Trade-off of the Day: happiness vs blindness to obvious

Paying too much attention to detail may cause you to miss the obvious:

(Science 5 October 2012) To our surprise, whereas attention improved the monkeys' ability to detect subtle orientation changes, it worsened their performance when the change was very obvious, which suggests that strongly attending to one feature (e.g., vertical stripes) makes it more difficult to see a very different feature (e.g., horizontal stripes).   -- Marlene R. Cohen. When Attention Wanders. Vol. 338 no. 6103 pp. 58-59. DOI: 10.1126/science.1229552

Paradoxically, attending to the present makes people happy, while having a wondering mind produces unhappiness. Is there a trade-off between one's happiness and blindness to the obvious just outside of the focus of attention?

Was Steve Jobs paying too much attention to the color of Google icon on the iPhone that he missed the obvious fact that Google was ripping off the overall iPhone design?

tags: trade-off, psychology, creativity, apple, google