Big Picture Mindset? More Like, Voluntary Myopia

I have quite bad eyesight. I use two pairs of glasses, like older people do; one for looking at distant things, one for looking at nearby objects. I change them all the time as the day goes. As annoying as it can be, it’s so part of my daily flow that I just don’t notice the nuisance anymore.
Among several disorders, I have hypermetropia, which is a condition in which I can’t see clearly objects near me. When dinner is over at home, and I start to clean up the table, it’s always interesting to see how different the table looks to me with and without my glasses. I like to do this silly exercise where I clean without glasses, only to then put on my reading ones and see how filthy the table still is. The same happens when I look at the sky with and without my other glasses; I can see many stars disappearing as soon as I take them off; the sky suddenly becomes unsettlingly dark, except for the brightest ones (and the Moon, which luckily I can still see it even without glasses).

I learned eons ago not to trust life around me without glasses, for my eye condition might be hiding important details of my surroundings.

Standing on this analogy, projects and complex endeavors are like my table after dinner: you either see the small stuff or you don’t, depending on what glasses you put on. It has become somewhat trendy to claim oneself to have a “big picture mindset”. This is equivalent to confessing you have a raging hypermetropia. You choose not to see the crumbs. The question is whether you have a pair of reading glasses at hand if needed, or you choose to see your professional life as a constantly blurred image.

Projects come to fruition when absolutely all the things, including the tiniest of the nuances, the minutiae, the incredibly specialized small stuff, comes together. There’s no point in building a house without ensuring the toilets have their floats, or assembling a bicycle without the bolts that keep the brakes attached to the frame. Things—systems, products, whatever—become useful and successful if everything, accounting up to the last bit, converges in a more or less harmonious way.
In general, having a “big picture” mindset can be reasonably useful. It may help you ‘zoom out’ from the buzzing details, observe things from a more abstract distance and gain knowledge about a situation. But you cannot go on in life the myopic way. You need to focus when needed.

There’s too many myopic people out there, with no glasses at hand, leading things. Interestingly, they are the first to be shocked, and at times even annoyed, when exposed to the fact that the table is full of crumbs.