Toward the end of last year, I decided I wanted a new ballpoint pen to clip into my Franklin Planner. My old pen kept breaking, so this time I wanted something sturdier that would last longer.
I searched several sites and read through various reviews to narrow down a few candidates. But comparing and agonizing over those candidates ended up taking far more time than I expected, and in the end I just bought a decent, serviceable pen and had been using it happily.
Then one day I found a pencil case I used to carry around during my MBA studies. Inside it were not one, but three of the exact pens I had shortlisted as candidates.
I already owned them, but thought I didn’t — and spent time and effort all over again to get something I already had.
It gave me a bit of a jolt, but it also made me think of something else.
Could something similar be happening elsewhere in my life?
I keep working hard to build more capability, gain more experience, and acquire more new knowledge, but it made me wonder whether I’m actually failing to make full use of what I already have.
So on a whim I sat down and listed out, one by one, the experience and things I believe I already possess. It felt better than I expected in some ways, and I also noticed some gaps.
But the question that came up most often was this one.
“So now that I have this, what am I going to do with it?”
A pen isn’t valuable in itself — it matters because of the good writing, the drawings, the difficult math problems it’s used for.
In the same way, what matters about the experience, knowledge, and capability I have isn’t how much more of it I collect, but what I create with it and what value I deliver to whom.
That thought kept leading to another, and these days I find myself repeatedly asking myself the same question.
“What am I doing with what I already have?”
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