Oh, my. I just read a news story about a man who enlisted the help of his two friends in order to make $671,000. Their plan? Find a chain saw, strap it to a pole so the friends doing the cutting don’t have to stand too close (wouldn’t want this to get messy…) and use it to cut off the man’s hand. Are you kidding me? Sacrifice a limb for money? And if you do, somehow, manage to allow this to happen, you get what that man received… no hand and a felony charge, including 20 year prison sentence, for insurance fraud.
Although I am horrified by this story, I am not unaware of the fact that each of us face choices like these, every day. Ok, so maybe you’re not trying to decide which of your own eyes you will pluck out in order to collect disability, but you are making decisions that require you to answer, “How far will you go?” And, although some of those questions are about money, (like, “will you trade time with your family to stay later at the office,” or “will you risk $5000 in the stock market, in order to hope to make $10,000?”), some of our trades and choices are about less measurable things. Will you stay with a man who ignores your feelings so that you don’t have to be alone? Will you be less than honest so that your friend’s feelings aren’t hurt? Will you eat the third donut, because they taste really wonderful, eventhough you know you should go for a walk, instead?
It seems to me that the daily task of decision making boils down to a system of calculations: traded value vs. received value, and risk vs. benefit. Does what we are trading have less value than what we are receiving? In the case of the trading of a hand for a little over $200,000 (remember, the sum they received has to be split over three people), and risking a felony conviction, we might think the answer is a resounding, “No!” For some reason, however, that imbalance wasn’t very clear to the guy in the news story. Just like, in the case of trading the time you could spend eating dinner with your family for more billable hours at the firm, the answer might not be as clear for you.
It makes me wonder which of the choices I make seem obviously imbalanced to others. Could the possible key to all of life be that we should get better at calculating trade values and risk vs. benefit? I would like to invite all of my friends to feel free to help me make these kinds of calculations in my life. And whatever I might say in the future, regardless of what case I make for it, please… never, ever tie a chain saw to a pole and help me cut off my hand.
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