My birthday is coming up in two weeks. My wife often asks me for gift ideas, since I can be difficult when it comes to presents. I am much more interested in eliminating things from my life than adding to it. I’m not interested in accumulating stuff. In fact, if someone would just agree to clean out the extra furniture from my garage, that might be the best birthday gift of all.
The curse of the minimalist.
Truthfully, the best gift anyone can ever give me is time, but that is not an easy one to bestow. Even so, Elysha has managed this at least a few times. She has hired people to cut the grass, rake the leaves, and shovel the driveway, returning this precious time to me.
I recently had an idea for a new kind of gift:
The gift of knowledge.
Find a way to teach me something I’ve always wanted to do but never could, or haven’t had time to learn.
There are many things I would like to learn. If you’re looking to give me something for my birthday, why not find a way to teach me one of these things? Either teach me yourself or find someone who can.
Can you imagine a better gift?
I can’t.
The list of things I want to learn includes:
Change the oil in my car
Give my car a tune-up
Post a podcast online
Invest in individual stocks
Hit my driver longer and more consistently
Install replacement windows in my home
Become more knowledgeable and skilled with WordPress
Sync all my calendars reliably on my iPhone
I know the last one sounds lame, but I still haven’t synced multiple calendars from multiple accounts (including my work account) onto my phone with any real success, and learning to do so would be an enormous time saver for me.
It doesn’t sound like much, and it might take someone just five minutes to teach me, but I have yet to find the person who can help me, and those five minutes would represent an enormous savings of time and effort for me and thus would make for an outstanding birthday gift.
Perhaps I’m not so hard to buy for after all.
