Recently, I've been thinking a bunch about where I put my energies and capacity. At work, I basically give it "all I've got", but at home, "there's a lot to be desired". The world of work can be pretty spelled out... it's much easier to assign a program of productivity and success. But at home, where the outcomes realm is much more squishy, it's easy to cash it in; to rely on the interest on capital. Work capital and home capital are not all that different, and so I've really got to consider building the one, and drawing on the other.
To that end, my focus is shifting more toward building life at home. But it's been tough, basically, because I'm a speed economy kind of guy. I play work and home wealth building very similarly... by using a get rich quick scheme. And that seems to have worked at work, but at home, where the evaluation of real wealth is truer and much harder to fake, I'm like the rich guy in trouble. I'm still walking around and purchasing like I'm a million bucks, but the asset liability ledger tells a different story.
This morning, I made a different kind of ledger. It's got a listing of the important life stuff (wife and kid, family, friends, interests) and assigns a frequency metric (ex. 1x / wk, 3x / wk). Nothing radical, but basically a schedule for making deposits. Accumulating capital.
Decades ago at Brooklyn College while working on my Ed masters we reviewed an article on human capital. It didn't read like my few paragraphs above, but it did espouse a relationship economy. A part of me hates that I'm at this place where the language that makes the most sense to me is the language of capitalism, but I have to be where I am, and take it from there.
Once upon a time, I think I might have flipped contrasting scripts: I might have sought to understand the world of economics through the lens of relationships. In fact, that's how economics was born. Somewhere along the way, you realize the tail is wagging the dog, or you hope you realize that. And so you seek to walk on all fours until you can stand on your own two feet.
David Brooks spoke of Andre Agassi's Autobiography being really compelling to him. I gave the opening a listen and found a really compelling quote by Van Gogh, sort of the way out of ourselves...
“One cannot always tell what it is that keeps us shut in, confines us, seems to bury us, but still one feels certain barriers, certain gates, certain walls. Is all this imagination, fantasy? I do not think so. And then one asks: My God! Is it for long, is it for ever, is it for eternity? Do you know what frees one from this captivity? It is very deep serious affection. Being friends, being brothers, love, that is what opens the prison by supreme power, by some magic force. —Vincent van Gogh, letter to his brother, July 1880”
― Andre Agassi, Open
No comments:
Post a Comment