Coffee Cup Analogy
A group of alumni, highly established in their careers, got together to visit their old university lecturer. Conversation soon turned into complaints about stress in work and life.
Offering his guests coffee, the lecturer went to the kitchen and returned with a large pot of coffee and an assortment of cups: porcelain, plastic, glass, some plain-looking and some expensive and exquisite, telling them to help themselves to hot coffee.
When all the students had a cup of coffee in hand, the lecturer said: “If you noticed, all the nice-looking, expensive cups were taken up, leaving behind the plain and cheap ones. While it is normal for you to want only the best for yourselves, that is the source of your problems and stress. What all of you really wanted was coffee, not the cup, but you consciously went for the better cups and are eyeing each other’s cups.”
“Now, if Life is coffee, then the jobs, money and position in society are the cups. They are just tools to hold and contain Life, but the quality of Life doesn’t change. Sometimes, by concentrating only on the cup, we fail to enjoy the coffee in it.”
So please, don’t let the cups drive you…enjoy the coffee instead.
Being happy does not mean everything is perfect. It means you have decided to see beyond the imperfection.
Never heard it put that way but I like it.
It’s a great example to inspire those who only focus on the outside, the material world. While what really matters it’s what’s inside that cup.
Lots of words for something very simple. You are not youre job. Or the coffee is not its cup in this case.
Good analog…
An excellent story to explain ‘don’t judge a book by it’s cover”
Quite the insight. Probably going to adopt some form of this in my life
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that was a very true statement on the lecturer’s part.
Coffee tastes better out of polystyrene
actually i think this is a pretty lame example. the cups all containing the same coffee, there was no difference, clearly. but unlike books, whose content varies in quality, the coffee was all identical; why SHOULDN’T they go for nicer (or larger) cups? moreover, the professor states that the cheap cups were “left behind”. clearly there was no dearth of mugs, so this was not a competitive environment. i would be hesitant to trust the professor to make a quality judgment of this large number of the remaining mugs; very likely his lower quality statement means something like the average mug niceness went down… so people left the chipped, awkward, unpleasant-to-drink-from mugs behind, and quite rightly. but there may be a pretty stellar mug or three that no one touched.
in the end, this is a BS correlation and completely anecdotal.
this is thoughtful
you missed the point completely
this is akin to copies of one book with different covers, not different books entirely.
the truth is completely lost on some people.
one book with different covers: and there are covers to be preferred over others. a hardcover is more durable, more protective of the contents, than a flimsy paperback. one with detailed illustration can be more descriptive of the contents, and a finer font on the face can make the text easier to read and more attractive to the eye.
the truth is that happiness isn’t settling for less, it’s settling for more than your neighbors got, in many respects; happiness is a differential between me and you, and amounts to a zero-sum game according to this analogy where each person eyes the other’s cup covetously. read some sociology.
I feel better now.
But I wanted TEA!!!
ser feliz, es sonreir como un niño, cuando te caes en la calle…”¡¡¡¡¡
ser feliz es sonreir como un niño, cuando te caes en la calle y encima se pone a llover, y no tienes paraguas….¡
This sounds suspiciously like “Accept the status quo and don’t worry so much about improving your lot in life” to me. Call me a conflict theorist, but I’m guessing the person who wrote this wasn’t exactly poor.
“They are just tools to hold and contain Life, but the quality of Life doesn’t change” If you are in absolute poverty your quality of life isn’t going to be quite as nice as a prince’s.
Yeah, but some cups allow you to enjoy coffee better. For instance, a plain cup will not hold in the heat and the coffee will get cold fast. A plastic cup will burn your hands. A porcelain cup will retain heat and warm your hands at the same time.
I agree with Kate. If you live in poverty, it’s pretty difficult to enjoy life as much as someone on a wave-runner.
Mutlu olmanız, her konunun yolunda olduğu anlamına gelmez.
Bu sadece sorunları sizin dışınızda görmeniz anlamına gelir.
asoskay
Very good points all of you, and well taken, while some are a bit more sophomoric then others. Some of them are not in English so I can not comment on them. but I digress, For one thing the article is merely an anecdotal statement, so there is no need to get melodramatic. However i thought it rather a cheery point of view. I think I would choose the porcelain mug however simply because as someone else mentioned earlier the cheaper materials don’t hold coffee well. I think also that I would have chosen based on artistic flair as I am a creative thinker, and based on size as I like coffee quite a lot so therefore would have picked a larger mug.