As some make gossip out of everything, so others business. They always talk big, take everything in earnest, and turn it into a dispute or a secret... Much that would be something has become nothing by being left alone, and what was nothing has become of consequence by being made much of... 'Tis by no means the least of life's rules: to let things alone.
Baltasar Gracián, 1647 (tr. Joseph Jacobs, 1892)
Some people are escalation machines: every remark becomes a dispute, every oversight a matter of principle, every molehill a file. The physics they never learn is stated plainly: attention is what most small troubles feed on, and things left alone shrink while things made much of grow. The remark unanswered dies in a day; answered formally, it becomes a correspondence; escalated, a feud with its own anniversary. The timing note cuts both ways: real matters are cheapest settled at the outset, so the skill is a fast honest sort, is this actually business?, and then either prompt attention or complete, disciplined neglect. The middle path, slow simmering engagement, is the only wrong answer.
Practice
- Run the ripeness test on every provocation: will this matter in a month? No: starve it completely, no reply, no retelling, no file.
- For the genuine business, act at the outset while it is small; the sorting is fast, the middle-ground simmering is what costs (maxim 72 forbids the dam).
- Watch your own conversion rate: if slights regularly become projects around you, you are the escalation machine, and the storms are subscribing to you.
Use this when
- Use this on society disputes, group-message frictions, and office slights, the three great factories of nothing-made-something.
- Use it as a leader doubly; your attention is an amplifier, and what you officially notice becomes an agenda item (maxim 88 files a tenth).
Ignore this when
- Don't let it alone when it touches health, money, or record; those files grow silently and are business from day one (maxim 254's linked evils).
- Don't confuse letting alone with looking away from people in trouble; matters may be starved, persons may not.
A picture of it
The society's two wings fought a two-year war whose origin no one could state under oath, a parking remark, answered by a notice, answered by a counter-notice, until the AGMs needed a police constable and the building's sale prices sagged under its reputation. The new secretary's innovation was doing nothing, formally and well: complaints without substance received a warm acknowledgement and no engine; the three real items, water, lift, accounts, were fixed fast and published. Deprived of fuel and given results, the war did not end so much as fail to attend. The constable was last needed at a Diwali function, for the queue at the counter.
Answer the three things that are business. The rest are weather balloons; shoot none down and they drift away.