All Selling Aside With Alex Mandossian

I heard this story from Steven Covey in his book First Things First. One day, a teacher was speaking to a group of high-achieving students. The teacher was trying to drive a point home using an illustration that the students would never forget. (I don’t think you’ll forget it, either!) The teacher pulled out a one-gallon wide-mouth glass jar and set it on the table in front of him, and carefully filled it with fist-sized rocks until it couldn’t possibly hold another. The teacher asked his students if the jar was full, and they all said, “Yes!” The teacher then reached under the table and pulled out a jar of gravel. He poured it into the first jar, shaking it to let the gravel sift down among the fist-sized rocks. With a smile, he asked the students again, “Is the jar full?” The class was onto him by now, and the response was, “Probably not.” This time, the teacher brought out a bucket of ocean sand, and dumped the sand into the jar of rocks and gravel, filling all the small spaces. He asked his class again i