Time

Thinking of the Holidays...

Suppose that there was a bank that credited your account each morning with $86,400. It carries over no balance from day to day. Every evening it deletes whatever part of the balance you failed to use during the day.

What would you do? Spend every cent, of course!

Each of us has such a bank. Its name is TIME. Every morning, it credits you with 86,400 seconds. Every night it writes off, as lost, whatever of this you have failed to invest to good purpose. It carries over no balance. It allows no overdraft (unlike Congress and the Federal Government!) Each day it opens a new account for you. Each night it burns the remains of the day. If you fail to use the day's deposits, the loss is yours.

There is no going back. There is no drawing against the "tomorrow". You must live in the present on today's deposits. Invest it so as to get from it the utmost in health, happiness, and success! The clock is running. Make the most of it.

Humans are Driven by Consequences

I was thinking today about all the things that our government is "trying" to do in the name of helping us and something dawned on me...when are we all going to "get it?"

I know its because it is my work, but when are we all (both government and non-government alike) going to realize that people don't just function in a vacuum. Human beings are driven by consequences. I believe we all have this innate ability to quickly measure a situation and take actions that will be in our own best interests...at least we think so at the time.

Why do we as a society constantly create situations that make people less productive and less happy. This is nothing new...I first saw it in the several unionized jobs that I held where it became clear that because no one could earn a higher pay rate than anyone else, people did the next best thing...they did the minimum amount of work to get by, thereby maximizing their own personal return on investment of their time.

We see it in government programs that encourage people to not work. We see it in health insurance policies that give us the impression that we can go to the doctor for "free" so we go more often than we really need to, which in turn drives up health insurance costs. We see it in the endless late night television advertisements by lawyers telling me that I am "entitled" to some sort of settlement for something someone else did to me. I see it when I actually have students tell me they deserve an A in a course because they paid tuition.

I guess the final straw today was when I read the Wall Street Journal assessment of the House Health Care Bill, in which I learned that our elected representatives want to spend a trillion dollars on something that the Congressional Budget Office estimates will help 2 percent of the population. It also didn't help to read that in the Cash For Clunkers program the government (because of its wonderfully efficient systems) spent something like $24,000 on each clunker it took off the road!

So, the bottom line is...people do things because they either pay off, or appear to pay off. Wait, maybe I just answered my own question....our elected officials do get it...what they are doing pays off for them! Not for the rest of us! But then why would any elected official really care about those who elected him/her anyway? I guess they are smarter than I gave them credit for being.

Attention Deficit Society

I'm convinced that everyone's really just looking for a shortcut. Over my many years of working with people privately and in groups, the clearer it is that many people just want an easier way out. Well, not because we're lazy (well, some are); it's more that we're completely overwhelmed.

Half the time, we all feel like we're drinking from an information fire hose. If you're anything like me, you're bombarded, and I literally mean bombarded by information, all day long. There's unwanted information (ads and pop-ups) and also WANTED information, stuff you asked for or paid for, and actually do want to get (like something you're trying to learn to improve yourself or how you do things). Not to mention the hundreds of emails we all get each day that we can't always respond to.

It almost seems like we're turning into an "attention deficit" society. Blame it on whatever you want (the media, the Internet, too many TV stations, spam, satellite radio channels, TiVO, etc.), we all don't have enough attention to spread out to do everything we want, including the stuff we don't. So we sometimes go into inaction mode and don't do ANYTHING. It's getting harder to keep focused, harder to make decisions, and mental concentration on just ONE thing seems to be getting more and more rare.

I'm noticing the people I work with also have WAY TOO MUCH to pay attention to. In addition to their work, they've got families, responsibilities, email, bills, and personal and professional development they need to focus on. In an age when we all have instant access to a ridiculous amount of information, making sense of it all and putting it all into place seems to be the hardest thing. And then we beat ourselves up about it.