Attention to detail is something everyone can and should do --- especially in a tight job market. Bob Crossley, a human- resources expert notices this in the job applications desk every day. “It’s amazing how many candidates elimintate (淘汰) themselves,” he says.
“Resume(简历) arrive with stains. Some candidates don’t bother to spell the company’s name correctly. Once I see a mistake. I eliminate the candidate.” Crossley concludes. “If they cannot take care of these details, why should we trust them with a job?”
Can we pay too much attention to details? Perfections struggle over little things at the cost of something larger they work toward.. “To keep from losing the forest for the trees,” says Charles Garfield, associate professor at the University of California, San Francisco, “we must constantly ask ourselves how the details we’re working on fit into the larger picture. If they don’t, we should drop them and move to something else.”
Garfield compares this process to his work as computer scientist at NASA. “The Apollo II moon launch was slightly off course 90 percent of the time,” says Garfield. “But a successful landing was still likely because we knew the exact coordinates of our goal. This allowed us to make adjustments as necessary.” Knowing where we want to go helps us judge the importance of every task we undertake.
Too often we believe what accounts for others’ success is some special secret or a lucky break. But rarely is success so mysterious. Again and again, we see that by doing little things within our grasp well, large rewards follow.

每个人都可以而且必须注意细节，特别是在紧俏的人才招聘市场中。人力资源专家鲍比，克里斯利在每天的应聘者中注意到这个问题。他说：“让人很吃惊的是很多应聘者都是自己淘汰了自己。”
“简历中经常有一些错误。一些应聘者不注意正确拼写公司的名字。一旦我发现这样的错误，我就把这个应聘者淘汰掉。” 克里斯利肯定说，“如果他们不能注意这样的细节，我们为什么要相信他们能胜任工作呢？”
卡勒.卡费尔说，加利佛尼亚和旧金山的大学教授都说:"难道我们不能多花心思注意细节吗？把细节做得完美会比在工作中花很多成本而带来更好的效果。为了避免因小失大，我们必须不断地问自己我们工作的细节是否有利于我们的整体工作。如果不利，我们就应该用其他的方法来代替他们。”
卡费尔把这个和美国航天局的电脑专家工作作了对比。卡费尔说：“阿波罗2号登月发射过程中百分之九十的时间都出现了轻微偏轨的问题，但是最后它仍然成功登陆，那是因为我们对目标有精确把握，使得我们可以对它进行必要的调整。目标明确有助于我们判断所承担使命的重要性。"
很多时候我们相信别人的成功有一些特殊的原因或者是运气。但是奇迹毕竟是少数的。一次又一次，我们会发现做好一些很小的事情往往能得到很大的回报.