Sitting outside at Starbucks, the table in front of me wasn’t clean. It looked like someone had spilled some sort of sugar, or whatever it is people put in coffee, on the table and not bothered to clean it up.

If a table is dirty when I come to Starbucks, I get a worker to clean it off. But I sat at my table for a few hours and watched as person after person approached the dirty table, saw its dirtiness, and changed their minds about sitting there.

A couple people tried to brush some of the mess off the table, but were unsuccessful.
One person tested how he could sit there and still use the table around the mess; that didn’t last.
Everyone else surveyed the mess and just looked for a different table.

The dirty table sat unoccupied for hours.

Well, it's just a Starbucks table after all, right? No.

For Your Game

How people deal with the little things is a clear window into how they deal with the big things. The dirty Starbucks table shows us: Most people tolerate what’s handed to them in life instead of exploring what they can do to alter things to their liking. The Mental Handbook builds the Bulletproof Mindset that empowers you to stop tolerating life and start owning it.

On a smaller level, Starbucks is a place of business. People work there. Their very job, above anything, is to serve customers. When a table is dirty, it is their job to clean it. Most businesses’ patrons don’t demand much by the way of service, merely accepting what they get, even when what they get is unacceptable.

There is a virtue to accepting what is in life, but all virtues have their limits. While we don’t control 99% of what happens, the remaining 1% is much larger than most people ever discover it to be. Why don’t we discover the capacity of that 1%? Fear of standing out is one. Not wanting to “bother” people is another.

What have been some of your reasons for merely accepting things that you would have wanted changed? Reply and let me know.


#WorkOnYourGame