SEPTEMBER 18, 2026 – What now seems to be in ancient times (the 1990s), the self-help guru Richard Carlson was punching out a series of books with a target market of human gerbils striving to get ahead on the proverbial wheel. Most of us gerbils had discovered that no matter how fast we made the wheel go round, we made little progress, and even the marginal progress was limited to moving up one or two rungs on the wheel. Rarely did we move placement of the wheel forward. In any event, we remained confined to a cage.
Mr. Carlson, however, imagined a much bigger wheel; one with bright lights and music and swinging seats, like a veritable Ferris wheel circling in place, but nevertheless allowing a lofty ride. It wasn’t long before he occupied a comfy operator’s chair, collecting magnificent fares and appearance fees. For him, the only “cage” was the inescapable one of mortality. (He died of a pulmonary embolism aboard a flight from CA to NY. He was just 45.)
His big best seller was Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff . . . and It’s All Small Stuff. It seemed to be perpetually hypermarketed in the big chain bookstores that I frequented back then. I never read the book or even inspected its cover, but could easily infer its pitch, its hook—that being, I imagined, the advice that to be happy and successful (as defined by the dominant culture), go big, not small; aim high and deflect all the inconsequential annoyances of life.
On one level, the theory seemed reasonable. It reminded me of a lawyer at one of my old law firms; a feisty litigator who was smart and very hard-working—dedicated to his work more than was good for anyone affected by his myopia, including himself. He was insufferable as he bore down on all the “small stuff” of every case he handled. The rest of us would’ve been fine if he’d kept to his own office, but he was constantly bugging anyone in the department who hadn’t remembered to close his/her office door before Mr. Legal Beagle wandered in to seek advice and counsel on excruciatingly “small stuff.” If Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff . . . and It’s All Small Stuff had come to market before then, I would’ve bought a copy, inscribed “Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff” across the half-title page, passed it around the department for everyone to sign, then left it on Mr. Legal “Minutiae” Beagle’s chair (while he was sweating the small stuff in someone else’s office). As we might’ve predicted, he burned himself out and left the firm after less than a year . . . sweating the small stuff.
Over my work life, certainly, I’ve encountered lots of other people who couldn’t see the forest for the trees. They’d get so hung up on inconsequential matters, they were effectively self-paralyzed. I myself fell into this category for a time—back when I was a baby lawyer and didn’t yet have the experience or knowledge to distinguish the small stuff from the big stuff and therefore, sweated all stuff.
The crowning example of this occurred when Dan, the head of the real estate department at my old firm of Briggs and Morgan (now Taft Stettinius & Hollister, LLP) assigned to me the job of representing one of our principal banking clients in negotiating and closing a construction loan. I’d just joined the department (after a year in pure litigation), and though I was acquainted with the words, “loan” and “construction,” I had no idea what legal issues and tasks were involved in the context of a “construction loan.”
Dan, the department chair, was a seasoned lawyer, of course, and he assured me that he would “help me along” in the matter. First up were the document templates that would have to be prepared, negotiated with the attorney representing the prospective borrower, and finalized before closing. He sat me down in our department’s main conference room one afternoon and ran through the list of documents, a sample set of which was stacked up on the table where we sat side by side.
“You start with the loan agreement,” he said, handing me a 30-some-page document, “and continue with the promissory note, the mortgage, the guaranty, the . . .” Soon the stack of standard construction loan documents that had been on his left was a Leaning Tower of Paper on my right.
“What I’ll do is prepare the first drafts of everything and mail them out to the borrower’s lawyer for review. Since I’ll be on vacation for the next two weeks; leaving Friday [it was Wednesday]—our family’s going on a camping trip down in New Mexico; don’t know what access I’ll have to a pay phone—In my cover letter I’ll tell the lawyer to contact you to discuss any questions he has. When I get back, we can finalize and go over title . . .”
I shuddered. What all this meant was I’d be tending the store, so to speak, all by myself, with no clue what I was doing. Dan knew this, of course, and told me to “talk to Dave” (the other senior lawyer in the department, who was Dan’s predecessor as well as his successor (the two traded the chairperson position periodically), if I “had any questions.”
