Everyone is missing out on the good shit in life focusing only on the forest but not the fine details, the forest only exists because of millions of small beautiful details.
I don’t know if it’s because I’m on the spectrum but I hope it isn’t, I wish everyone could experience the same joy I get from all the small things.
What the saying is trying to convey:
Sometimes people focus on a few small details of some problem to such a great degree that they completely fail to consider the larger context and purpose.
It isn’t trying to say details are unimportant. Only that the larger context matters and should be considered while investigating the details of a problem.
I am trying to think of a good example. The one I found online is something like, “the senator was so focused on the wording of one subsection of the bill he didn’t stop to consider the bill was too unpopular to ever pass regardless of the wording”.
Ok how about this. Let’s say a company is to unify access control across disparate systems. The overarching goal is to be able to set policy in one place not in each individual application.
A team is in the process of evaluating a candidate product. They want to complete the evaluation in a set time frame and focus on a particular scenario (web app, specific tech stack) for a proof of concept that isn’t representative of many of the typical scenarios in the company (web, database, API, etc).
The team spends their time focused on getting the evaluation done and discovers the product doesn’t integrate as well as originally expected with a key system. They focus on coming up with a solution so they can complete the proof of concept.
They consider their efforts a success when they finish up the eval on time.
But the evaluation wasn’t useful because it didn’t really consider the overarching project goals and in the end the solution didn’t even meet those goals!
Hope this helps.