Growing up, my parents put a significant emphasis on reading any topic any time. As my professional career moved through its various stages, I have collected reference books that I was unwilling to let go. Over the last 15 years, we (our team, family and I) have acquired quite a library. The topics are varied. I read everything from professional publications, non-fiction, fiction and sometimes a genre that my mother calls ‘mind candy’. And! I have read all the books in said library at some point. Do I read them now? No.
Over the last two days, I have sent around 300 reference books to the physical recycle bin. One of my colleagues asked if I had paid for all those books. Yes, I had. What was the average price of a book? As I removed the covers for audit purposes, I realized the average price of the 300 books was around $100.00 Canadian. When I did the math, $30,000.00 worth of books were gone. To put this in perspective, the books would have filled an 8 foot by 4 foot bookcase. We have 6 such bookcases.
I held on to many of the books for far too long. Just as in project management, we hang on to the original idea for far too long. Somewhere in the world, business changes once every six minutes. In essence, our lives change about 10 times an hour. If we don’t allow for change, we will be without room to grow. In project management, lack of a process for managing change can be the ‘kiss of death’ for a project.
The golden nugget for today is “as hard as it is to let things go, let them go. Move on and make the needed changes. “
