Wednesday, March 29, 2006

Lessons in Boring Economics


Life's lessons are often learned but rarely remembered.

What's the best way to learn to ride a bike? Training wheels? Nope. Gravity.

Gravity is your reality whether you understand it or not.

You won't escape it and eventually the ground comes up to meet you with one hundred percent accuracy.

Here comes the boring part. Perhaps you've already stopped reading because you're feeling a math exercise approaching?



Everyone is faced with making economic decisions every single day. You are programmed at a young age to incorporate factors such as popularity, cost comparisons, and even irrational emotional reactions when making these decisions. So you struggle through life making the same unconscious economic decisions others make that continue to drain your never adequate income.

And that's the first boring economic lesson:

1. Your income will never be adequate to escape gravity. Never. You can trade your health for wealth but the ground still comes up to meet you.

Here's where we could wax the philosophical hair right off the Neanderthal psyche in bold ripping motions exposing the raw meaning of life. But that would be like petting a burning dog...a painful distraction with no upside.
Try and stay on target here. Economics and Gravity.

The second economic lesson?

2. Consuming your valuable time agonizing over trivial economic decisions actually costs you more than you realize. And trivial is not defined by the size of the purchase. It's defined by gravity again.

What does that mean? Well, quite simply, it means do you value your time in free-fall? Or have you succumbed to filling that time with distractions?



And today's third lesson is a lesson everyone eventually learns...typically too late.

3. Every economic decision is trivial. Every single one. Other decisions are more important and will impact your life with greater magnitude.

It's up to you to figure out what those are. Don't take too long. Gravity taught you how to ride your bike and it's busy making sure you'll eventually learn the meaning of life. And since there's no blog in Heaven and probably not one in Hell either, it's unlikely you'll be sharing that lesson with the people who matter to you.

Big sky above you, a river inside. Much to learn, you still have, Padawons.

Much to learn, Much to remember.

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