You know me, I usually dive into things headfirst. I like the big projects, the ambitious fixes. I’m the guy who sees a rusty shed and immediately starts planning a three-story glass tower. It’s exciting, right? Problem is, that approach has completely destroyed my last three attempts at launching anything profitable on the side. I learned the hard way that ambition without microscopic focus just leads to bankruptcy of effort.
I was stuck. I’d just tried to implement a new customer relationship management (CRM) tool for my consulting work, thinking I could just plug in a few pre-built modules and it would handle everything. I spent two solid weeks on the high-level architecture—the database schema, the fancy dashboard visualizations. I skipped the boring stuff. Naturally, it imploded spectacularly on the first live test. Data was misfiled, notifications were going out to the wrong clients, and I spent a frantic Sunday morning manually undoing six hours of automated damage. I wanted to just throw the laptop out the window.
That Monday, I was staring at the failure log, feeling completely defeated. I remembered that old copy of the I Ching that’s been collecting dust on my shelf—the one my old man swore by whenever his factory had supply chain issues. Just out of spite, I pulled it down, threw the coins, and asked what I needed to do to stop failing at the easiest tasks.
The resulting hexagram was 62, Xiao Guo: Preponderance of the Small.
The Mandate: Stop Flying High and Start Walking Low
The reading hit me like a ton of bricks. It wasn’t about the grand vision; it was about the tiny, boring details. The core advice was essentially: “Focus on the small things, be overly cautious, and don’t aim for anything spectacular right now.” This felt completely counterintuitive to my nature, which usually screams “Go big or go home!” But since “Go big” had just sent me home crying, I figured I had nothing to lose by trying the opposite.
I decided to apply the Hexagram 62 rule to rebuilding that disastrous CRM. I didn’t just rebuild it; I forced myself to work at a ridiculously slow, detail-oriented pace. I had to focus on the corners, not the center.
My 62 Practice Log: The Humbling Details
The whole process felt tedious, like filling out tax forms with a calligraphy pen, but I logged every step. It went against every fiber of my being to move this slowly, but I stuck to the principle of “flying low.”
- First Week: Cleaning Up the Nouns. I used to be terrible with naming conventions. Sometimes it was clientData, sometimes it was cust_info, sometimes just user_data. I spent four days just on standardizing every single variable name across every script, making sure there were zero ambiguities. The hexagram says the small details must be perfect, and the smallest detail in code is the name you give something. It was boring, but for the first time, my whole system looked clean.
- Micro-Testing the Inputs. I wrote unit tests for every single input field in the CRM. Not just testing if the input was a valid email, but testing what happens if someone put in an emoji, or 10,000 characters, or just pressed the space bar 15 times. I’d always skipped this, thinking “no one would actually do that.” But Hexagram 62 warns you to prepare for the smallest, weirdest possibility. I fixed three critical vulnerabilities in the data pipeline just by being excessively paranoid about what people might type into a basic form field.
- Documenting the Obvious Connections. I forced myself to create a flow chart showing how a simple button click led to the database update. Before, I just kept the flow in my head. By drawing it out, step by step, I discovered I had a redundant logging operation running every time a contact was updated. It wasn’t a huge performance hit, but it was an unnecessary detail—a loose thread. I snipped it. This focus on trimming the unnecessary small parts made the whole structure lighter and faster.
- The Anti-Automation Stance. For critical operations, like sending confirmation emails, I temporarily disabled the super-fancy, integrated automation tools. Instead, I wrote a simple, bulletproof function just to handle that one task. It was less cool, but it was guaranteed to work. The hexagram taught me that sometimes, simplifying the mechanism is the only way to gain stability.
The Unexpected Victory
Two weeks later, I had the core CRM functionality back online. It wasn’t feature-rich, it didn’t have the beautiful dashboard I’d wasted time on before, but every single interaction was flawless. Every piece of data went exactly where it was supposed to go, every notification fired exactly when it should have.
And here’s the crazy part: because the foundation was perfect, scaling up the rest of the features felt effortless. When I went to implement the reporting module, the data was already so clean and organized from the “Preponderance of the Small” work that the reports basically wrote themselves. The big results came automatically, but only because I honored the tiny, invisible steps first.
If you’re stuck on a big project, fighting against massive complexity, stop. Stop trying to fly high. Walk low. Focus on the smallest functional component you can think of. Make sure that single, humiliatingly small detail is perfect. Then do the next one. That slow, painful focus on the details—that’s how you win big. Trust me, I only figured this out when I was forced to abandon my ego and listen to an old book about caution.
