Measuring "Value"

According to the “Outliers” (Malcolm Gladwell), you need about 10,000 hours to become expert. This can apply to piano, theoretical physics or law. At 4 hours per day, 300 days per year, this will take 8 1/3 years.

That is daunting. With some help, maybe it is possible to do it in 8,000 hours.

Stephen Hawking’s book “The Brief History of Time” is one of the world’s best sellers and least read books. According to 20th century physics, on the quantum level, time is reversible, ie the laws of physics apply forwards or backwards in time. On the macroscopic level time goes forwards (at least that is our perception and a cruel one). The “arrow of time” has been subject of much debate in the domain of physics. But I doubt if we would have many meaningful conversations on everyday life unless we implicitly assumed time moves inexorably only in one direction – ie forward.

Lawyers sell their time so there is a direct linear relationship between time and money. For lawyers and other professionals like accountants and architects, time is money.

Unfortunately for those of us who are slaves to this clock and have been doing time records for 20 or 30 years (regrettably even more for me). time and money have become interchangeable, in fact synonymous.

Mastercard’s advertising is truly ingenious – zoom in on a kid playing hockey - $2.00 for the puck, $25 for the stick, $200 for the skates, - watching your kid score a goal is priceless – but for everything else there is Mastercard.

If you spend each of your 5 –6 days a week in the office attributing to each hour a price, what is the price of the hour you spend watching your kid play hockey, or piano or for that matter, you playing piano.

What happens if you can’t allocate value to activities which are not “productive” ie cannot be billed out. Or if you can only prioritize activities based on monetary value.

Here is a link to an article from the New York Times in which the writer struggles with this issue. He expresses it much more eloquently and subtly than I can.