What's the difference between a bad golfer and a bad skydiver?
A bad golfer goes, WHACK! DANG!
A bad skydiver goes, DANG! WHACK!
Accidents. They happen quickly, don't they? Blink your eyes, and a finger is cut, a toe is stubbed, a car is wrecked, or a life is permanently altered - or taken. If only I could do those 8 seconds over again...
Last night my college-age daughter - a beautiful person - dropped her iPhone on the tile bathroom floor. I was just getting ready for bed, when I heard the weeping and wailing. It was a new phone, and a case had been ordered, received the day before, and not installed. She didn't like it, and was going to return it and get another. So the phone was not in a protective case.
The phone still works. A credit to Apple Engineers. But the glass is shattered, and the case is broken. It's really not usable. So the brand new iPhone is totaled. Disappointing? You bet! Expensive to replace? A relative question. To my daughter who's in the middle of a nursing program, yes it is expensive.
Her mourning was a bit out of proportion, considering the gravity of accidents others face (like bad skydivers). I need to teach her - and the whole family - an important lesson. Here's a thumbnail of what I'm going to teach them:
This is something I've recently re-learned from a brilliant teacher, Doug Andrew: In life we accumulate 3 types of assets:
1) Foundational
2) Intellectual
3) Financial
A bad golfer goes, WHACK! DANG!
A bad skydiver goes, DANG! WHACK!
Accidents. They happen quickly, don't they? Blink your eyes, and a finger is cut, a toe is stubbed, a car is wrecked, or a life is permanently altered - or taken. If only I could do those 8 seconds over again...
Last night my college-age daughter - a beautiful person - dropped her iPhone on the tile bathroom floor. I was just getting ready for bed, when I heard the weeping and wailing. It was a new phone, and a case had been ordered, received the day before, and not installed. She didn't like it, and was going to return it and get another. So the phone was not in a protective case.
The phone still works. A credit to Apple Engineers. But the glass is shattered, and the case is broken. It's really not usable. So the brand new iPhone is totaled. Disappointing? You bet! Expensive to replace? A relative question. To my daughter who's in the middle of a nursing program, yes it is expensive.
Her mourning was a bit out of proportion, considering the gravity of accidents others face (like bad skydivers). I need to teach her - and the whole family - an important lesson. Here's a thumbnail of what I'm going to teach them:
This is something I've recently re-learned from a brilliant teacher, Doug Andrew: In life we accumulate 3 types of assets:
1) Foundational
- Family and Relationships
- Health
- Values & Beliefs
- Character
2) Intellectual
- Knowledge & Experience (when mixed with contemplation = Wisdom
- Talents & Skills
- Ideas
- Traditions
- Methods & Systems
3) Financial
- Everything that accountants measure on a balance sheet
- Material goods
So here's the question: If you had to bankrupt one category of assets, which would you choose?
The best choice is Financial, for two reasons:
1) They're the only assets that you can't take with you at the end of life.
2) You can use the other two to recover and rebuild financial assets.
My daughter's broken cell phone is in the 3rd category. Regrettable? Yes. Expensive to replace? Yes. Is there something we can learn so this never happens again? Yes. But at the end of the day, cell phones are things. And things are replaceable.
Final point: In such moments, we can think of people we know who had a major loss in one of the other two categories. And be grateful.
No comments:
Post a Comment