I must first confess that although my nerd/geek credentials are solid, I hold a Master’s Degree in Managerial Economics. Oddly, your fields of study and your career warp your thinking. When I was managing 7-11 stores I thought in terms of inventory, rack spacing, sales turn and shrinkage (product shrinkage not the kind you are snickering about). When I received my electronic engineering degree and worked on avionics systems, it was voltage, current, flow, resistance, capacitance and reaction. When I received my degree in Computer Science, it was all input, processing, output, feedback. With economics it was all about maximizing your utils by matching marginal costs with marginal demand. These studies have to a degree hard-wired my brain.
Culture has the same effect on us all. The constant stream of advertising and consumerism has created a sense of price but has neglected value. I used to try to explain to my wife the difference between price and value when I was managing portfolios. For instance, price of a stock can go down because of factors in the overall market and rumors. The value of the stock may be higher. People can take their capital away from a sector or the whole market due to unrelated circumstances. If a company still has great sales, products, or even assets, it is worth more than its price. Once I owned stock in a company with stock valuation less than the auction price of its plants, land and equipment. Basically, if the company never made another dime, it could have liquidated and been worth more than its price. Other times companies look like they have great prices – for instance penny stocks – but are not worth it. A company in the red and going under is worth a negative amount and a penny per share is too much.
So it is with my life. I used to chase the almighty dollar and a big part of me still wants that. I learned that my wife, kids, friends, dogs and pursuit of writing are higher in value. Still, there is that constant cultural nagging for me to jump back in and make the big bucks. I was thinking about this as I dusted off the top of one of my comic book boxes. It is a long skinny white box made specifically for storing them. I have some really nice X-Men, Wolverine, Cable, Superman and other comics in there from twenty years ago. I put them all with backing, special plastic slips and rigid upright dividers. I plan to reread them and I realized how anal and OCB I am about it. I am not willing to get any stain or crease in them. My kids, adults now, probably have horrible memories about having to read the comics on a flat clean surface and turn the pages just so in order not to crease them.
The funny thing is that I have no intention of ever selling them and I never bought any collectibles as an “investment.” Even so, I am compulsive about keeping them in mint condition. I value my collections of books, comic books, postage stamps, figurines and sports cards completely with their emotional and sentimental value, but still society has implanted this thought that I must preserve them so their price will be high. Strange.
My older relatives were upset when I was just a child because my Grandfather gave me his extensive stamp collection. Think early American stamps – like all of them – in this collection. His own sons wanted them bad. Why did he give them to me, just a little kid? In his words, “I know Michael will never sell them.” It’s true. I’m over 50 now and still have every stamp. I’ll never get rid of them. My goal is to find someone who loves them as much as me and pass them on.
Thinking about these things in detail is how I remind myself to focus on value, not price. To focus on a good life, not a financially wealthy one. It surprises me how hard it is to walk away from a life that was literally killing me with stress and producing no legacy. I was leaving footprints on the beach only to be washed away by the next wave. I know this has been a rambling post, but I hope it will help to inspire and remind you as well to pursue the things that are important to you and resist the mindset created by consumerism.
Michael Bradley - Time Traveler 