What’s your most valuable commodity?

I recently had a lengthy conversation with someone close to me who was recently diagnosed with cancer and it struck me that priorities and the currency that drives the most value differs from person to person.

For most, the concept is simple: it’s money. At its core, money as a currency buys goods & services, both that we need and that we want. To make clear: if money is most important, it doesn’t mean that someone is materialistic or ascribes priority based on money. Rather, money, like all resources and commodities is scarce and intentionally so. Not everyone can have as much money as they want, otherwise it would be worthless and so it acts as a limiting factor controlling what we can do, what we can not, forces prioritization and has a major impact in how we spend our time (since most need to work to make money). In our society, unless you are quite wealthy, it’s had for money not to be a significant driver in your life unless you’ve made a very conscious decision to live in a manner that is deeply ‘off the grid.’

The limits of money dominated the my life beginning in my teenage years (and perhaps prior from the standpoint of what we could do as a family) through young adulthood. Though it was never a major problem in terms of satisfying our most basic needs, for me personally, when I was growing up, money meant the freedom to make my own choices. Initially, it was about my earliest passion, collecting baseball cards. But by middle school it limited the ‘in’ clothes and sunglasses I could buy and by high school, the amount of gas I could buy for adventures with my gas guzzling van — while limiting me to the most embarrassing car in my school. In college, money dominated and limited the social choices I could make, the spring breaks I could afford, perhaps who I could date & much of what I could do in the plethora of free time I had. As a young adult in the early phases of my career New York City, it seemed to have huge impacts in my dating options (I guess I and the women around me had expensive taste), where I could live and what I could indulge on. A passion I re-found, Baseball, was in certain respects, good for me because paying a few hundred bucks for a season and $20 for a batting cage made for an affordable hobby.

But as my career progressed, I dated & then married, money became much less of a limiting factor with two post-MBA incomes. With fatherhood, for the first time, a new commodity displaced money as most valuable: Time. I first experienced a taste for this in business school when at any given moment there were multiple options of things I wanted to do (often trumped by something I HAD to do) that required a disciplined approach to prioritizing my time. However it was also in Business School that the weight of loans, getting a new job with higher income and figuring out a way to partake in all of the expensive social options (e.g. traveling to exotic designations) still made money a key limiting factor, even if it was never discussed. As a new father however, I found that juggling time with my newborn son, my wife, my interests & my job were an all new challenge and one that I struggled with. As time became more of a limiting factor, I forced myself to be much more productive at work so I could get home by an early hour to allow my wife to do things she wanted while on maternity leave and later, became the critical space before sleep to bond with my kids. I also found myself outsourcing all kinds of odd jobs that I would do previously by myself and almost always now take the option for delivery & installation for home projects that I would previously DIY (generally successfully but after hours of cursing). In general, whether paying for take out dinner instead of cooking or always taking a car from the airport instead of a train leads to some eyebrow raising from some around me, but being conscious of the value of my time and being able to afford some more expensive things to spend more time doing the things I love and spending time with the people I love has become most important. I suppose at the end of life, the importance of time only grows for many, as they realize they can live off their life savings and the anticipation of ones own limited mortality increases.

But other than these two key factors, money & time, I think there are two other important commodities - and I’ve started thing about whether there are more. One is energy. I’m somewhat blessed to have a high amount of energy and if there is enough time and money to pull something off, I will. I’m that guy that will occasionally fly out to California for a day trip for something important but be back on a red eye for something else important. The trip is usually paid for by work, the time is what it is and I can make due with limited sleep occasionally, but there are some people who could never give that kind of energy. And there are some, for example those with health conditions like undergoing cancer treatment where energy is much more of a limiting factor. These people are fortunate to have the money to take care of their immediate needs and have almost too much time on their hands, but can only dedicate a certain amount of calories to their needs and interest before they literally can’t give anything more. And that leads to a completely different set of choices about how you spend your time and energy.

I would argue also that young children and some other crave another important commodity: attention. We generally take these for granted but it’s not always a given. Love, attention & the feeling of belonging are absolutely paramount needs for young children — for whom little else is important — and as we grow, generally these needs are trumped by the other commodities but remain important and there are times at which these can be most important, particularly if completely lacking or may persist when most important during adolescence.

So have you ever thought about your most valuable commodity? And are you checking in on it periodically? I think it’s very important to check in with yourself on this periodically as it’ll help bring critical clarity into the choices you make and why you make them.