Since childhood we are molded to work in team. We are taught to be a team member, a team player to perform any kinds of tasks. My child psychology was always driven to work for unification and compiled efforts. This is good. Indeed team work and efforts is good than individualism. However, as I left the frame of child psychology of mine, I started thinking about my-self, my career, my passions, my emotions and a lot of 'my' follows. I turned selfish.
As I write here after, you might call me selfish many times and I would always accept that. The critics after being selfish help rather me to go more selfish. The things I write now is universal to all (if you disagree then I would heartily accept that it is not universal). I am neither supporting any 'ism' here nor developing a new one, simply justifying my lout attitude. Everything in this world is done to foster one's self-interest. No one works for other or any job without confirming one's self-interest. The justification to self interest varies from people to people. I have enough instances to justify my logic. For a simple instance, I am writing these things to develop my writing skills and somehow to establish as a good blogger (as of now) and you are reading this to work on your reading skills or may be quenching your quest. Mutually, we are adding bricks to enhance readership and authorship and this will ultimately work for the benefits of society. The collection and summation of these self interests will tend to fix a culture. Every time I do something, first and foremost, I seek to identify my own interest there. If I don’t realize my self-interest, I promptly quit the job and here people might call me selfish. Yes, I heartily accept this as I know why people call me selfish? It is only because I am not in a sense to satisfy their interest, and I am selfish here.
I am not against of team work, team building and unification but only trying to capitalize on the importance of 2 in the most common example used to address team work, i.e. 2+2=5. Here, each 2 stand to mean the self interest of each member of team. The ironic symbolization of 2 is to deal that 2 is always important in a team and collection of such 2's would give greater output. Thus for team effort and team work one should always work to concentrate to address self-interest of each member. Team leader should be able to define individual incentive before to pledge of getting work done by team. This can also be justified by this example. In a market you as customer try to get good commodities at the best price possible and the supplier would confirm his/her maximum benefit before the transaction is carried off. Further, many such small self-interested transactions will integrate to become the nature of whole market and its economy. Here, your transaction is playing a role of 2 and such other transactions would become another 2, which compile to give 5, the smooth run of market.
Marginal Value Meter
Seeking self interest in every activity I do, one day an idea clicked in my mind to calculate Marginal Value for each activity. Marginal Value is a term often used in economics, deals with calculating additional value for any commodity or activity. Here I talk about the method to calculate Marginal Value of each activity that I perform. Before I discuss Marginal Value calculation I would like you to go through the following things first.
Context Analysis
The first step of calculating Marginal Value is to calculate your context. Context here I mean in a sense of your money, knowledge, network, fun or entertainment or any other relevant things. For example, if you are going to attend a lecture and to calculate the Marginal Value what you need to fix first is what you already know about the materials and knowledge that are to be discussed throughout the lecture. Try to figure out the knowledge and understandings that you already have about the topic before attending the lecture. Secondly, know the time of lecture that you are going to attend. Calculation of time you are going to spend would provide a base to calculate your Marginal Value. You can add few more things that are relevant to the activity.
This will provide you the framework of your context and your context analysis is done.
Scaling and Calculation
After the context analysis, now you are ready to calculate Marginal Value. Here I follow the same example of lecture session. Suppose the lecture session is of 100 minutes where the lecturer discusses about Free Market Economy. If you are totally unaware about the topic and knowledge on it, after completing the session the whole session will be fruitful and thus the Marginal Value would be 100%. But if you know the basic knowledge on it and the lecturer spends his half of the time i.e. 50 minutes to discuss the basic knowledge (which you already know) and rest of his time to discuss about the new approaches about the topic (which is supposed that you don't know) then your learning period would be of 50 minutes and the Marginal Value would be 50%.
This method can be applied in any kinds of activities. You can scale your calculation on the basis of knowledge, money or any other factor. Also for day long activity, you can segregate your factor, calculate according to segregation and for overall day long calculation you can have your average Marginal Value calculation.
Need and Importance
Marginal Value calculation has great need in our life. I have seen many people working or wasting their valuable time in worthless activities that do not support their earnings, career or any other such aspects. The Marginal Value calculation would provide a scaling dimension of daily activities and always enforce you to go productive. This would be more factual and needy to the students and young professionals. It will direct you to shape your career, goal in life and even make you disciplined.
Happy Calculating!!
