The Value of a Man
I've written about life's purpose before, in fact many times. But as I sit in my room preparing for another week, my thoughts continue to drift to this question. How do we measure the value of a man?
When you think, “valuable people”, someone like Warren Buffett or Bill Gates might come to mind. Their combined net worth far exceeds the GDP of many countries. But there are plenty of wealthy hedge fund managers out there who you’ve never heard of. If instead I said the name of the relatively "poor", Theodor Seuss Geisel aka Dr. Seuss, you might immediately recall the joy of reading The Cat and The Hat. Thus, a man's value to society can't only be correlated to his bank account.
“In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it’s to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success.”
Bill Watterson is the genius behind Calvin and Hobbes, the lovable comic that was syndicated for 10 years. Bill's disappearance from the public's eye is a mystery to capitalists, but his comic strip is no less valuable. If you're wondering why you've never seen the official "Calvin and Hobbes Movie", it's because Bill has never sold the rights.
A man's value can be measured by the lives he's touched. If a hedge fund manager makes a billion dollars this year, that's terrific, but if he isn’t doing anything with his money to inspire or improve people's lives, history will forget his name.
Gandhi led an entire country to freedom wearing what some might consider rags. It wasn’t his clothing that people cared about, it was his courage. Some of the most valuable people to me are my family. Yet, to about 7 billion other people, they’re of no special significance. Value is relative. We’ve got it backwards.
It’s not what man has that makes him valuable, it’s what he gives.