Hello all,
In my previous post I wrote that we often cling to something only because of prior effort, when it would be beneficial to just throw it away, and speculated it’s because of our need to not look stupid.
After I posted it, it made me think.
I remembered Marie Kondo’s book.
Marie Kondo is a Japanese lady with the unusual profession of helping people put order to their homes. She wrote the international best seller “The life-changing magic of tidying up”. It looks like a bold title. Life-changing magic… of tidying up? And yet she’s right.
Our homes become messy faster than we can clean up. Marie Kondo believes that the reason for this is they’re full of clutter. The reason they’re full of clutter is that we don’t throw things away. The reason we don’t throw things away is our inability to get rid of the burdens of our past. So, if you follow her method and throw away your clutter, it becomes a symbol for you: you’ve thrown away the burdens of your past. It can be life changing.
Her method starts from throwing away the majority of your clothes. Among those you have to throw away are the ones you bought several years ago and you never put on. Her way of eliminating the remorse associated with discarding a brand new item is to thank it for having fulfilled its purpose, which was to give you joy. It gave you joy at the moment you bought it. After that it stopped giving you joy. Your closet shouldn’t be a graveyard, even if some items in it died prematurely.
If your brand new million-dollar information system sucks too much, the way to throw it away is to acknowledge that it fulfilled a great purpose: to teach you something and let you build an information system that sucks less.
I feel it’s not just our homes that can benefit from Marie Kondo’s method—it’s also our businesses. And it’s not only tangible things that are cluttering us. It’s also computer files, software, business processes, or even clients.
Regards,
Antonis