You see, we humans are a special kind of stupid. We’ll spend months planning the perfect wedding venue and first dance, but forget that love is built in ordinary moments and small gestures. We’ll pull all-nighters perfecting a client presentation down to the last pixel, but then miss deadline after deadline once we’ve won their business. We’re masters of the grand gesture, but absolute disasters at perseverance and commitment.
So, about that granola story… some time ago, I watched an interview with a divorce lawyer James Sexton, that perfectly captures our human fallacy. For years, his client would notice when his wife’s favourite granola was running low and quietly replace it before it ran out. No announcements, no seeking credit – he just did it. Then one day, the granola ran out. The empty bag sat there, like a middle finger to their relationship. Days passed.
The same wife shared with James another story from their early marriage days. Each morning, she would give her husband “an executive perk” – two minutes that would set his energy and motivation to get through the day. Then one day, she started questioning this morning ritual because she felt she wasn’t getting the same attention reciprocated. So she stopped. And just like that, another thread of their connection began to unravel.
…ok, I’m not naive enough to think this marriage ended solely because of granola and bjs (though any nutritionist would tell you both are excellent sources of protein (:. Real relationships are infinitely more complex, with countless tiny details that both partners gradually start to neglect. These are just the symptoms that stuck in memory, the tangible examples of a much larger pattern of small giving-ups from both sides.
The butterfly effect
Maintaining standards is boring. Mind-numbingly, soul-crushingly boring. And there’s actual science behind why we’re so terrible at this. Research from the European Journal of Social Psychology shows it actually takes 66 days on average to form a habit. And a research from Roy Baumeister on decision fatigue shows that we have a finite amount of willpower each day. Every decision, every act of self-control, every maintained standard depletes it. By the end of the day, we’re running on emotional and cognitive fumes. That’s why even the most disciplined people might find themselves skipping the granola + banana run.
These small actions create what scientists call “butterfly effects” – tiny initial changes that lead to massive unexpected outcomes. A client remembers how you noticed their coffee preference three years ago, and brings you their company’s biggest contract. An employee recalls how you remembered their birthday and stays loyal during a crisis. That morning “coffee service” leads to a more energetic husband, who crushes his presentation, lands the promotion, and takes you to Tuvalu. Or doesn’t – because you decided it wasn’t worth the effort.
To give or not to give a damn – that is not a question
Steven Bartlett touches on this same principle when he talks about “the 1%’s” – those tiny details most people overlook because they’re too busy chasing the big wins. He argues that these small things ultimately create the greatest differentiation between success and mediocrity. The truth is, most people know they should pay attention to details. But knowing isn’t the same as doing. The real difference comes from consistently executing on this knowledge, when others won’t.
So yes, sweat the small stuff. Notice the details. Replace the granola. Because in the end, there is no big stuff – there’s just a lot of small stuff that adds up to something significant.
The real cost of “not today”
The most dangerous phrase in any language is
“I’ll do it tomorrow.”
because tomorrow becomes next week, becomes next month, becomes too late. Just like watching your plant die – you don’t notice it day to day, but suddenly you’re looking at a sad, brown stick in a pot, wondering when exactly things went wrong. Relationships and businesses die the same way – not with a bang, but with a thousand tiny surrenders. I’m a professional plant killer here, so speaking from experience:
Your future self is being shaped right now, in this moment, by what you choose to do next. Excellence isn’t about grand gestures or dramatic innovations. It’s about being the person who shows up. Every. Single. Time. Even when it’s inconvenient, even when nobody’s watching, even when ‘good enough’ would probably do. Because that’s the real competitive advantage – actually giving a damn when everyone else is too busy making excuses.
Move fast and break things (Including your promise not to be an asshole)
We all heard the Blockbuster story. They were making $800M just from late fees – essentially building their business model on punishing customers for enjoying their product a little too much. When Netflix offered to sell themselves to Blockbuster for $50M, their CEO supposedly laughed it off. After all, why fix what’s profitable? (Spoiler alert: that laugh cost NFLX $392.78 billion). Turns out customers don’t actually enjoy being treated like delinquents for keeping “The Notebook” an extra day.
Traditional banks are still perfecting their talent for charging you creative fees for accessing your own money. Meanwhile, neobanks like Revolut and Wise showed up with this revolutionary concept – not screwing you on exchange rates. PayPal and Western Union were too busy perfecting their “f*ck you, pay me” algorithms to notice that customers were developing a strange aversion to being mugged via transaction fees.
And trust me, I know this pain intimately. At Oishya, we allow customers to pay in GBP, USD and EUR, but being a UK company means PayPal has us in a chokehold. Since we can only add a UK bank account to their merchant account, we’re forced to use their merciless exchange rates + their processing fees. Every USD transaction costs us 6.70%, EUR ones are even worse at 6.75%. (GBP transactions get hit with a 3.20% “thanks for existing” fee). PayPal knows they’ve got us by the balls – they’re too convenient to leave, too established to ignore – especially the US customers love them. It’s the ultimate “convenience tax.”
So I do not-so-secretly hope for an underdog who will challenge them eventually.
But it’s fascinating to watch how this cycle repeats itself.
Those same neobanks that once disrupted traditional finance with their user-friendly apps and transparent fees are slowly developing the same symptoms they once fought against. Feature bloat, declining service, mysterious fees creeping in.
Tom Blomfield (Monzo’s founder) said it best:
“Today’s disruptors are tomorrow’s incumbents, eventually burdened with their own legacy systems and corporate inertia”.
But that’s not an excuse to give up. If anything, it’s a reminder that staying good is harder than becoming good. While the old giants are having their fifteenth meeting about scheduling a meeting to discuss their waterfall digital transformation roadmap’s planning session, there’s always room for companies who simply choose to give a damn. Who understand that basic human decency shouldn’t be a competitive advantage – but hey, if everyone else is determined to suck, might as well win by not sucking.
Just do what you say you’ll do
Success isn’t about doing extraordinary things. It’s about noticing the granola jar before it’s empty. It’s about answering that email before it becomes urgent. It’s about giving a damn about the details when everyone else is chasing the next big thing. There are no big moments and no dramatic transformations.
So yes, sweat the small stuff. Because in the end, there is no big stuff – there’s just a lot of small stuff that adds up to everything that matters.
