Positive NPV

In finance an entity will choose to undertake a project based on whether or not it will ultimately add dollars to the bottom line, or have a positive net present value. Unfortunately this is generally only applied to money. What if, as humans, we endeavor to have positive NPVs? In relationships, activities, at home, at work, with earth and with ourselves. Do we add any real value?

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Breaking the barrier of “experience necessary”

Many of us become caught in a paradox that can hinder our advance towards meaningful work. With our qualifications all stacked up and CVs formatted we apply for jobs. We tick many of the boxes, but the dreaded “experience necessary” lets us down.

My solution – I’ve offered to work for a reputable company, part-time, for free. I asked the managing director if I could work and told him there would be no strings attached. This hasn’t been confirmed as happening – but they want to know more about me. It’s looking promising.

How can one afford to work for free? Personally I will be able to balance this with my part time work and dip in to a savings account when necessary. More to the point – why would one choose to work for free? Consider how much you (or your government, family etc.) have spent on your education. The sum is huge. Well, working for free in a quality and meaningful workplace is the inverse of this. The amount spent on the education in this respect is not measured in dollars; it is measured in time. You are giving time in exchange for experience.

What will it take for you to attend the University of Experience Necessary? The qualification you leave with is powerful. It gives the ability to tick that final box on an application and make yourself the complete package when applying for a job.

[positivenpv]

The value of context

While reading yesterday I was awed by the phrase ‘hard work is only a prison sentence if it has no meaning’. I don’t think the author meant this to have the philosophical impact that it did on me. The sentence slowed me down and I read and re-read it. In a social media era where one is swimming in statuses and tweets of quotes and anecdotes that are designed to make one be inspired I was surprised at myself for responding so emotionally to a single sentence in a fiction novel. I’m saying to myself: ‘yes – this is what I believe but haven’t been able to say so poetically’.

You see, I like to think I love and welcome hard work. When I started working construction I felt awkward leaning on the shovel. The labourers’ mentality of ‘boss is coming – look busy’ bothered me. It didn’t take long for my keenness to dissolve. I became the leader of the team that checked the windows were shut on the 8th floor every hour (no one ever opened them). The boss was never on the 8th floor. That wasn’t me. I wasn’t adding value.

What was the missing element? Why did I work hard at university and in the garden but not when I was at work? The irony of going to work to avoid work then coming home to work hard hasn’t escaped me. Then I read the aforementioned sentence and I realised there was no particular missing element – there was an entirely missing context. By context I mean a framework of goals, meaning and achievement.

For one to enjoy working hard one must take meaning from both the process and the result. The journey and the destination. I have been accidentally inspired to bring meaning back to my hard work. Personally, and hopefully for others, anything meaningful will have a positive NPV.

Note: The book was Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

[positivenpv]

The green grass...

The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. Conventionally anyway. Well I think my grass is pretty bloody green. Could be greener, but yes, it is some green grass. Problem is that I want hop the fence to see the wilted brown grass.

I hate the thought of China rising up and urbanising. The factories with their pseudo-slaves, working in monotony in order to produce cheap goods we don’t need and probably don’t even want. All this in order to feed a family who only can’t eat because they left family farms to move to the city. But I want to go to Shenzhen and witness the calamity. I want to meet the workers and decide for myself if they are happy.

I love nature, landscapes and towns, while larger cities do not appeal to me. Yet I can’t wait to get to cities like Hong Kong and Singapore, wander the concrete forests and indulge in what I’m not missing out on.

I was once in Ho Chi Minh City when friends and I decided to turn against the flow of tourist traffic and go see the Saigon River. Eyes peered out from fences and windows bemused at the ‘lost’ tourists. A man said he’d murder a puppy he was holding unless we gave him $5 (we didn’t and he walked away). When we arrived at the river it was foul. It stood stagnant, orange and brown and permeated with plastic. It was immediately clear why the guide books didn’t promote it. I hated the city for what it had done to what I’m sure was a once beautiful and prosperous waterway. That didn’t detract from the experience.

A former colleague once told me it made him sick to think that people spend money to travel to the ‘third world’. That’s fine, he didn’t value it. I do, and I want to add value to myself and to the world by traveling, mingling and mixing with those who aren’t on my lush green pastures. Who am I to say their grass isn’t sweet, if not sweeter.

“The grass is browner on the other side…” – it just doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.

[positivenpv]

I want to do this, this and that but instead I’m going to do… nothing.

To get the most value out of yourself I feel it is important to understand how you can do this. For some it may be sleeping in, consciously consuming and watching films. Some days that tickles my fancy. Usually I, on the other hand, need to be on the go. Lately I haven’t been. I deem that to be wasteful.

We have wants and needs, goals and ambitions. To not be pursuing these is spilling the soup on the way to the table. That is a waste. This is to be considered freely, if sitting on the deck snoring is a pastime you value then it is not spilling the soup.

I’m not currently unemployed, I’m underemployed. Working small hours to cover expenses. The remainder of my time is spent floundering around.

I want to build myself a large edible garden. I want to explore and journey across Asia to Europe. I want to work full time in a meaningful job. I want learn to make my own furniture. I want to help in my community. I want to take extended breaks at the family holiday home.

I’m doing little to none of this, even with more spare time on my hands than I’ve had in years. I don’t have a bountiful bag of resources at present, but I do have time. Time equals all men; my 24 hour day is just as long as yours. I need to start cashing in my time. How can we convert time, our most valuable resource, in to greater value?

