I see so many people these days who are not concerned about the little things, and it worries me. “Le Bon Dieu est dans le detail” the French have said for centuries, and it is just as true today. I read information from established writers (well-established enough to have proofreaders), full of grammar mistakes and the wrong words, and I get worried. The problem is, that our lives, and many life or death decisions, are made up of little things, and if people forget to pay attention to them, then our lives could be at risk. Let’s face it, saying that the little things don’t matter is not freedom. Let’s call it by its real name: sloppiness.

Remember when Dennis Quaid’s children were given the wrong medication dose? There is a perfect example of a little thing having to do with zeroes on the end, where those children were given a thousand times the normal dose, and over a million and a half medication errors occur in the United States each year, mostly to children, who are unable to check these things for themselves.

What would happen to you if your paycheck were to miss a zero? What would happen if an engineer is reading a manual and someone uses a word that sounds like the word they wanted, but the word they chose means something entirely different? There might be hundreds of deaths involved.

So start caring about the little things: grammar, word choices, etiquette, arithmetic. The more details you are accustomed to paying attention to, the more details will matter in your life. And those details matter to  everyone.