100th Article! & Heart Shaped Rocks
During spring break last April, I took my kids to visit glitter mountain. It is just past the Arizona border and is an open gypsum mine where for a small fee, you can collect pieces of sparkly gypsum for yourself. As we drove through the dusty red desert, my kids were excitedly chatting about what kinds of “treasure” they were hoping to find.
After the type of debate only a 6-, 10-, and 15-year-old can get into, they landed on wanting to find a special heart shaped rock. That was the plan.
At the mine, the sunlight bounced off the gypsum crystals making it shine and glimmer like its namesake. My kids excitedly scurried around the rocks looking for the pieces of gypsum that caught their eye the most. As they hunted for “heart-shaped” rocks/pieces of gypsum, they found many other shiny rocks that they also thought were super cool – and so, of course, those rocks went into their pockets as well.
When we finally had been there for over an hour, we headed back to the car. I was excited for the kids to show me the treasures they had found… and I quickly realized that they had found many, many treasures. Their pockets bulged as they waddled back towards the car.
“I thought you were only gathering special rocks!” I shouted at them.
“Mom! We found so many special rocks!” They shouted back.
“Can you put any of them back? Downsize a little?”
“No!! We want to keep them all!”
“Ok, did you at least find your heart shaped rocks? Can I see them?”
My kids looked at each other wide-eyed. “Uh…Yeah, we found them…. They’re in there somewhere…” and they pointed to their lumpy pockets.
For the next 15 minutes, I stood by as they pulled out rock after rock – holding them up to the light, giving me commentary on each one and then eventually placing them into the bags we were going to use to transport them home.
About 8 lbs of gypsum later, my kids each had a plastic bag lovingly tucked under their seats with their special prizes. And in all of that, there was maybe a total of 4 heart shaped rocks.
This is my 100th article and I feel like I’ve been showing you my rock collection. For 100 weeks, I’ve been hunting and showing you my favorite “idea rocks.” They are all special prizes to me. I’ve been gathering concepts about how to spark your drive, care for your needs, deal with hard things, and unpack the science behind wellbeing, stress, and achievement.
I didn’t know it when I started, but writing has been an important practice for me because, like my kids, I feel like all of these concepts are treasures. And yet, if I show them to you all at once, that can be pretty overwhelming.
As I’ve been hunting for my own “heart shaped rocks” in my rock collection of ideas, I’ve become even more grateful for this outlet. Because for a keynote and workshop format, participants aren’t ready to see the whole collection yet. They just want to see the most important heart shaped ones.
And yet, all of these concepts feel like treasures to me and so it’s hard to cut out the ideas that are too much for someone who is seeing them for the first time. Writing has become an unexpected safe space to store my whole collection and by doing so, I’m subverting the dangers involved with sunk cost bias.
You see, when we invest time and attention into something, we’re less likely to step away from it – even if stepping away is the better decision. This is sunk cost bias, and it shows up in many aspects of our lives. Sometimes it’s what gets us in trouble with stress and can be why we’re willing to overdo things. It sounds like, “I’ve gone this far, may as well keep going!” We don’t like the idea of losing the treasures we’ve worked on -even if those treasures aren’t worth anything to anyone else.
So, writing for 100 weeks has shown me that having a place to store my treasures helps me feel like I’m not losing them completely while also helping me set them aside enough to focus on the most valuable things.
I’ve learned a lot by writing 100 articles, but I think this has been the most unexpected and welcome lesson so far.
Thanks for reading with me today. I hope you find ways to store your treasures and to be proud of your most special ones. Even if it takes a little while to identify exactly which ones those are.
