If I were a Buddhist, my principle of “we get to select our problems” might be called “the law of karma” or something sophisticated. I’m not a Buddhist, so I have to deal with problems. My favorite way of explaining this thought is to contrast the lowest drunk on skid row lying in the gutter with a wine bottle, and the Chairman of IBM, Sam Palmisano at 35K feet in his Gulfstream, winging his way to some important meeting.
Both these gentleman have very significant problems. The drunk started down a path where he decided that alcohol was going to be his selected problem. There are a zillion reasons he may have made the decisions he made, and no doubt he had some tendencies by DNA at birth, or upbringing that led him to where he is. Today, the problem he is likely most aware of is the need for more booze. His “circle of influence” or thought process has narrowed so far that his set of problems is small (although not desireable). An outsider can say that he COULD make all sorts of different choices … get off the sauce, get cleaned up, get a training, get a job, etc, etc., but for today he is choosing (in a very foggy way) to have a small set of problems, and to manage his life with a bottle.
Sam on the other hand, made a whole lot of different decisions, and certainly had some excellent breaks along that way as well. However, his set of problems is MUCH larger. No doubt there are high expectations, demands, and likely both on the part of the parties that he is headed toward, and on top of that, the last quarter didn’t look very stellar, so much more needs to be done on that front. He is leading an organization with over 250K employees across the globe, $96 Billion in revenue, and a ton of customers and stockholders, all of whom expect him to deliver. Sam is very well compensated, but his job is endless and the best he can hope for at the end of the day is “progress on the right things”. His list of problems borders on infinity. Selecting the wine list for the Gulfstream has to be a bear too ;-)
Most of us are in between these two extremes. Much of the media and what we are taught in school leads us down a path where “being the drunk is hard, being Sam is easy”. I’d like to argue that if one could register the “stress”, or “problem load” on either of them on a day to day basis, the answer might be a lot closer to “the same” than we would imagine. Sam has a lot of training, experience, and no doubt just God given capability to do what he does, but he is still “working very hard”. The drunk has come close to losing nearly all the capacity that he ever had, so to him, the daily challenge of getting the next bottle, finding a nice grate, and some scraps of food is indeed “working very hard”. We don’t get to run away from our problems, at best, if we are careful and lucky, we may get to select what problems we have.
“On the way up”, we have a tendency to look at people in higher positions and think “they have it made”. If they enjoy the job, they may indeed “have it made”, but once one has climbed a few of those rungs, nearly everyone realizes that they don’t “have it made for free”. They have decided to keep “working hard” when some others have decided “this is hard enough”. Much like muscles, I believe that many of us could do jobs at a very high level, but just like most of us deciding to not run a marathon, climb Mount Everest, or ride in the Tour De France, we decide to not challenge Sam, or even a good number of levels below him.
What is always strange to me though is that somehow we seem to think that money as a form of “winning” just isn’t fair. Very few people look at Lance crossing the finish line, some guy standing on top of Everest, or the winner of the Boston Marathon, and demand that some of his blood be removed before the attempt next time, he be forced to carry weights, or to “give some of his glory away” to those who came in second, turned around, or dropped out. We seem to understand that everyone gave it their best and someone made it to the top or came in first. We accept that as “fair”.
Each day the media and teachers in classrooms try to make our economic system out to be unfair because different people have different outcomes. We DESIRE different outcomes. The drunk fervently desires his bottle, and Sam desires his jet. There isn’t anything natural about “equal outcomes” any more that it would be natural for everyone in the Boston Marthon to come in first (last?). In the economy, we are certainly not all going to come in first, but we need to remember that it is very possible for us to all come in last.