Opening the Package

There's a brief parable I read once that described a beggar sitting on a wooden crate asking everyone who passed by for money. One day someone stopped and asked about the wooden crate he was sitting on. The beggar shrugged and said it was just his seat. The stranger said "So you never looked inside?" And so the beggar opened the crate and found a pile of gold.

That's it. Pretty simple. The lesson is obvious right? But how many times do we operate in our own lives like that beggar?

At work, we had a collection of development tickets that were being passed around from group to group looking for a home. No one wanted to own them and work on them. They looked like a hassle to deal with. Finally, I got them. What did I do? I clicked on each one and read the description. Then I made a few phone calls. 3 out of 5 of the tickets were obsolete and the other 2 were going to be resolved in a re-design of another project that was already in progress! Voila. Problem solved; it took only a 1/2 hour. The tickets were marked as deprecated and closed however these tickets had been passed around for several months!

Lesson: open the package. No one wanted to look inside! But once we did, the weight was lifted and it was painless...

This also happened in my personal life. I had bought a poster in California that was rolled up. I had to get it framed. I thought I knew the dimensions of the poster and that I needed to get it custom framed. I gave the dimensions to a framer and they gave me an insane price. I didn't act. The poster languished for 2 months before I took further action. This time, I actually unwrapped and unrolled the poster. And you know what?? The poster's dimensions were nowhere near the dimensions that I thought they were! They were much smaller and consequently cost much less to frame. Lesson: Open the package!