Investment allocation

Usually when people talk about properly allocating investments they refer to money.  Even more important is how you allocate your time.  With money you usually want to have some investments in areas that will pay off over time, some investments in areas that will pay off quickly, some risky, and some safe.  This strategy is to protect you from future events that are outside of your control.

Your time needs to be allocated with the same type of care.  For example, if you put all of your time into earning money at a high paying job that does nothing to develop your skills or talents as a person, you could be wiped out by a lawsuit and be left with nothing.  On the other hand, if you spend all of your time going to school or doing interesting work for little pay, your "investment" is at risk if you were to suffer a disability or injury to your head.

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Skill & Focus

Personal productivity is something that is fairly difficult to quantify.  Most people tend to just assume if they are doing better than the average person then they are doing good.  For people who really want to achieve their full potential, simply comparing themselves with others isn’t particularly rewarding because it doesn’t say anything about their true capabilities.

If most of your work is repetitive or easily quantifiable, it is easy to measure your productivity against yourself.   You just consider how many of units of work you accomplished in a given amount of time.  Unfortunately, most work doesn’t lend itself to this type of measurement.

If we could measure both our skill level and our focus level on any task we should be able to have a pretty good idea of our productivity.  This type of measurement isn’t a hard numbers approach, but it is a good exercise in becoming aware of where we are functioning in relation to where we could be functioning.

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How Good do you Look

In the perfect world our opportunities would be directly tied to our skills.  Luck wouldn’t play any part in our successes and our looks would most certianly not be a factor.  We don’t live in a perfect world and no matter what we do there isn’t a single thing we can do about it.  In the real world luck plays a big part in success and good looking people are picked for promotion over their more skilled peers.  You can fight the system, but it won’t make a difference.  What people think of you is at least partially dependent on how you look.

In someways this isn’t so unfair.  If you are looking to hire someone, would you be more likely to hire the person who hasn’t cut his hair in 6 months, has holes in his shoes, and hasn’t washed his face in several weeks or would you tend to want to hire the person who looks like he keeps himself well groomed and wears neatly pressed clothes.  When you first meet someone you start making guesses about their skills and ability to interact with people.  If they look like they don’t care about the way they look, it seems reasonable to assume they may not care much about developing their mental skills.  Obviously this is not always a correct assumption, but it is a method of profiling–reaching initial assumptions about people based on experience with similiar people in the past.

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