Do you recall as a kid enjoying entry to a small-town carnival or amusement park where the rides required tickets? For example, a kiddie roller-coaster may have required three tickets to ride whereas a cooler ride like bumper cars may have needed four or five to participate. Whereas the coolest rides like the Zipper, Tidal Wave, or Gravitron needed the most tickets, perhaps six. If you were lucky enough to have a strip of tickets bought for you, you clung to them like they were gold as they literally represented your ticket to ride. Somewhere you remembered hearing the wisdom that a fool and his money were soon parted, and you were no fool and weren’t about to be parted from your tickets without having had the experience of a lifetime. Trading tickets for thrills helped learn the lesson of managing scarce resources. When you had a limited amount of something, you had to be judicious with respect to how you spent. Contrast this approach to selecting rides compared to those where one admissions price gave unlimited access to rides in the park for the day. In the latter, it was just time and energy that limited what you could enjoy. In the former, a finite set of tickets led to careful and cautious decisions as to which rides to select.
Warren Buffett advocates for long-term investing. He supports a buy and hold strategy over day trading. He suggests a commitment to patience over time as a more reliable strategy than trying to time the mood swings of the market on a near term basis. To encourage people to limit the number of investments made Buffett encourages them to see the number of investments available over a lifetime as being limited. Buffett suggests that we view the number of available investments to us as being like having a punch card where only 15 to 20 punches are available. When we are regularly reminded of the limitation of our options, we may be more careful with each decision we make. If you’re in your twenties and you’re hoping to live well in to your 80s, having only twenty investments to last for the length of your investing lifetime is not many. What kinds of factors will you consider as you invest in something that you hope to hold on to for sixty plus years? Where the Universe of unlimited options is scaled down to a much smaller number it is reasonable to assume we’ll be more cautious, careful, and considerate in our choices. We’re less likely to chase whatever seems like the latest and greatest investment fad. We’re more likely to stick with approaches that have withstood the test of time.
What if we applied Buffett’s investment approach to other areas of life? For example, what if related to health care we were only allowed a certain number of doctor visits over the course of our lives? As wonderful as having access to a public health system funded by our tax contributions is, having unfettered access to limited medical resources creates systemic burdens. Where we bear no responsibility or cost for a trip to the doctor’s office, we may run there for every runny nose, knee scrape, or tummy ache. By going for trivial issues which will largely work themselves out with the passage of time we take up the time of medical professionals and create wait times for those with more pressing medical issues. With no cost to get in line, the cue is needlessly lengthened. If there were a limit to the number of not necessarily lifetime visits but visits in a timeframe for each family member, people might think a bit more prior to seeking medical support. Scarce medical resources may be better distributed amongst those that are suffering from acute ailments as a result. Constrained choices may force refined choices.
How about a limited number of calls for other forms of assistance like lawyers, accountants, and teachers? What if we couldn’t call plumbers and electricians 24/7? If we were limited to the number of calls for “help” we could make, what would that do to our definition of a crisis? If each of these were like our get out of jail free card in the game of Monopoly which is in limited supply, would we think two, three, four, or more times before we used it? With a limited number of calls for assistance would we be better able at differentiating the difficulties we face? Would we be less likely to ask for help with every trivial trouble that comes across our plate?
Where options and assistance are available 24/7/365 we’re breeding dependence and encouraging a lack of responsibility. Is our “go-to” response for resolving problems to call for help or to figure things out? Our personal duty of care is diminished where immediate help is accessible. If help is not readily available, would we be more thoughtful? Could this be a way to promote personal responsibility for our choices? Is there potential value to promoting personal responsibility first and prioritizing as a value? Perhaps, we’d be more cautious and try to stay out of situations where we need the assistance or advice of “experts.” Maybe, we’d take care of things better and engage in regular maintenance precisely to avoid having to call a repair person. In the good old days before the internet and instant everything, people were able to manage more tasks themselves. Where we had no choice but to be self-reliant, we learned to lean on ourselves to get things done.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, our options aren’t about to be obliterated in any area anytime soon. Nonetheless, viewing calls for help and dependence on outside resources as limited in availability is worthwhile in terms of helping us adopt a posture of personal responsibility. There’s a confidence that flows from developing competencies to solve as many personal problems as possible.
How can we apply this idea to our work worlds? Can we use it to breed initiative in ourselves? Can we try to help staff embrace this idea to become more self-reliant themselves? What barriers can we build to make it more difficult to seek help? Yes, management is here to help. Sure, we have a support desk. However, what steps have you taken to define and address your problem before seeking help? Can we encourage staff to work through certain steps themselves before reaching out for assistance? Can we provide resources to customers to help them help themselves? What responsibility can we help others cultivate for themselves to empower them to get things done without depending on others? Is our dependence on others creating a roadblock gumming up productivity? Does our ability to get things done decrease when we’re delayed due to waiting on assistance from others? Having limited access to resources and assistance can be a forcing function that drives initiative. Embrace the idea of seeing scarcity as a strength, restricting the number of calls for help one can make, and encouraging a reach for responsibility.
