In Part 7 of this series of posts on prioritizing your relationships, I left you hanging on my every word, waiting for the discussion of applying prioritizing your relationships and using your life’s precious resources in those relationships. Based on Bentham’s utilitarian approach, modified for a little Greatness!, I discussed how to plan the application of your life’s precious resources of self, time, effort, energy, emotion, intellect, property, and people to big, important things.
Then I teased you, saying I would next explain how to do the same thing when less important issues pop up urgently. Such as, my favorite example, when one of your kids presents, literally crying on the phone begging for help with his or her major homework project due first thing Monday morning, just as you got into your groove for your Sunday afternoon workout at your favorite fitness center.
This urgent and moderately important (more important for your kid, but it should also be somewhat important for you) need will require an investment of your self, time, effort, energy, emotion (some), intellect (some to some more, but not usually a lot), property (those tri-fold cardboard table-top displays are expensive), and people (if you have to help, then so should your kid’s other parent). So let’s run the factors on it.
- Intensity becomes Resource Leverage: How much of my life’s precious resources will I and others have to invest and will this increase or decrease my and others’ net balance of life’s precious resources? I, the kid, and his or her other parent will have have to put in our various types of resources on this; nonetheless, we will also get a bunch of resources of various types back out. (The exact details of which is beyond the scope of this discussion.)
- Duration: How long will this investment and increase or decrease of resources last? We will invest for a few hours probably, but the return for our kid will last of a good while. We can get back to the workout in the evening instead of the afternoon.
- Certainty or uncertainty: How likely or unlikely is it that the investment and return on resources will occur? Fairly likely.
- Propinquity or remoteness: How soon will one have to invest one’s resources and how soon will the return on those resources occur? Fairly soon on the investment; fairly soon on the return for the parents and probably tomorrow for the kid, and maybe Thursday night for the presentations of the science fair at school.
- Fecundity: What is the probability that the investment in resources will be followed by increases in resources of the same or a different kind? Assuming you have a relatively Great! kid, it is highly probable the kid will enhance his resources, which will enhance your resources.
- Purity: What is the probability that the investment of resources will result in a decrease in my and/or other’s net balance of resources? It is possible the whole project will fail, but not likely. It is possible the whole project will not be well received by the teacher or judges. But it is not likely to result in a total decrease in your or everyone else’s net resource balance.
- Extent: How many people will be affected by the change (investment vs. return) in our life’s net balance of resources? You, the other parent, the kid, the teacher, other parents, other kids, college admissions boards (okay, we are stretching here; but, you get the ripple effect of this all).
- Priority: What is the priority on my hierarchy of relationships of those people affected by this decision? This is your kid crying on the phone for Greatness! sake. Not some guy in a boiler room ask you for $20 for the police benevolent association’s annual fallen heroes’ survivors’ drive (of which the fundraiser is going to keep $19 and forward one buck to the widow(er)s and orphans of the fallen heroes).
Go think about how you can best create, use, and recreate your life’s precious resources of self, time, effort, energy, emotion, intellect, property, and people to perceive, plan, prepare, and practice persistently promoting your practically perfect performance in life and send me a comment telling me how you did it.
Then, let’s move on to Part 9 of this series on prioritizing your relationships and talk just a bit more about practicing personal primacy.
In the meantime, you GOTTABGATT!, so go out there today and be… Great! All the time!