Everyone should 'Take Inventory" as a basic part of their life discipline.
I have been formally Taking Inventory for 20+ years, and am a huge believer in its simplicity, specificity & iterative nature in helping me to codify my personal truths.
So, what is inventory and how do you take it?
At its most basic, Taking Inventory is “taking note” of your observations.
The decision to write an item down is the point when a moment of thought becomes inventory taking.
(Sidebar: With the free Notes app that comes with iPhones and Macs, whenever a moment of insight strikes, regardless of where I am, I can jot down the thought, and it syncs to all of my devices, so I always have one master version. This makes it brain dead simple to take as much or as little inventory as comes to me.)
The types of thoughts that you can Take Inventory on are limitless.
- Observations about people
- A statistic or fact that gets under your skin
- Beautiful images that made you happy
- Something you ate that doesn’t agree with you
- Something you read that inspired you
From these raw nuggets, many will be written down and forgotten, but the ones that stick, that bubble up again and again for you, these ideas can be categorized into buckets, such as:
- Work
- Sports
- Relationships
- Self
- Ideas
- Topics of interest
Over time, you can develop these categories as areas of focus, change or growth.
This can be items like writing down, or Taking Inventory of, the specific things that another (such as a partner) does that:
- Pleases you
- Frustrates you
- Confuses you
This takeaways can a simple calculus expressed in the form of:
- Do more of this
- Do less of this
- Do something different here
From such a natural progression you can codify and cultivate your Primary Life Narratives that you want to amplify and sharpen in your life.
What makes Taking Inventory so powerful is that when coupled with how growth and change occurs means you are literally one year from getting into some new space, three years from truly belonging, and five years from being an expert in that domain.
So write it down. Start Taking Inventory. It will change your life.
