Westley: And our assets?
Inigo Montoya: Your brains, Fezzik’s strength, my steel.
Westley: That’s it? Impossible. If I had a month a plan, maybe I could come up with something, but this [shakes head]
Fezzik: You just shook your head… doesn’t that make you happy?
Westley: My brains, his steel, and your strength against sixty men, and you think a little head-jiggle is supposed to make me happy?
Westley: I mean, if we only had a wheelbarrow, that would be something.
I’m a planner. Specifically I’m constantly planning for everything to go wrong in predictable ways. I don’t EXPECT them to go wrong, I just spend a lot of energy planning for them to, so I don’t have to spend energy worrying about it. I hate worrying. I like being prepared.
Being prepared requires a lot of resources the vast majority of which never get used. You end up ceasing to think of them as assets until you’re faced with a locked castle gate guarded by 60 men and a mostly-dead man starts throwing out a hypothetical wish list of items.
So, recently I got to thinking; if I have a lot of assets that have or will soon outlive their usefulness, am I really being best prepared? So I decided it was time to go through and figure out what my true assets are, and what is just taking up space. I’m a museum collections professional, I know the true cost of keeping items more than most people. Time to: Use. Give. Sell. Dispose
I have a lot of writing assests. I have longer stories on the verge of being submit-able. I have a couple unfinished shorts. I have a large list of ideas. I have a ton of “To Read” to go through in print and digital. Sometimes it is easy to get stuck on how far you have to go and you lose track of how far you’ve come and what assets you have around you.
I’ve got more than a wheelbarrow and a holocaust cloak, and it is time to use them.
MINERVA ZIMMERMAN 