Small yet not small

Phong sent a message to his friends' phones even though they were all sitting at the same table in a café:
"Let's find a way to help Kỳ, it's so sad that he keeps failing."
All five friends messaged back "OK"; only Kỳ sat there looking distracted, knowing nothing.
Afterwards the friends all asked about Kỳ's business and analysed all sorts of reasons for his failure. Kỳ also honestly told them everything. It was sad: he tried very hard but kept running into unexpected bad luck and failing, not because he was lazy at all. His wife had left him too. The six friends promised to help Kỳ with his business as much as they could. Kỳ was very moved.
After a while they parted and everyone went home, but Phong secretly messaged the other five friends to come back and continue talking, leaving Kỳ to go home alone.
Phong said:

• I've found the cause of Kỳ's failure. He often overlooks small details, and in this life anyone who pays no attention to small details is sure to fail.
  When he drank, water ran down the side of the glass onto the table in front of him and he didn't wipe it. He put dirty tissue in the rubbish basket, it fell outside, and he didn't pick it up and put it back properly. When he picked up a newspaper with a photo of a leader on the front page, he threw the paper down onto the seat, unintentionally committing the offence of disrespecting an elder. When the waitress came to serve, he was indifferent and didn't say a word of thanks.
  We sat together only a little while, yet I found him careless both in his work and in his ethical views. It seems hard to help him in the long run. He has to correct his way of living himself first.
  Bình added:
• I also noticed that sometimes he puts his feet up on a chair, stretched out straight towards the people on the other side. I don't know if it is unintentional disrespect to others, but it could make people uncomfortable.
• If we want to help him now, someone has to take the trouble to stay on him and coach him on every small thing. Only by being attentive to every small thing can he succeed 🕴️

We drink from a bottle of water without finishing it, leave it on a chair and walk off. At that moment we commit two faults: wasting clean water and not putting rubbish in its proper place. These two faults add bad marks to the book of our lives.
We stop at a café for a drink, the chair lets us lean back comfortably, and as it happens we put our feet up high pointing towards the street, so that everyone passing by on the road is unintentionally "trampled" by us. This fault of unintentional insult also adds bad marks to the book of our lives.
We hear someone attack our country and we prick up our ears and listen attentively as if in agreement, and at the same time we are ungrateful for the labour of our predecessors. We should have "had it out" with that person so that he was not allowed to insult our homeland again. We only listened and did nothing, but that is the fault of "not doing the right thing". More bad marks in the book of our lives.

Day after day, each small fault piles up in succession, we gradually lose our value in heaven and earth, and by the principle of fairness, heaven and earth push us aside. That means failure.

People who achieve success in life often did not fervently aim at success; they simply handled every small matter very sensibly, very delicately and very ethically. If we handle every small matter correctly, heaven and earth will give us a good place in life.

And the pictures of respected people being thrown about and left lying around are a common disaster for society. A bottle of soy sauce printed with a picture of the Buddha, the back of a T-shirt printed with a picture of Jesus, a newspaper with pictures of leaders thrown about carelessly, nobody knows that all of these are faults. Those faults make our lives more uncomfortable.

Ethics and Wisdom must be nurtured in every small thing, because everything small is not small at all.