Observations of Life

To get things started and to give you an idea who I am and the way I look at life, here is an article from the March issue of our newsletter. 

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     Well, it has been a couple of months since I put pen to paper here. December was personally busy with family activities and the holidays. And as much as I enjoy the writing that I do, I have to, at times, put it aside for other things.

      January came and went with a minor illness that left me less motivated and inspired to write. It lingered longer than I expected and I just didn’t get any writing done. Then my desktop computer crashed. Not that I didn’t have other computers to write on, but again, I could not motivate myself to write until I fixed it.

     Fixing the computer took a little time. I finally figured out that my hard drive died. I ordered another and then took a night installing Windows. There were some minor problems in doing this, but I worked them out and got the computer up and running. This was followed by installing all of the programs I used on the computer. This was then followed by downloading updates for all of the programs and operating system. This took some time also. But eventually it was done and it’s as good as new.

     It’s always nice when things work right. I seem to appreciate them more when this happens. I, we, forget how much we depend on other things and people to help us day to day. If your car didn’t start or the public transportation didn’t run, how would you get to work? Most of us would probably agree that our mobility is important to us and want it available when we want it. But there are seemingly little things that are bigger than you imagine. What if there was not trash collection? What if where you work, there was no one to take out the trash or no one picked it up at the curbside? What if the person who brought the toilet paper to the stores no longer did? What if you ran out of soap? We worry about gas shortage but rarely think of these things.

     But there is an underlying principle here and that is the way our initial perception is of someone’s or something’s importance. More specifically, the importance of what people do. Most would agree we need firemen and women, the police, teachers, doctors, nurses, and the military, as well as say they are very important. But we also need those who serve in less dramatic or sensational roles in our daily lives. Those who pick up the trash, clean the restrooms, serve us our lunches, the cashier at the convenience store, the person who delivers the newspaper to your home or local news stand, and the boy or girl whom you pay to mow your grass all have jobs that seem less important, but have an underlying importance. Because if they were not done, what would happen?

     Can you imagine going out to dinner and there was not a restroom, let alone a clean one? Or if you could not stop and buy a newspaper in the morning and have that cup of coffee on your way to work, but only because you had to walk to work since there was no one to service your disabled car? At these times you might begin to see the importance of these jobs and those people who did them.

      Compensation for our labors has been an age-old issue for many. Some people think that they should be paid more for what they know. Others think they should get more for being on the job for a number of years. Still others think that no matter what they do, not mattering how well or poor their performance, they should get what the person next to them gets. Some people complain they are not paid enough, yet will not think twice about leaving a small tip for their waiter or waitress who deserve much more for their labors. They bellyache of their perceived inequities done to them, yet never see how as a payer of services, they violate their own preachings.

      And as much as many will deny it, we are all employees and at the same time employers. In the past I have written how everyone works for someone else, even the self-employed. But you do hire and fire people everyday. For every service or product you buy, you are hiring and firing the people in those businesses. From buying a car to paying a kid a few dollars to wash your car, people are hired and fired, from transaction to transaction. So when people complain about employers in general, they must share some of that blame for themselves. But now I’ll take a slightly different direction.

      I saw a cartoon in the newspaper a long time ago which illustrates this premise very well. In the first panel we see two secretaries asking how is it that trashmen are paid so much more than them. The next panel has the secretaries saying to each other how educated they were and important their work is. The third panel has an observer hearing this and then asks them why don’t they then become trashmen (trashwomen). Then in the last panel one secretary says, “You couldn’t pay me enough”. It comes full circle and they unknowingly answer their own question.

      One of the best examples for understanding what you are paid for your labor is this simple formula. I got this from one of the recordings by Earl Nightingale. It is: What you do, how well you do it and how easily you can be replaced will determine what others will pay you. If you only can do one thing and no one needs that one thing, no one will hire you. If you do something that many need and there are not many who do it, you have more demand (supply and demand). If you do something better than everyone else and people want the best of what you do, you have more value. If you do something that is common and you can be easily replaced, you can have lower employment value to people.

     The fact of life is that what you do is a commodity. And for the most part, you are the designer of that commodity. At least at some point in your life, you had choices to remain as you were or better yourself and become a more valued commodity. What did you invest in yourself personally and professionally to make yourself a more valued person to those around you, to those you want to be around and to those you want to reward you for what you do vocationally?

Roger J. Willard

Willard Hypnosis Center

www.willardhypnosis.com

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 14th, 2009 at 8:51 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.