The little things add up to the big picture. It’s a saying I’ve kept in mind since I was a kid.
Growing up in the world of sports, I always understood the idea of doing the little things. The big things are the ones that grab headlines or show up in the box score – hitting home runs or driving in runs in baseball, scoring points in basketball, piling up the yards in football, and so forth. To win, you must score more than your opponent – that’s the bottom line. But winning a game requires more than just the direct act of putting a ball in a basket or touching home plate, or stopping your opponent from doing the same thing.
The little things don’t start the headlines of most recaps in the newspaper or show up in the highlights on SportsCenter. Even so, they are immensely valuable to a team’s success. While sports is the most prominent example of this, that also happens outside of there. And the idea remains the same.
Winning a baseball game, broken down, requires a lot of things to score runs. Even the most direct way a run is scored – a home run – requires more than merely swinging a bat. It means a good swing on a pitch in a good enough spot to hit it, and sometimes being able to hit a tough pitch. Sometimes it means working a count to get the pitch to hit out or hitting a mistake pitch thrown by the pitcher. Other ways that runs are scored take things like good baserunning, hitting the ball where fielders aren’t playing (i.e., going the other way while the opponent is playing you to pull the ball) and running as hard as you can to beat out a throw on a close play.
Or think about basketball. The highlights will show the game-winning three-point shot, but will they also show the screen someone set to get the shooter open? They will show a fast break dunk, but will they show the time the point guard on this running team knew it made more sense to slow down to make a better play? Those who know the game well speak of players who “do things that don’t show up in the box score.”
In most sports, there is also the prevention of the opponent from scoring. This can take the form of knowing the opponent’s strengths and how to stop them, such as not letting a basketball player go to his right when he’s weak going to his left, or playing a particular defense against another team in football, and executing the game plan properly. Sometimes this comes from the experience of playing against an individual or team in the past. This also involves reading the action as well, and often the team that reads what the opponent is doing better will then make the winning play(s).
Most jobs require someone to utilize a core set of skills on an everyday basis to perform a core set of responsibilities. For me, it means I develop software, primarily using a few programming languages and/or tools. But writing code is not the only thing I do by a long shot, and there are a number of activities surrounding that which go hand-in-hand with it.
Besides writing code, I often have to produce various forms of documentation. At one company, any engineer who was essentially a product owner had to produce and maintain their own documentation, which might include a specification or requirements document as well as a user manual of sorts. I’ve also been in settings where background information that led to a solution is documented for the benefit of others on the team who are likely to use it. In all of this, I have to consider my audience – usually other engineers, but not always.
I also have to understand how to approach someone for more information, including if they might have limited availability because of meetings or if they might be somewhere other than their office. I have to know who to talk to in order to get the best information, which sometimes means asking someone else who knows the most about it. And to make the most of someone’s time, I have to come prepared to ask the right question(s).
A big part of what I do also involves understanding how to make something a little better and/or easier for myself or others. This may or may not involve writing code – indeed, there are days when I write no code at all, and not unproductive ones.
Just as a box score might show the bottom line of a game but not tell you the whole story, so, too, will one’s resume not tell the whole story. You might have a resume that shows you having all of the most desirable skills for a job, but do you know how to best use them? Do you know how to grow into something better? Do you know how to work with teammates to get a desirable product or result? Those are things that a resume won’t show, but one must give a sense of them in an interview.
In a work or athletic context, winning teams need people to produce. That certainly is not in doubt. They also need people to do things that don’t show up in the production metrics, because at the end of the day, those things help drive the production metrics that everyone looks at. They might not be tracked in the same way, but there can be no doubt of their importance in the grand scheme of things.