Scalable Collecting
The rich, hidden treasures of your totems
Office moves are a great time to reflect on what you’re holding on to and what you’re letting go of. I used to have a very packed office that got more and more packed with each additional year of team gifts and books and shirts and what-not. That changed overnight, all because of one piano key.
I met Karl Stock on June 3, 1991, my first day on the job. Karl was my first skip manager at Microsoft1. I learned a ton about people management from Karl over the four years that I worked with him. But more than that, I have had a terrific longstanding friendship with Karl. We’ve hiked and biked all over the place. And in recent years, on multiple occasions, I’ve visited Karl and his family down in Arizona2.
There are countless treasured conversations I have had with Karl over the years, including one piano story. When Karl’s kids had grown and moved out, Karl and Martha decided to move to a smaller place on Bainbridge Island. Karl is a people person, and while he had collected many things in his house over the years, he hadn’t thought much about those things. In their downsizing move, he was surprised to find out that he was having a hard time letting go of certain things … because of the memories that they held.
He had a beautiful grand piano. Both of his kids had learned to play on that piano. Just looking at the piano reminded him of sitting with them at the piano or hearing them from the other room as they played. It made no sense to keep this piano, and yet he couldn’t imagine parting with it. I asked, “What if you just take one piano key with you? Would that be enough to remind you of all of these wonderful memories?”
I didn’t think much about this conversation at the time, but a few years later it was my turn to practice what I was preaching, when me and my siblings got together to clean our childhood home out before we sold it3. Forty years of memory accumulation. I was glad we had seven of us to work through this. It was an incredible experience to have all of us together again under the roof, one last time.
As the cleaning process went on, each of us began building our own separate save pile. These were the things that each of us was going to take with us. The rest went into the huge dumpster that had been dropped off in our driveway the morning we got there.
