Here I'll show you a framework for making life choices and analyzing other people that's been helpful.
I think of myself and people as walking balance sheets, where things can be assets or liabilities, and the resulting equity (A minus L) is the amount of freedom you will have in your life.
Assets The "core operating asset" - skills x passion x time available x market demand/role fit - basically, if you have a skill that you are passionate about, that you have time to do, and whose output (channeled through a role) society values highly, you are an extremely valuable person. Your liquid and illquid wealth less current debt Your friends - they can support you Your family - they will support you Your network - they can prove of use to you
Liabilities Your job - believe it or not, your job is a set of obligations that you must perform on a regular basis. The more things you have to do at work, the more your work is a liability. This one usually lines up with your COA - the roles which compensate you highly for your skills, passion, and time are typically those with high obligations in this area. Your family - obligation to support them Your friends - you must support them as well Your network - you must feed your network to have it grow Your addictions Your ego
These lists are incomplete, of course. What's left is equity - your personal equity that you actually own.
Thinking about this through the lens of leverage, then, brings a new perspective to freedom: to be free, you must run an unlevered balance sheet, or one that is as unencumbered as possible. In contrast, a levered balance sheet is intrinsically risky - you will have to be much more cautious about choices involving your "core operating asset".
This is useful to analyze other people. You can start to understand how far people can be pushed or prodded or what type of choices they will gravitate towards. Generally, people underestimate their future liabilities and overestimate their future potential, so this has implications on their balance sheets as well; you can use this to get them to do things.
One other thing: the most special thing you can do, of course, is transfer some personal equity from yourself to someone else. Generally this involves a ring and lots of flowers.
I've heard of a way people make decisions by drawing up a list of pros and cons, now you're saying you should put that in a framework which takes into account essentially your strengths and weaknesses. Seems like just another way to say you should take the context of the decisionmaking process into account. No need to make that an overly formal process, I can't imagine you'll make better decisions just because you've made an excel grid.
The problem is that you really have no way to gauge how much assets are worth or how much liabilities play against you, or HOW they affect the decision you're trying to make. You can think about those things without the framework and you'll still face some gaps in the information that's available to you. At the end of the day when I take decisions I take all those things into account, try to make a good guess. I'm not foolishly trying to optimize outcomes with a formulaic representation of my worth which gives a flawed representation of what I am. I think that most of all, like Jimmy said, we're living organisms, not balance sheets. This is important because living organisms juggle with unknowns that can't be plugged in a framework.
i can imagine the content of the first post in this thread being explained in a tone and manner of the great Alec Baldwin speech in "Glen Gary Glen Ross"
every entrepreneur lives, eats, and breathes " Always Be Closing "
its an interesting way of looking at things. with this framework you'll optimize on friends / family. cut out friends / family that you spend more time supporting than they give back and make friends with people who give you a lot for very little. of course, now you have to define what unit exactly you are measuring.
On June 09 2016 05:29 Xyik wrote: with this framework you'll optimize on friends / family. cut out friends / family that you spend more time supporting than they give back and make friends with people who give you a lot for very little
Aaaaaand this just explains why this framework is just dumb shit. If executed on grand scale, nobody will have any family or friends (because if you don't cut a family member/friend, it means he supports you more than you support him and in that case, he cuts you out), just a network where people only contact each other when the contacted person is going to be useful for them. If the contacting person is going to be as useful for the contacted person, you have a business. If not, he gets rejected and that's exactly the kind of a world I wouldn't want to live in.
Then, you also get the ability to invest in family members/friends, you take care of him for some time and if he doesn't start giving back, you stop losses. If he starts giving back, you take profits. Yay, slightly more livable world. Or not. Can't even decide lol.
So if a parent gets terminal cancer, walk away. If you have a child with Downs Syndrome, put her on the street. If your friend becomes suicidal, tell him the situation seems sub optimal for you and cut him off.
so lame, reducing such complex issues with real people involved to a series of "balance sheets".
c'mon man use a little intuition, common sense and emotion when it comes to making important choices in your life. you cant reduce everything to a convenient equation.
On June 10 2016 15:46 Dapper_Cad wrote: So if a parent gets terminal cancer, walk away. If you have a child with Downs Syndrome, put her on the street. If your friend becomes suicidal, tell him the situation seems sub optimal for you and cut him off.
Translating an individual's complete web of social and psychology factors into an accounting formula is a pretty interesting idea for a movie (I somehow expect that movie to be horror/crime thriller), but probably isn't going to win many converts in actual Social Science or Psychology departments.
The really crushing critique of this, I believe, is that this is simply not how we have evolved to understand social relationships, self esteem, or success. Your formula does not, for instance, account for status and social validation, making it inappropriate for primates. At a simpler and more nitpicky level, plenty of people cannot rely on their families to support them.
I return to my earlier point - this is a fun idea but doesn't belong in the sober recommendation genre. More like short story or something.
I also wanted to say that I dont think its heartless - there is clearly an attempt to include sentimentality, but to reframe it in a new language - that is perhaps the most interesting part of it. But, as stated, I think that attempt is a little over ambitious.
If any of you actually paid attention to the content of the post Shady said that the balance of the assets and liabilities was your ultimate freedom, not happiness, which makes his assessment completely correct. if you value a free life where you don't have to worry about others, their decisions, or their happiness, then you have to minimize the liabilities listed above... think beach bum surfer trope. But if you value family more, or your work more, then you will ultimately have less freedom to do what you want to do as your responsibilities both perceived and real will shape the extent of your freedom. the OP doesn't pretend to tell you what is more important so don't read it that way.
EPT
