What Does a Stormtrooper Costume Have to Do With Clutter?
Greg McKeown says a stormtrooper costume shows the clutter that is not sitting in a closet. In a Halloween store he stood in the mirror dressed head to toe in a suit that was not cheap, and he saw he had been half-planning the moment for 30 years. It went back to age 10, around Return of the Jedi, when an older brother said it would be great to own a real stormtrooper outfit from the movies. The idea sat unquestioned. He says it lived that way for 13 years. In the mirror, no part of him wanted the suit, including the child he thought he was buying it for.
His wife now uses the costume as a test. She asks whether a goal is the stormtrooper: something he keeps chasing because he caught it once and now feels it is his, not because it still serves him. McKeown thinks a lot of people are carrying stormtroopers, and the same question covers a sweater or a line of business. The turnaround is not how much a person values what they already hold. It is how much they would pay to obtain it if they did not own it, or how much they would sacrifice for an opportunity they do not have. Tim Ferriss quotes McKeown on the version Andy Grove used at Intel: if the company were not already in that business, would it pursue it? The point is to strip off the extra value that ownership adds, the endowment effect, and judge the thing again from scratch.
