Early Edition is an old TV show about a man who gets tomorrow's paper today. I think the paper also must have periodically and magically updated throughout the day because sometimes the headlines on the paper he had on hand changed during the day, if I recall correctly.
In one episode, there are two front page items that he keeps trying to fix. One is about a little girl who has been in an accident and seriously injured and the other is about an airplane flight that takes off, runs into a flock of birds and crashes, killing hundreds of people.
He tries to help the little girl but he feels it is a low priority. He wants to give it short shrift and just kind of hand her off to hospital staff and wash his hands of it. His much higher priority is trying to prevent the airplane crash that will kill many more people.
But his attempts to hand the girl off to hospital staff and be done with it keep failing. He keeps being pulled back to deal with her because staff is not taking her injuries seriously enough and the headline concerning her condition keeps getting worse, not better.
He finds this frustrating because he really wants to focus on preventing the airplane crash. But at the end of the day, getting hospital staff to actually treat the girl's lifesaving internal injury is actionable whereas trying to prevent the airplane crash is not. The airport thinks he is a nutcase for calling them and predicting that the plane will crash and kill all aboard.
In the end, he gives up on preventing the airplane crash and just makes sure the girl is taken care of. As he is sitting in the hospital waiting room, resigned to his failure to prevent the crash, he sees the headline finally change and also meets the parent of the little girl who thanks him for helping.
The parent of the little girl turns out to be the pilot of the airplane. The pilot got called away from the plane to rush to the hospital to sign papers giving permission to perform surgery, thereby grounding the plane and preventing the crash.
I'm seriously handicapped. I often am unable to work on the things I desperately WISH I could work on. I do my best to make my peace with working on the things I can handle for the day.
Sometimes it works out. It isn't always as clear as the above story that X "trivial" thing was really the lynchpin I needed to deal with and just didn't see it ahead of time, but at a minimum doing what I am capable of doing that day instead of trying and failing to work on something else means SOMETHING gets done.
In one episode, there are two front page items that he keeps trying to fix. One is about a little girl who has been in an accident and seriously injured and the other is about an airplane flight that takes off, runs into a flock of birds and crashes, killing hundreds of people.
He tries to help the little girl but he feels it is a low priority. He wants to give it short shrift and just kind of hand her off to hospital staff and wash his hands of it. His much higher priority is trying to prevent the airplane crash that will kill many more people.
But his attempts to hand the girl off to hospital staff and be done with it keep failing. He keeps being pulled back to deal with her because staff is not taking her injuries seriously enough and the headline concerning her condition keeps getting worse, not better.
He finds this frustrating because he really wants to focus on preventing the airplane crash. But at the end of the day, getting hospital staff to actually treat the girl's lifesaving internal injury is actionable whereas trying to prevent the airplane crash is not. The airport thinks he is a nutcase for calling them and predicting that the plane will crash and kill all aboard.
In the end, he gives up on preventing the airplane crash and just makes sure the girl is taken care of. As he is sitting in the hospital waiting room, resigned to his failure to prevent the crash, he sees the headline finally change and also meets the parent of the little girl who thanks him for helping.
The parent of the little girl turns out to be the pilot of the airplane. The pilot got called away from the plane to rush to the hospital to sign papers giving permission to perform surgery, thereby grounding the plane and preventing the crash.
I'm seriously handicapped. I often am unable to work on the things I desperately WISH I could work on. I do my best to make my peace with working on the things I can handle for the day.
Sometimes it works out. It isn't always as clear as the above story that X "trivial" thing was really the lynchpin I needed to deal with and just didn't see it ahead of time, but at a minimum doing what I am capable of doing that day instead of trying and failing to work on something else means SOMETHING gets done.