[positivenpv]

In an ideal world...

I had a dream… just like Martin Luther King Jr and Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz.

In my dream I worked on a small permaculture-type farm one morning a week for a few hours. I then took away my food for the week and went to “real work”.

Now that sounds like my kind of living. The dream has got me mentally exploring the idea. You would eat seasonal food. You would know where it comes from. It would be fresh. It would have low food miles. You could add your skills to make the community stronger.

All that is needed is a small community of civilians who add value to the chain. They might be gardeners, abattoirs, machinery operators, cooks, composters, anything really. Even the humble labourer would have his place.

I personally can’t imagine anything so important in life that one couldn’t drop what they’re doing for the sake of the week’s food, unless you’re Mahatma Ghandi.

The purpose of sharing this isn’t to make us all have buzzing food communities lush with rainbows and butterflies. Rather, to consider where your food comes from. The idea of local food resonates with me. It removes the ambiguity around how much value is being reaped from people and the planet on the way to my kitchen. A great book is Confessions of an Eco Sinner by Fred Pearce. Fred travels the world to find where his stuff comes from. It is a somewhat more haunting read than I thought it would be. What steps could we take, in altering how we source what we eat, to create a positive value link in the food chain?

[positivenpv]

[positivenpv]

The City Without Roads

I live in a city of roughly 120,000 people. The city is, by modern super-standards, sprawled. However I can drive to the other side of town in ten minutes.

What if my city, or your city, had no roads within a certain area? Namely the CBD. I mean, we would still have roads but these are reserved for couriers, deliveries, the disabled, elderly and perhaps buses. Special passes are required to drive. There is a low speed limit, say 30km/h. People walk, skip and hop in to town either from home or from well-designed car storage areas. The city comes alive with lanes and stalls in place of gas stations to catch the attention of passers-by. I’ve heard from a few town planners with this same ideology (I am not claiming to have conceived this) that cities, even in the USA, with this kind of evolution are attracting a young, bright and vibrant class of citizen. The focus on walk/cycle town planning is having a positive feedback snowball effect. Better people, healthier, happier, and less dependent on finite resources.

I’ve assumed something there – would people really be any happier if they had to walk for ten minutes in the morning and the afternoon?

This idea is immediately thrown in to the too hard basket, even by me, and I believe in it. What we are talking about will have to be a newly-built city, or will it? What if this was given a 10-20 year time frame? Businesses dependent on having cars in the city (there can’t be so many like that can there?) can move to the periphery. Would businesses defy the car-bar and move to suburban locations? If so, so be it.

Here is the part where I let the hippies down. I am not against fossil fuel use for transport. I actually want to work in association with the fossil fuel industry. We need oil for transport. We need to use less of it. We need to stop depending on it.

I believe a walkable city would create significantly more value than it would destroy. I believe this applies to all 3 P’s – people, planet and profits. A truly positive NPV.

[positivenpv]

The Value of... Value

If I’m not working, how come I can afford to live? And live comfortably for that matter too. I consider myself a ‘saver’. In reality, I naturally spend less than I earn. It comes down to a concept that isn’t hard to adopt. Buy only what you value (where possible). Save the rest.

I value fresh food, coffee, my car, nice beers, books and holidays away from home. I don’t value gaming, dance clubs, gyms and household ornaments.

Recently I purchased the supporters jersey for my region’s rugby team. That, combined with a week of spending more than necessary in bars and restaurants, left me ‘feeling the pinch’. My disposable income was almost at zero. Money occupied my mind in an undesirable way. I also talked about money more. Our means of consuming was consuming me. I like the jersey, but do I like it more than I would have liked spending the money on other things that fulfill me? I’m still not sure of the answer to that.

Motivation for this topic comes to me because of a (now former) workmate. He is of similar age, has similar interests and lives round the block. We were paid on a Thursday and he had no money from about Monday onwards. Like me, he wants to travel and has big plans. How will he convince an airline to let him board on an IOU? The key difference separating us was that he appeared clueless as to what he truly valued. He threw his money at targets he didn’t even know he wanted to hit. “If only I hadn’t bought...”

My weeks spent slaving away before I left my old job were worth $445 or less in dollar terms. I still saved around a third of that (I do concede that I am only financially responsible for myself). By recognising what I value and exchanging money for these items only, I feel like I am adding a surplus to myself. The NPV of my expenses > 0.

[positivenpv]

The value of being unemployed

I left my job about 2 weeks ago. I spent most of my waking hours working for an asshole, getting a minimum wage and glancing at my watch far too regularly to see how many minutes I needed to endure until the next smoko-break or home time. It was misery. I've been beating myself up over it - I'm a pussy, children are dying in Africa, European youths are 30% unemployed. All true, but the benefits of leaving that job are becoming more clear to me. I have an identity that I need to keep and build on.

As a finance student I have always thought about this idea of the positive net present value, which I've decided to call this irregular diary/blog. What I was doing had a dollar value of $445 paid into my a/c each Thursday. Some of the costs included my ability to enjoy a given day, the environment (the site was extremely wasteful), my health, and my ability to spend time with others. Was this worth $445? Not to me - the 'project' had a negative NPV. So I left.

I'm looking for jobs every day in traditional sources. I have savings and I won't be accepting charity or government handouts. Plus I don't spend much on a day-to-day basis.

Tumblr currently has 168.8 million blogs and I expect no one will ever read this. Its more for me to put down personal thoughts.