It wasn’t just the sharp pain that made him wince. It was also the damned inconvenience.

He had just poked his hands into the brown paper bag to fish out the first of the hot chips. The pain made him let go. His first instinctive move was to stick his finger into his mouth to wash the salt away.

He remembered the moment that he first felt the sharp pain. It had happened early in the morning and it would bother him all day. There was nothing dangerous about what he was doing that morning. He had been to the stationery cupboard many times previously and had always got what he wanted without any incident. But this time as he pulled on a ream of paper, he got cut.

It did not make sense that something as small as a paper cut could spoil his whole day….After all, he was the occupational health and safety officer for the company and he could imagine the laughter if he was to produce a safe work statement for handling paper!

Simon Gerrans went down twice at Liege-Bastogne-Leige. His year started with a crash. He is a professional cyclist and knows how to ride a bike. Yet, something as minor as a touch of wheels or a misplaced obstacle can spoil a whole season.

It is the small things that can make the big difference. If something as senseless as getting a cut from a piece of paper can spoil a whole day, then it is the opposite little things (like a smile at a stranger) that we can do which can set us up for a great life.

A lifetime is built one day at a time. And most things that we do on a daily basis are just fillers . It is like all the hay in a haystack that buries the needle. We can jump around on the haystack day after day with nothing much happening. Until the day we happen to step on that needle.

Just as the appearance of small things that can spoil our whole day, there are opportunities every day for finding those small things that we can do which will ultimately lead to happier results,

How do we find those things?

Usually, we have no idea what those things are. Just like the paper cut, those moments will appear when we least expect it to. It is up to us to recognise them when they appear and then do the right thing before the window of opportunity closes.