How much do you Make?
Next time somebody asks you how much you make, what will you answer? Will you ask them to clarify what they mean?”How much what?”
Change? Apthy? Money? Mediocrity? Data? Privilege? Waste? Entertainment? Meaning? Power? Function? Understanding? Happiness? Passion? Trouble? Insight? Emotion? Commentary? Music? Art?
Funny how we assume that money is the thing we “make” so often that’s all anyone would want to know or ask about, or that that is the most interesting part of someone’s life. It’s a construct many of us seem to follow and a question often asked, which means there is a habits of thinking that are hard to break out of. To help out, download the sketch as a desktop background and keep it for a few days, see if it helps.
March 4th, 2008 at 10:27 am
The reason money pops into mind first might be because apathy, emotion, progress, art, hierarchy and all those other things are harder to measure and quantify. With money, you have a concrete, quantifiable number. The problem is that although an individual’s earnings give you a good idea of what they are worth to society at the very moment, it provides no clue of how much they are worth to society in the long term.
March 4th, 2008 at 10:33 am
Agreed, numbers are easy to compare and create a simple scale. For all that’s been written about Triple Bottom Line accounting, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_bottom_line , I haven’t heard much about companies trying to quantify even just 2 other methods, Social & Ecological.
If anybody knows any companies that have successfully been able to show in a quantitative sense how much Social good they create or how much Planet good they do, I’d love to see how they did it.