Sometimes the biggest reason I can think of for becoming ridiculously wealthy is to be able to pay someone to take care of the stupid crap I don’t want or have to time to deal with.
For example my “it is still too new to not work properly” smartphone would be handled by buying a new one or having someone on staff who could fix it for me.
When the car needs service I wouldn’t worry about it because it would be handled by someone else and I could focus on the important stuff.
Will Theory Meet Reality?
Before we go any further down the rabbit hole let’s remember I don’t like having to ask someone else for help with much of this.
I don’t want to ask someone to fix the car/phone/computer because I want to do it myself. I like knowing how to do these things and I get immense satisfaction from being able to do them.
Still time is our most valuable resource and we never have enough so it would be smart for me to ask someone else to handle them for me.
But, if I did there would be a part of me asking if it was smart, because what would happen if I was lost in space.
How Does That Relate To Anything?
In the ancient times known as the 20th century before we all carried computers in our pockets and flying was fun because 9/11 and the War on Terror hadn’t impacted it life was different.
It was a time when my dear friend David, the guy I thought would become an astronaut discussed and debated all sorts of things.
You can blame the what would happen if you got lost in space conversation on our having seen Apollo 13.
If you haven’t seen the movie and don’t want to know what happens you better stop reading now.
Ready….
And we are back.
So the guys on the ground work feverishly to try and help the astronauts figure out a way out of this jam but the potential solutions are limited significantly based upon the location of the astronauts and the resources they have to use.
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David and I are holed up in a booth at some diner talking about what we would do in that situation and how to take advantage of limited resources.
We are bouncing things back and forth and I am teasing him about being the pilot who carries 5 flashlights in a plane that is so small you only need three.
“Josh, I don’t have to use each flashlight as a flashlight, I could use parts of one or more of them to do something else, something more important for a particular situation.”
Then & Now
Twenty-one or so years later I have a lot of life experience under my belt that I didn’t have then and a deeper appreciation for that conversation and many others.
I never imagined that many years later I would reference that movie in discussions with my kids and talk to them about how it represents real life problem solving.
Sometimes they roll their eyes at me and ask me if I really think we’ll ever need to worry about being lost in space.
If I respond with “Danger Will Robinson” they look at me and ask why I say things and make no sense and I tell them they are just too young to know about good television.
But every now and then I’ll bring it back up and talk about narrowing our focus and say that sometimes the challenges we face seem bigger because we have too broad a focus and too many potential resources to draw upon.
On the other hand having multiple resources sometimes helps because on a day like today where the printer/scanner refused to work I used an app to scan the page I needed and then emailed it over to myself as a PDF.
Truth is that if I was that wealthy guy I referred to I probably still would prefer the solution I came up with because it was faster and more effective than waiting for someone to fix or purchase a new unit.
Might be nice to test that theory out, as my departed scientist friend David would say, sometimes you don’t have enough data to come up with a real answer.
In this case I’d like to do more than make an educated guess, suppose I better win the lottery on work harder on coming up with a better option for generating a very significant cash inflow sooner than later.
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