Opportunity Costs
When we experience a influx of opportunity and have a large amount of choices to make to better our lives and work, we sometimes become overwhelmed and lose through inaction. Opportunity is a way of perceiving actions that are placed in to our path. Some of them are seen as burdens or unwanted challenges, while other excite us and provide all of our present desires.
Opportunities can be found in life, love, work, education and travel. Rarely, the opportunity exists in many, if not all of these parts of our life, all at once. We just don’t see the chain of circumstance that connects them.
There exists the business concept of Opportunity Costs that involves lost revenue through a diversification of funds, time or resources. The idea involves choices made. This idea has carried over in to science fiction with the idea of parallel dimensions where each of our choices creates a unique time line with all potential futures and presents existing simultaneously. No decision is ever left behind, you just carry forward without it. There is a statement which asks, “If you knew you could not fail, how would you live and chose to act?” or something like that. Would it be safe to ask, “What if the world were an ‘AND’ and not an ‘EITHER-OR’ existence?”
Why must we chose? Is the world the dichotomy we envision and are taught by our elders whose choices have been made? Can there not be an option to have both or many choices?
Work sometimes overwhelms our schedules and resources. Most businesses today would be ecstatic to be flush with work and contracts. They would choose to have more, not less, and to have an ‘AND’ world. If they could achieve more with less and have their choices fulfill their lives and provide rich opportunities in their lives, would they not?
During a time of joy, whatever the reason, and especially in a time of sorrow it is best to be grateful, enriched by and positive for the opportunity choices we must make. The cost we pay is only our personal energy and time, the most valuable elements of our lives. Money costs nothing, is nothing and represents nothing other than faith. Fiat currencies are based upon trust, and if that trust is taken advantage of, you have inflation, recessions, and depressions. The trouble is that we have come to trust money more than other people. We have not invested in ourselves or our relationships. We have exchanged our time and energy for money (debt). We have given over our opportunities for money. Would you take money to spend time away from your family and loved ones? When we work for others and bypass the opportunities of our lives for money, we are shorting ourselves the rich treasures of life for fear of the opportunity costs. We fear they are too high for us and that we will never recover the lost money. We don’t fear the lost time and energy, why is this? We have been led to believe that we are not valuable and that our time holds some value which can be exchanged for money. Are your days for sale?
We all must eat, drink, shelter and care for our loved ones, especially ourselves so that we may continue to do so. Yet none today understands or practices the art of farming, gathering and building the structures and systems we require. We have exchanged our knowledge and labor to be taken care of by strangers who owe us not one selfless act. The doors may close tomorrow if their paycheck ceases to come to them and the cost of that situation is beyond measure. The opportunity came to provide for our love ones and we missed it in exchange for an instrument of debt. We cannot simply state that we will only work for money. There is more that we are working for from day to day. We cannot say we ‘were just doing our job or as we were told’ without any judgment. Are we imbeciles and automatons subject only to the whims of others whose dictates and pieces of paper (money, unilateral contracts, administrative rules, policies) are our sole judgment?
I believe the costs will be too high in the only true resource of our lives to say that is the truth of life. Opportunity is a moment in your life to reaffirm you foundations and stand firm. It is a time to fill in the cracks, grow stronger, and ask for assistance in reaching higher.
What are your opportunity costs?
