Life is like a bottle

feifei

Life is like a bottle [Copy link]

Life is like a bottle
In a time management class, the professor took out a bottle, put beautiful pebbles in it, and asked the students: "Is the bottle full?" "Full!" The students answered in unison. 　　The professor smiled and took out a bag of gravel and poured it into the bottle, shook it, added some more, and asked the students again: "Is the bottle full?" 　　This time the students did not dare to answer rashly. After a while, someone whispered: "Maybe it's not full..." 　　"Great!" The professor said, and then took out a bag of fine sand and slowly poured it into the bottle. After pouring it to the mouth of the bottle, he asked the students again: "Is the bottle full?" 　　"No!" This time the students all learned their lesson. 　　"Excellent." The professor praised the students' performance, and at the same time took out a large glass of water from under the table and poured the water into the bottle that seemed to be filled with pebbles, gravel, and fine sand. 　　After finishing, the professor looked up and asked seriously: "What enlightenment can we get from these things?" 　　After a silence, a student answered: "Professor, I think... no matter how busy we are, no matter how full our schedule is, if we push ourselves, we can still squeeze out some time to do more things." 　　The professor nodded: "Good answer, this is a time management class after all, but more importantly, there is only so much space in the bottle. Have you ever thought about it, if you don't put the pebbles into the bottle first, you may never have the chance to put them in again." 　　The professor's words are indeed thought-provoking, "There is only so much space in the bottle", life is like a bottle, you only have so much time in your life, about 20,000 days, how to use this time? 　　Some people are busy all day long, spending a lot of time paying attention to their diet and clothing. Is it cheaper to buy cucumbers or beans today? Is it better to buy cucumbers cold or cooked in soup? Is it better to cook soup with tofu or eggs? As for clothes, how should they match today? Will it attract attention? They are very focused on trivial matters, and their minds are always thinking about various trivial matters. They can't distinguish the importance of problems, and they are not good at distinguishing the size of things. Although such people look smart, or very smart, they do the work of "filling sand" all day long - if the bottle is full of fine sand, can pebbles still be put in? Time is occupied by trivial matters, where can serious things and big things be placed? Therefore, people who nag about trivial matters all day long usually become incompetent for big things. 　　William James said: "The art of wisdom is the art of knowing clearly what to ignore." In life, the more interested a person is in trivial matters, the less interested he is in big things. If you try too hard to pursue perfection in trivial matters and always want to do everything well, then you may neglect the most important things and fail to do the most important things well. No wonder a wise man said: If someone scolds him on the street, he won't even turn his head, he doesn't want to know who scolded him. Because life is so short and precious, there are so many things to do, why waste time on such unpleasant things? 　　Rousseau once calculated: one-third of life is spent when young and ignorant, and one-third when old. Sleeping every day takes up another one-third, and the remaining one-third is filled with many trivial matters and troubles, so there is little time left to achieve success. Therefore, a truly smart person should be someone who is indifferent to those insignificant things, and someone who is not disturbed too much by unimportant people and things. Chen Jingrun bumped into a tree while walking, and thought he was hit by a pedestrian; a first-class economist went to buy vegetables, but he was far less shrewd than a housewife, and was fooled by a hawker... However, these do not affect their being smart people, first-class mathematicians, and first-class economists, while those seemingly smart pedestrians and housewives may be mediocre for life. 　　Jia Pingwa has a famous essay "Ugly Stone". Ugly stone is a meteorite. "It cannot be used to make walls, steps, sculptures, or cloth. It is not made into these small things, so it is often ridiculed by the general world." The greatness of ugly stone lies precisely here. "It is beautiful in its ugliness." "It has patched the sky, it has been hot in the sky, it has flashed light..." Some first-class people are "ugly stones". They want to complete many first-class things in their short lives. Therefore, they will not waste a lot of time and emotions on meaningless trivial matters. Most of them have the ability to ignore "small right and wrong" and just use their energy to do first-class things first. In the bottle of life, they first throw beautiful "pebbles". After ensuring that there is enough space for the "pebbles", they put in gravel, fine sand and water. Life is 　　like a bottle. In this limited life time and space, the difference between people is often due to what you put in the "bottle" first.