Enjoy the coffee, not the cup!

Source: Picked from the message board in my office. Real source unknown.

A group of alumni, highly established in their careers, got together to visit their old university professor.

Conversation soon turned into complaints about stress in work and life.

Offering Coffee to his guests, the professor went to the kitchen and returned with a large pot of coffee and an assortment of cups porcelain, plastic, glass, crystal, some plain looking, some expensive, some exquisite – telling them to help themselves to hot coffee.

When all the students had a cup of coffee in hand, the professor said: ‘If you noticed, all the nice looking expensive cups were taken up, leaving behind the plain and cheap ones.. While it is but normal for you to want only the best for yourselves, that is the source of your problems and stress. What all of you really wanted was coffee, not the cup, but you consciously went for the best cups and were eyeing each other’s cups.

Now if life is coffee, then the jobs, money and position in society are the cups. They are just tools to hold and contain Life, but the quality of Life doesn’t change. Some times, by concentrating only on the cup, we fail to enjoy the coffee in it.’

Don’t let the cups drive you.. Enjoy the coffee instead!!!

Getting rid of unwanted stuff

Yesterday, I cleared a lot of things from my house. And at the end of the day, the effort was worth it.

I had a whole pile of clothes most of which I had not worn at all in the last 1 year. Off they went! And so did a lot of books and other stuff like stationery, footwear, CDs and DVDs, etc!!

What was discarded?
1. Anything not used for more than 3 years (except a few things)
2. Anything that was < Rs 100 and unsure of usage in future.
3. Clothes that weren’t in my best 15 pair list.
4. Papers/books that I had not bothered to use in the last 1-3 years or more (depending on the book)
5. CDs and DVDs that were too old.

And I gave my mother strong instructions to discard unwanted stuff in the kitchen. She was too unwilling to do that initially. Had to really convince her into doing it. So we even discarded some unwanted utensils, plastic items, bottles, etc.

Where did it go?
1. Some books went to the 2nd hand vendors
2. Some books sold to local paper boys
3. Clothes given away. (and not many these days want used clothes!!!)
4. DVDs and CDs and other stuff to local paper boy on weighted basis.

What books did I discard?
1. Novels by Sidney Sheldon, Robin Cook, Michael Crichton, etc. I havent read a single novel in the last 4 years!!
2. Sub-standard books as per my review
3. Books on topics of little interest to me and having low purchase value.

Lesson learnt
I have a huge unread list!!! 40% of books I ever bought have not been read!!! Right from my 8th std!! Though the topics of interest have changed, the habit has been the same. I get too excited and buy a lot in advance. Lose interest in it later and it stays unread!!!!

Almost 60% of stuff we stack is unwanted!!

In my opinion, an empty house is more alluring to my eye than a stuffed and decorated house. I now feel good that I removed a lot of clutter!

What to stop doing?

I am a big fan of Jim Collins. I like his book Good to great.

Today a job that I was ran took too much time to execute and I found myself in half-sleep mode. So in an attempt to shake myself up, I did some googling and landed at this site. Found it interesting. This guy had a link to a great article by Jim Collins.

It talks about what one needs to stop doing. I think this is a very vital question to ask yourself. To achieve our goal, we all focus on what has to be done. But very few care to think of what needs to avoided. How many of us have the sincerity and guts to question our own favourite ideas (that are not working) and say “Hey, that’s not such a good idea after all; let’s unplug it and move on to something else (Jim’s quote)”.

Please read the article. (Click on the link and go to Best New Year’s resolution? A ’stop doing’ list) Well, I have something to work on this weekend! To create a stop doing list!