Have you ever given a crummy gift because you thought it was expected?  Have you ever put out second-rate work because you couldn’t figure out what first-rate work looked like or because you didn’t even know it was second rate?  I know that I have.

A couple of years ago I was getting ready to marry my beautiful wife and was looking for gifts for my groomsmen.  I wanted to get them nice, useful gifts because I valued them and their friendship but I was held back by something.  I was held back by convention.

Held Back By Convention

“What do you mean, ‘Held back by convention,’” you ask?

I couldn’t think of any great gifts because I knew what kinds of gifts were expected.  Were “traditional.”  To be fair, my friends and I really aren’t the “monogramed beer stein and cigar” crowd but most of the recommended gifts (Amazon link) for groomsmen are what I would call useless.  The kind of thing that my groomsmen would never actually want but would feel obliged to keep simply because it had been a gift.

For whatever reason, I found my brain locked into junk gifts as though I were a moth circling a fluorescent bulb.  I couldn’t see any further than the “conventional” gifts and found myself anchored to them in the same way that a manufacturer’s suggested retail price makes us think we got a great deal when we have just been fleeced.

Sadly, I got them exactly that kind of gift.  Though  I don’t know exactly what I gave them any more – probably a travel coffee mug with our wedding date on it or something like that – I can guarantee it was almost entirely useless.  And that, whatever it was, it certainly didn’t express what these guys have meant to me and I doubt that even one of them has it any more.

A Whole New World

Of course, at the time I felt pretty good about myself for fulfilling the convention. That is until a couple of weeks ago when I was a groomsman.  I was in a friend’s wedding and he got us a super-cool gift.  As you can see, he didn’t defy the tradition, but he wasn’t imprisoned by the “conventional” gifts.  I suspect he thought long and hard about what to do.

Continue reading →