09 Building up your life’s credit balance

I like to think that each of us starts out with a certain credit balance, bestowed on us by dint of membership in the human race. As we grow and travel through life, we are constantly interacting with our fellow humans, other living things, the forces of nature, and negotiating with the Fates and the Furies… playing our percentages, juggling our few chances, giving and taking.

Each one of these interactions has the potential of adding to this balance… or of drawing it down. When we are very small, the human race looks on us with a bemused tolerance and affection, finding us charming and lovable, even when we gurgle or worse down their shirt fronts. We can safely keep taking at this stage in our lives, without drawing down much of the bank balance. As we grow, however, the community becomes less tolerant, more critical. If we persist in being childish, we will soon find our credit dwindling. At sixteen, the plainest Jill or Joe looks winsome and handsome, with all the promise of a lifetime ahead. Anyone can find admiration and romantic attachments at this age, a quirk of adaptation to propagate the species. Gradually, however, we find that this potential contracts, options grow ever smaller and fewer, and soon we have to start putting back into the bank by serving others, kowtowing to the community, conforming to the rules, and serving in our slots in society.

Children are one-sided consumers and demanders, but even they have to start replenishing the balance one day, if at least by making themselves less dependent on their families and more self-sufficient, and finally independent.

As we pass through our working and family life, we have a choice at every moment. Every meeting, every interaction, every discussion, can be the source of increasing and replenishing your balance of credit, or if you convert them into adversarial confrontations, arguments, or contests, you may well be drawing down the balance at every step. This is brought home in today’s web world by instant feedbacks that establish and grow your reputation in the community, no matter that you don’t actually come face to face. The question is, how do you replenish the balance, increase the credit,  and reduce the downdraft? How do you arrive at the later stages of your life with a huge credit balance to last you through your sunset years, when your capacity to add to it may be much less?

The answer is that you’ve got to put in, during the years of maximum productivity and influence. In many ways, this is no different from building up your pension fund! The more you let go, give away, or let go during the years of maximum activity, the less you will have to worry about at the later stages. The less you stand around for immediate recompense, the more the stock is going to grow, and the richer you are going to be in your years of need.