for they never come alone: they are linked together like pieces of good fortune... One slip is a little thing: yet some fatal loss may follow it till you do not know where it will end... Do not wake Misfortune when she sleeps.
Baltasar Gracián, 1647 (tr. Joseph Jacobs, 1892)
Small troubles are dangerous precisely because they rarely arrive alone. Misfortunes come linked in a file, one pulling the next, so that a slip dismissed as trivial can begin a chain whose end you cannot foresee. The counsel is to take the small evil seriously, to bar the door at the first one rather than wait until the sequence is running, because by then it may have gone somewhere fatal. There is a companion caution: do not wake trouble that is sleeping, do not stir a small bad thing into a large one by poking at it needlessly. Attend to the first small problem while it is still small and still the only one, and you often prevent the whole file that would otherwise have followed it in.
Practice
- Treat the small trouble seriously and close it early; misfortunes travel in files, and the first is the cheapest to stop (maxim 138 knows what to let alone).
- Bar the door at the first slip; by the time the chain is running, the end is somewhere you cannot see or control.
- Do not needlessly wake sleeping trouble; some small bad things grow only when poked, so know which to close and which to leave.
Use this when
- Use this on the minor problem you are tempted to ignore; the small crack is where the chain of failures usually begins.
- Use it in risk-prone areas where one slip compounds: finances, health, reputation, safety.
Ignore this when
- Don't swing into treating every trivial thing as a catastrophe; the point is not to despise the small evil, not to inflate it (maxim 208 warns against overthinking).
- Don't wake trouble that is genuinely asleep; some small bad things are best left undisturbed, not attacked.
A picture of it
Two managers spot the same small irregularity in a vendor's invoices. The first waves it off as trivial and moves on, and the small slip, unaddressed, is the first bead in a file: a second irregularity, then a pattern, then a fraud that surfaces months later at a size that threatens the department. The second treats her small version as the thing to close now, questions it at once, and stops the chain at the first link. Same trivial beginning. One despised the small evil and met the large one it grew into; the other barred the door while it was still just a door.
The small evil is the first bead in a file. Bar the door at the first, before the chain runs somewhere you cannot follow.