The drafts went out, Dan left for vacation, and a day or two later, I received from the borrower’s lawyer a lengthy letter listing his innumerable proposed changes to the documents. The letter ended with, “Please call me to set up a time when we can discuss.”
I was so new to the game, I had no idea what to make of his several pages worth of requests for modifications. What I didn’t fully appreciate at the time was that the lawyer was someone who “sweated small stuff,” and that in his world view, all the small stuff was BIG stuff. To me, all the gobbledygook in those loan documents (and thus in the letter seeking modifications thereto) was just plain “stuff.” I had no idea how to distinguish “small” from “big.”
At that stage, my biggest fear wasn’t the other lawyer with his countless “asks.” It was Dan, returning all sunburned from vacation, and learning that I’d given away the store. But since I didn’t know the difference between the cash register and the Popsicle-splitting device sitting next to the metaphorical cash register or the difference between meat and dairy down one aisle and Twinkies and Tootsie Rolls down another, I took the safe route: In effect, I slammed shut and locked the doors to the store by saying “No” to everything—absolutely everything the lawyer was requesting.
Of course, Dan got a good laugh out of my protective stance when he returned to “the store” and set me straight on what was small stuff and what was big; what to sweat over and what to give on. It was all an excellent lesson on how to direct myself to understand better, how to distinguish between big stuff and small so that I didn’t wind up sweating (or not sweating) over the wrong stuff.
As I advanced in life, however, I learned that if I didn’t sweat some—and in fact a lot—of “small stuff,” it could become very big stuff with very big fangs that could bite me in the butt.
Low tire pressure, for example. A two-pound drop in psi might be something too small to sweat over—at first. I learned this just recently with my car. My son had noticed it when he borrowed my car for his drive up to the Red Cabin. He stopped to add enough air to restore the psi, and it seemed to hold for the rest of the drive. Why sweat the small stuff? I thought, when he appeared. The next morning, however, the tire was flatter than a pancake. Because I hadn’t bothered to sweat the small stuff, I was inconvenienced far more than a bit of earlier sweat would’ve cost.
Perhaps, I thought, “don’t sweat the small stuff” required a cautionary corollary to the effect that, “An ounce of perspiration can be worth a pound of expletives.”
In quite a different context, however, my dad once made an observation about “details” that could also be applied to “sweating (or not) over the small stuff.” In comparing two recordings of a piece, he remarked that Artist A, featured in the first recording, paid closer attention to detail than Artist B, playing in the second. “The thing is,” I remember distinctly Dad saying, “often one detail—one note or chord or phrase or crescendo or diminuendo—doesn’t make or break the performance; but in combination, all the thousands of details of a performance add up. Together, they make all the difference. So, the more you pay attention to every single detail, the better the piece as a whole is going to sound.”
Dad’s middle name was “Detail,” and no matter what the context, he paid close attention to all the details. It could be said that if anyone sweated over them, it was he. Yet, he could also step back from a project and know when it was okay not to sweat a detail—not to sweat the small stuff.
Such an occasion occurred up at the Red Cabin when he was helping me nail reworked lumber (roofing boards from the old red log cabin that had been on the site and from which I’d salvaged lots of perfectly fine old lumber) onto the walls of a room. I ran the tape measure and saw, while Dad swung the hammer. In measuring the cutout of a board to fit it around an outlet box, I was wide on one side by a quarter of an inch. The board still fit, but it wasn’t as perfectly snug as I’d expected.
“Darn!” I said, in a tone too harsh for “small stuff.”
“What’s wrong?” Dad asked.
“I can’t believe it! I measured twice and cut once—wrong. Look . . . the cut-out is too wide.”
Dad took a gander and with barely a thought said, “Oh, no one’s going to notice that. The cover plate will cover the gap, and besides, you’ll probably wind up putting a piece of furniture up against that wall. Don’t worry about it!”
Dad the Detail Man knew better than I . . . not to sweat the small stuff.
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© 2026 by Eric Nilsson
