You can instantly improve something if it’s a detail – straightening a picture, helping a customer service agent deal better with an individual caller, helping a client solve a small problem. These ARE things you can do, and do fairly easily. Most clients may not see the value in the details, but you can. An example of this is NY City, where the police department decided to focus a LOT on petty crime/small infractions such as vagrancy, public urination (sorry, but it’s true), and other non-murder type stuff. Peeing seems a lot less important than reducing the murder rate, right? True, but as a result of a focus on the micro, the police department has shown a 50% drop in macro problems like murder, rape, etc. The moral is to focus on what you can instantly fix and it’s a good bet that, to a large extent, the bigger goals/problems will start taking care of themselves. 

Carpe diem,