Monday, September 20, 2010

Cleaning House: A Metaphor for Deeper Issues?

It’s two days before I depart for Berlin, and I was tasked to clean the library room. This room houses my precious hoard of my books, magazines and digital resources. It is my fortress of solitude where I explore other worlds within my head. The question for me was: Am I a hoarder?

How often do we clean out the clutter? Oprah Winfrey once featured the issue of clutter and hoarders in an episode of her popular talk show. Clutter is stuff we accumulate through time? Hoarding is a mental disease that reflects our dependency to things that we have difficulty letting go of. On an emotional level, this can refer to bearing grudges, being resentful, vindictive and vengeful. This can manifest latter as abnormal reactions.

I still have my mangled triathlon bike in a box. It is a grim reminder of my accident in February this year. Should I throw it away? Should I salvage the parts that can be re-used? Did it serve its purpose as evidence?

I have been mindful and fascinated by Pareto’s Law (20:80), and how leverages work. If 80 percent of our staff merely contributes 20 percent of our results and productivity, why not de-hire some of them. Instead hire new staff that can deliver on the 80 percent of the results, and more. Why do we unconsciously promote mediocrity?

In the early stages of building fitness, whatever we do translates massively to improvements. Our bodies adapt and cope cleverly, by becoming stronger and less sore. Then, as we near the elite level of competition, more training intensity and volume does not covert into large improvements. We hit training plateaus often, and our incremental gains are less frequent. We appear to be doing more for less.

What I learnt from my back-stiffening and laborious task was:

1)    I have a lot of stuff! (Where did it all come from?)
2)    Get rid of things we (really) don’t need.
3)    Destroy traces of your documents (bills, receipts, notes, pamphlets and letters) as you do not want to risk identity theft.
4)    You will need to sort out what you have left (separate, categorise and organize).
5)    What you have left after the filtration process may be the essence.
6)    How do you feel when you throw stuff away: painful or pleasurable?
7)    Review your team profile and composition: who is worth keeping (employing). Who do we need to let go in challenging times?
8)    Keep a check when your collector’s urge returns.
9)    There is a distinction between being a collector and a hoarder.

I am a hoarder of information and knowledge; perhaps, I need the assurance of physical evidence to feel assured of my cognitive abilities. Mind you, few guests visit my library, as it is my mind-bank, so to speak. Yet, things do have a mysterious way of accumulating – and it would, eventually, reach a tipping point.

So, what do you clean out recently? What did you keep? What did you throw out? How did you feel after you throw out stuff you decided was not important?

We come with nothing, and we leave with nothing.

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