December 6, 2015

The best things in life are free.  But do we truly get that? 

One of the great inventors of our time, Dean Kamen said “The ideal would be a machine that has no size, no cost, never breaks down, is available wherever you need it all the time, free.  That will never happen, there is a very pervasive but naïve assumption that aid means you give things away.  If you give things away with this mythical idea that it should have no cost, it will end up demonstrating that it will have no value.” From the documentary, Slingshot.

Sometimes, things need to take a piece of us before we realize the value added.  If we received the physical wellbeing, added confidence, and all the spill offs of the approach to mastery without giving anything of ourselves, we likely would not see the value in what we obtained.  What this means is, yes, there is a price to success in whatever you do, but it is in that sacrifice that the true value of the achievement is realized. That is common human nature.

We are crazy creatures.  Our brain seems to want to attach a sacrifice to every experience in order to give the experience value.  Take for example spending time with your kids.  Does the experience seem a little sweeter when you have put off work in order to spend that time.  Knowing you gave something up, has somehow made the time more valuable.

Take a lottery winner as another example.  Within a year, most winners would not rate there life enjoyment greater than prior to the winnings.  I think this is demonstrated because monetary freedom removes much need for sacrifice.  Remove the catalyst (sacrifice) and they lose value to life experience.

I am not sure if it healthy to be that way.  I really believe if we become more aware of the miracles that happen each day in our life, and the mind boggling probabilities that have come together for these miracles to happen, we would require less sacrifice to see the true value of our lives. Perhaps we might even recognize the sacrifice to be a miracle in itself, and to add value to the experience from a different perspective. 

For example we may gain an appreciation for the time spent away from the Kwoon for work as valuable, rather than toilsome.  From this perspective, stripping away our conventional view of value, we multiply our recognition of miracles in our life tenfold.

How we value the things most important in our life, has great implication on the value of our life.