Martin is a friend of mine and related an interesting experience he had over the weekend. He likes to shop at Costco and buy things in bulk because he saves money.
A while back he bought a 10 pound bag of shredded cheddar cheese but he didn’t use much of it. After sitting in the refrigerator for a month or two the shredded cheese began to grow mold.
Last weekend Martin cleaned out the refrigerator and discovered some mold in his shredded cheese. But most of the cheese was still good and didn’t have mold on it. He didn’t want to throw away a bag of mostly good cheese and he didn’t want to eat cheese that had mold on it. So Martin decided to sort through the shredded cheese and throwaway the moldy parts.
At first finding the moldy pieces is was easy. And he thought he would be done quickly. But as time wore on he had to dig and searched deeper and deeper to find the moldy pieces.
After 40 minutes of sorting shredded cheese Martin realized that it would take many hours to be 100% sure that there was no mold left in his bag of shredded cheese.
And so he threw the bag away.
Often we get caught up in something that seems very important at the time but in the end turns out to be a waste of our time.
Sometimes things come up that are urgent and demand our attention. Some things take a lot of time and have little value for us in the end.
Watch out for these things. Before you embark on some project or task that it’s going to potentially take a lot of time you should ask yourself, “What do I really get for this? Is this really worth it?”
