A great man ought not to be little in his behaviour... For though it is important to know all, it is not necessary to know all about all... To overlook forms a large part of the work of ruling. Most things must be left unnoticed among relatives and friends, and even among enemies.
Baltasar Gracián, 1647 (tr. Joseph Jacobs, 1892)
Overlooking is governance, not weakness. Any position of standing, boss, partner, parent, elder, comes with full visibility into a hundred daily frictions, and the amateur error is treating visibility as an obligation to respond. Every friction you officially notice becomes an agenda item; notice them all and you preside over a permanent tribunal that exhausts everyone, yourself first. The great decline to be little: they register everything, act on the tenth that matters, and let the rest pass unrecorded. This is doubly true among familiars, where the alternative to overlooking is a relationship conducted as case law. Hovering around what annoys you is, the quote says, a kind of mania. It is also a choice.
Practice
- Sort frictions by consequence, not by irritation: the repeated story is charm, the repeated missed handover is business. Only business gets noticed officially.
- When you must correct, correct once, cleanly, and close the file; nobility is in the not-reopening.
- Watch your hover-list, the small things you circle back to; each is a mania candidate, and dropping one is a visible gift to everyone including you.
Use this when
- Use this the day you take charge of anything; the first month's noticing pattern becomes the office's permanent weather.
- Use it in partnerships and marriages, where the tribunal alternative has a documented failure rate.
Ignore this when
- Don't overlook hazards to health, money, or the vulnerable; the tenth you notice must include everything that actually endangers (the same line the parents-maxims draw).
- Don't let overlooking curdle into never being corrected by anyone; this maxim governs your downward and sideways gaze, not your accountability (maxim 147 keeps that door open).
A picture of it
Two partners built a garment business over twenty years, and the elder was asked, at a felicitation, how the partnership had survived when most don't. His answer embarrassed the interviewer with its smallness: in twenty years I have noticed perhaps one thing in ten that irritated me, and mentioned one in ten of those. The younger partner, listening, laughed and said the arithmetic was mutual. Between them, four decades of frictions had been permitted to die unrecorded, and the business had used the space they would have occupied.
Little men keep full records. Rule bigger: know all, file a tenth.