Life Management
INSPIRATIONAL, 28 May 2018
Dietrich Fischer – TRANSCEND Media Service
A professor gave a lecture on time management. He filled a mason jar with a dozen fist-sized rocks, until no more would fit. He asked his students,
“Is this jar full?” All shouted “Yes!”
Then he took some gravel from under the desk to fill the empty spaces and asked again, “Is it full now?”
Some said, “Probably not.”
He filled the space between the gravel with sand, and finally poured water into the jar to the brim.
“What is the lesson of this?” he asked.
A student answered, “No matter how full your schedule is, if you try really hard, you can always fit one more thing into it.”
The professor replied, “The main lesson is that unless you put the big rocks in first, you’ll never get them in at all.”
What are the “big rocks” in our life?
______________________________________________
Dietrich Fischer (1941-2015) from Münsingen, Switzerland, got a Licentiate in Mathematics from the University of Bern 1968 and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from New York University 1976. 1986-88 he was a MacArthur Fellow in International Peace and Security at Princeton University. He has taught mathematics, computer science, economics and peace studies at various universities and been a consultant to the United Nations. He was co-founder, with Johan Galtung, of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace, Development and Environment in 1993.
Excerpted from Dietrich Fischer’s Stories to Inspire You – TRANSCEND University Press-TUP.
This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 28 May 2018.
Anticopyright: Editorials and articles originated on TMS may be freely reprinted, disseminated, translated and used as background material, provided an acknowledgement and link to the source, TMS: Life Management, is included. Thank you.
If you enjoyed this article, please donate to TMS to join the growing list of TMS Supporters.
This work is licensed under a CC BY-NC 4.0 License.
The last student to answer, as well as the professor, gave good answers about the “main lesson.”
One may infer some other “main lesson[s],” too.
1. There can be more than one “main lesson.”
2. One’s “lessons” always depend upon the information available.
3. One’s lessons depend upon one’s ability to interpret the information.
4. One’s ability to interpret information depends upon one’s critical thinking skills.
5. No matter how good one’s “critical thinking skills,” augmenting them with insight, imagination and intuition can be very helpful.
6. Life is not a “bowl of cherries”!