LIVE FROM LIFE - Life, the key factor

How often does one hear the question – ‘Will you give it your hundred percent?” Equally common is the oft repeated ‘strength’ in the bogus HR questions in the interviews – ‘Sir, I give every task my hundred percent.’ Whether actually giving ‘hundred percent’ to ‘all tasks’ is physically possible or not is another question – my point of discussion here is the very idea of giving ‘hundred percent’ to something.

Let us begin with a very general question – what is the thing that is the most valuable and most irreplaceable of all that we own. Moralistic (and politically correct) answers aside, it is our life – we see stories of riches to rags and back to riches, but barring the Easter miracle (I am agnostic tending to atheist, but this example is etched in the thoughts of most of the English understanding populace, so there), there has hardly been any instance of someone losing his her life and then gaining it. One cannot even get back a single second of one’s life to live again – here, as I am typing away on a vacation, I am forgoing precious moments I could spend with family. The old Kansas song is so true – ‘I close my eyes, only for a moment and the moment’s gone.’ Will you give up, say, a month of your life for, say, million bucks? Well, most of you might say yes, but ask that question from a man who is dying – he might be willing to buy for a billion or more! So, we can safely conclude that our life is a valuable resource for us, and a key one at that. What returns do we expect for the investment of our life moments into the economic machinery? All monetary turnovers will go pale in comparison to the basic but essential returns expected – the so call hierarchical needs pyramid, as is often quoted as Maslow’s need hierarchy pyramid. We need to satisfy our physical needs, security needs, affiliation needs and the other learned needs, and later the transcendental needs, in that order. The first two are needs that are being fulfilled by lower life forms too, so an apt return to investment of the human life would comprise only of the other three levels. On the basis of these observations, let us examine some of the common ideas we have about what to do with our lives –

1. Have one aim and dedicate yourself to it. Is this suggestion, often told by the ‘wise’, correct? Now, that you agree that our life moments are resources to be invested, let’s take an analogy – suppose you have a given sum of money. Is it advisable to invest it all in one stock, or one sector? While in some cases this might pay huge dividends, in most cases, it is advisable to ‘diversify the portfolio’. So, if we do that with our money, why not do that with our lives? Some may argue that a minimum level of efforts are required to anything at all in some venture, we are just belittling our potential, thinking that we cannot get to the threshold in more than one front of effort. So, if we view our lives as resource, it is simply a natural follow up that it is wise to diversify as much as possible.
2. Work very hard and diligently, as rewards take time coming in. This is another wise man’s advice – and often shining examples are put up of Abe Lincoln, or Faraday or Lal Bahadur Shastri and similar personalities, who rose from low places to their successful ends by virtue of hard work, which paid in the end. The taught, like us, lap it up and start a grueling struggle for an education, and a career, with eye’s firmly on some future gain, neglecting the comforts of today. Well, for one Abe Lincoln, we have got thousands of name less and faceless people, who work really hard, unmindful of whether actual gains are being made or not – and toil on into obscurity. Coming back to the money analogy, going for a lot of ‘hard work’, without any immediate rewards, is like taking up a project with huge fixed costs, and that with a very long investment turnover period. Both are cardinal sins according to the principles of financial management. So what is the advice from me to those who have lost their way to this article – redesign your effort reward system e.g. if you are studying for some exam you have to take in a couple of years time, it is important to constantly check your progress, and reward yourself, with small things, such as a movie, or an eat out – this gives both a feedback, and a shorter break even period of effort – rewards, both sound investing decisions for the key resource called life.

These were two small ideas on how life decisions could be simplified and objectified if we do not take it for granted, and see it worth what it is. A whole book may be written on how such a model may be applied to more interesting situations – but perhaps that would stifle the libraries full of ideas that could be generated if the discussion was confined to these two hopefully stimulating examples. Invest wisely.