The kanji for "meticulous," (an SAT word!) or paying attention to detail, is the same in Japanese and Chinese and is very interesting: it means having a "thin heart," as one can picture someone examining with a fine magnifying glass or focusing all of one's energy into that one thin piece of one's heart. The opposite is true in Chinese, being rough and oblivious to detail is called 粗心, or having a thick heart. Really don't know why these analogies are what they are, but it definitely describes me.
Today I noticed that my pants have a whole in them on the inner leg; near the crotch area. It's not really obvious to others and not in a critical area, but the problem is I've been wearing these pants for 2 days, and didn't notice. I don't know if the hole was caused by me tripping on something or trying to stretch out and overdid it, or just got washed too many times in the laundry (probably the laundry). But yes I don't notice things, even about myself. MJ constantly adjusts my hair back and forth because I notice my own appearance. MJ is great at paying attention to detail especially appearance wise, not just for herself but the things we own, the places where we live, the hotels we stay at, the beds we sleep in (and whether they are dirty!) so she's a great compliment to my rough ways. She definitely would not have let me walk out of the house wearing pants with a hole in them!
But it's not just that, there's other areas where it's critical to be fastidious. Checking one's bank account or credit card statements, for example, is really important to go over with a fine tooth comb. Contracts, legal agreements.
There are industries where the whole basis of the job is to be meticulous and look over details. I just watched a Japanese drama where the main character (Satomi Ishihara, kawaii!!!!) is a book editor and has to check over whole books for factual accuracy, grammatical accuracy, etc. I used to have to do that job in law school for the Interdisciplinary Law Journal at USC; very, very tedious job to get a law journal published, not just for the author, but for the staff working on the journal who have to check everything.
My job now, for example, requires a lot of meticulousness: I go over a lot of documents in different languages to see if something is pertinent to the case and might prove the case. One paragraph, one sentence, or even one word (one single character! in Asian languages) can be the difference between something being unimportant to the one that breaks open a case and is the "smoking gun" and used as evidence.
Sometimes just in life, it's important to notice details of the world that surround us: the color of leaves changing in the neighborhood, which neighbors have cars parked on their driveway (house burglars actually hone in on these details to see who's on vacation), it's just good to notice things. I used to when I was a kid, question things, try to remember differences, but now it's just one big mush of information crammed in and forgotten immediately by the next article I read online about the next big sequel to come out or who's playing in the World Series.
As a result of not paying enough attention to detail, some things build up over time that I notice and become a burden eventually. My car deteriorating bit by bit until I need to have a major fix-up (recently it was my tires had almost worn out entirely), earwax clogs my ears gradually until one day I can't hear normally out of my ear, subscriptions to the MLB app pile up month by month before I remember to cancel, and over a year they become a 12x cost. That's how they get ya, these subscription-model businesses! And over time lotto ticket costs pile up (unless I win in which case they will seem trivial!)
Ironically, I might have already made a post about the importance of being meticulous, but I didn't pay attention enough to detail to check!
Fantasize on,
Robert Yan
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