It occurred to me today that inventory should be a part of everyone’s process.

Yesterday, I started writing a blog about inventories, and how important it is, often, to be sure of what you have and what you’re missing. Since I still have a little more to say on the matter, let’s begin.

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My brother and I, when we were kids, had collections. He collected coins, I collected stickers. He collected books on World War II, I collected antique camera equipment. When we were collecting different things, everything was cool, because we weren’t likely to confuse his Time/Life book of Photographs from World War II with any of my Care Bear stickers (I don’t want to talk about it, so don’t ask). My Kodak Brownie II was not likely to wind up in among his Kennedy Half Dollars.

Unfortunately, we both collected comic books.

My brother owned the The Silver Surfer #1 comic book from 1982, and he was very proud of it. He kind of had a thing for Silver Surfer, back in the day.

Even though I wasn’t much of a Silver Surfer fan, somewhere along the way, I picked up the 50th issue of The Silver Surfer. I can still picture it in my mind’s eye. It had a silver foil depiction of the Silver Surfer, and it also had Thanos on the cover, somewhere.

My brother periodically stole that comic from me, claiming that it was his.

I would, from time to time, find my Silver Surfer #50 in his collection, and I would take it back, and then he would accuse me of having stolen what was actually mine. And we would argue about which of us actually owned the issue #1 and which of us owned the issue #50.

So, one day, I decided to create an inventory.

I created a spreadsheet (understand, that this was back in the late ’80s, so spreadsheet technology involved loading MS Office from a command prompt in DOS to launch a spreadsheet maker) that listed out all of the comic books that were a part of my collection, so that there wouldn’t be any more confusion about who owned what.

Another part of me wanted an inventory so I could use it to quickly scan through the pricing guides that I would buy, from time to time, to keep track of the value of my collection.

It just occurred to me that my insurance agent has asked us, on multiple occasions, to create an inventory of what exists in our house, in the event that we ever have to replace our belongings (due to theft or fire or some other disaster), but we haven’t done it. It’s too much work on the off-chance that we end up getting robbed, or our house burns down.

But, I can tell you that an inventory can come in handy for things like that.

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I think that it benefits a person significantly to take inventory of their life, every so often, to get a sense of where you’re going and where you’ve been. Some of the most successful people I know are regulars at doing this. In fact, it might be the case that the most successful people in the world are constantly doing this, so that they never have the opportunity to veer too far from their necessary course.

If we know what we want, and we know what it takes to get what we want, why do so few people end up getting what they want? Maybe, they should have stayed on top of their ‘life inventories’.

I can’t imagine that everyone is doing this, if for no other reason than the fact that introspection is often very difficult. When we look inside, to take an inventory of what we might find there, we often don’t like what we see. We might find laziness or apathy or guilt or hate or addiction, and those things are not what we’d want to find, if we are honest with ourselves. However, without doing some inventorying like this, we can’t set out to solve the problems within ourselves if we don’t even know that the problems exist.

I can’t go shopping for peanut butter until I know that we are out of peanut butter, or that there are three unopened jars in the pantry.

The other problem with doing this type of ‘life inventory’ is what you may discover that you have to do, in situations where the inventory is way off. You see, it isn’t that big of a deal for a person to make a minor course correction in the journey of life, if they discover they are off by a mile of two, but if you end up on the entirely opposite side of the globe, there is much work to be done, and many changes to be made, to get you back to where you want to be. If that’s what a life inventory ends up showing you, then maybe you’d be better off not knowing.

They say ignorance is bliss.

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Today, while I was at work, I unboxed about fifty computers, after having made an inventory record of their serial numbers, so I could attach asset tags (little stickers with inventory numbers and bar codes on them) to the laptops, to get them ready for distribution in the fall.

All the while, I was thinking about this post, because I came to a realization.Inventories are a pain to initialize, and they’re a pain to repair, if the maintenance work hasn’t been done along the way. But, a well-built inventory, that has been kept up all along the way, is a breeze to administer. At work, with only a few exceptions, my inventory of technology is pretty decent, and adding new devices to it is fairly simple.

I suspect that it’s the same way with life. Staying on top of things makes it easier to ‘steer the ship’. If you let things slide, and it’s been a while since you took an inventory of what you’ve done, what you’re doing, and what you plan to do, then you should expect that the results are going to be pretty ‘off course’.

But, don’t let that deter you from doing what needs to be done to get on top of your ‘life inventory’. The alternative, spinning your wheels and wasting your time, passing the days in a manner which might not amount to much when it’s all said and done, could be an epic waste.

Get on top of your inventory.