Allocating your Resources

Dr. Cecil Clements
Duration: 12:29 (Compressed for the Internet)

Many of you know that I am travelling in the United States. I travelled from Omaha, Nebraska to Lincoln. I had a meeting which was supposed to be for 2 hours with a wonderful speaker, Dr. Warren Wiersbe. He’s a great teaches and a prolific writer who has written over 150 books and gifted wonderful material to people all around the world. This 2 hour luncheon meeting lasted for 4 hours. I had a great time listening to him, hearing him talk about the things that had molded and motivated him throughout his life. He is now about 81-82 years old and spends his time writing. I came away from that meeting so uplifted. I realized that I had been in the presence of a man who had put everything into life and was happy at the end of it.


As I was trying to gather my thoughts for this call, I came across this article that I would love to have all of you read. But I will throw out just a few points from this article that had a great bearing on my meeting with Dr. Wiersbe.

The author of this article Dr. Clayton M. Christenson, is Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and he talks about his life’s passion. He has cancer and is looking back at his life wondering “What has all this been worth?” He asks the question, “How will you measure your life?” The answer is in the form of such a beautiful article that I hope you will go online and read. But I actually took notes.

He says, “One of the things that you need to do to really be sure that you find happiness in your career is to be able to allocate your resources well. We all have resources of personal time, energy and talent. All of this ultimately shapes our life’s strategy. The key is to be able to allocate all these resources well because we all have only an x amount of time in our lives and how are we going to put these resources into the different things that demand our energy and time and our talent. We probably have a spouse, kids to raise, community to contribute to, success in our career and other things that all of us are involved in.

What is the key to allocating your resources well? He says, “When people who have a high need for achievement, and that includes all Harvard Business School graduates, have an extra half hour of time or an extra ounce of energy, they’ll unconsciously allocate it to activities that yield the most tangible accomplishments.” We like to do that. We want to see immediate results, immediate gratification. And our careers provide the most concrete evidence that we’re moving forward. You ship a product, finish a design, complete a presentation, close a sale, teach a class, publish a paper, get paid, and get promoted. This we tend to do and we see immediate tangible results.

In contrast, investing time and energy in your relationship with your spouse and children typically doesn’t offer that same immediate sense of achievement. Kids misbehave every day. It’s really not until 20 years down the road that you can put your hands on your hips and say “I raised a good son or a good daughter.” You can neglect your relationship with your spouse and on a day-to-day basis; it doesn’t seem as if things are deteriorating. People who are driven to excel, have this unconscious propensity to under invest in their families and overinvest in their careers, even though intimate and loving relationships with their families are the most powerful and enduring source of happiness. That is the key: to have an intimate loving relationship with our families.

Again we tend to allocate our resources into things that we see immediately, into the things of immediate gratification. The things that you need to watch out for:

1. Allocate your resources in a wise manner.
2. Finding happiness. What we look at ultimately in the things we do? What is it that we hope to achieve? The key here is not in the bottom line of profits, of buying and selling and taking companies. The key comes from making sure that we build up people around us. He quotes Frederick Herzberg who asserts that the powerful motivator in our lives isn’t money; it’s the opportunity to learn, grow in responsibilities, contribute to others and be recognized for achievements. I have 2 mental pictures:-. I picture one of my managers leaving for work one morning with a relatively strong level of self esteem. Then I pictured her driving home to her family 10 hours later feeling unappreciated, frustrated, underutilized and demeaned. I imagined how profoundly her lowered self esteem affected the way she interacted with her children. The vision in my mind then fast-forwarded to another day when she drove home with greater self esteem, feeling that she had learned a lot, been recognized for achieving valuable things and played a significant role in the success of some important initiatives. I then imagined how positively that affected her as a spouse and mother that day. That is the key. We look at people around us and say how can we make sure that we are building up these people? Because when we build them up, then they go back into families who benefit from our good sense of self esteem.
3. Avoid the ‘Marginal Costs’ Mistake. Typically and most of the time, unconsciously, we often employ the marginal cost doctrine in our personal lives when we choose between right and wrong. A voice in our head says, “I know that as a general rule mostly, we shouldn’t do this. But in this particular extenuating circumstance, just this once, it’s ok.” Those words ‘just this once’ can be a cause of trouble for us later on, because all through life we find extenuating circumstances. We find ourselves in situations where we say, “I need to bend the rules just a little bit like before.” That is going to cost you. He says that the lesson that he learned from all this is that it is easier to hold on to your principles 100% of the time than it is to hold onto them 98% of the time. If you give in to ‘just this once’, based on a marginal cost analysis, you’ll regret where you end up. You’ve got to define for yourself what you stand for and draw the line in a safe place. Make the decision that you would go with the principle and not by the situation or the circumstance.

As I read that article, I thought back to my time with Dr. Wiersbe, thinking that this was a person who had invested so much into the lives of people all around with all he has done. We had a 2 hour slot with him and yet he spent 4 hours listening to all that I was doing. As I heard him talk, I thought, here is a man who is so well-known, such a wonderful person. And yet he has the time to spend, to invest in somebody like me who has come from another country, doesn’t know him too well. But in the time we had, he was willing to pour himself into me.

How about you my friends? As you look at your life, what is your bottom line? How do you measure your life? Those are good questions for us to ask. And Christenson says, “Make sure you allocate resources to the things that matter the most. Deep rewards grow out of building up people. Live a life of integrity, marginal cost doctrine in choosing between right and wrong will cost you.

I pray that this will add to your day and motivate you to think about something that has far greater significance than just bottom line costs that is expected of us in a company.

God Bless You All.