I’ve been watching a lot of Scott Galloway’s podcast appearances recently. Galloway. a professor at NYU and host of two podcasts, speaks about a wide range of things, but I was introduced to him by his Ted Talk, How the US Is Destroying Young People’s Future. In it, he talks about what he sees as some of the policy and social failures that have lead the US to where we are now, with young people struggling to reach the same success that their parents had seen. He seemingly talks about this in an objective way, citing statistics to support each of his claims, which has been one of the characteristics that have attracted me to his work.
One of his less well represented ideas is something that I hadn’t formalized until I heard him describe it. He talks about what it takes to be successful, and he summarizes this as producing more than you consume. For example, he says that he has a lot of problems with his father, but his father was there more for him than his grandfather was for his father, so he met that requirement of an improvement. Galloway himself strives to be an even better father for his kids and often speaks about how much love he has for his kids.
This principle of providing more than you receive is seen all over in our modern world. For a company to be successful, they have to produce something more valuable than the raw materials they purchase. For a person to remain employed at a company, they must provide value than the money they’re given. For a parent to raise good children, they must provide significantly more effort than they will likely ever get back from their children.
This idea got me to reflect on all the investments that have been made in me, and the ways that I have failed to give more than I’ve gotten. If you are reading this, there has already been significant investment in you. From when you were very little, people have been investing in you. First is usually your parents, who create you and begin caring for you. Then, they enroll you in some sort of schooling, where you meet friends and teachers. Teachers are some of the heaviest investors in you. They’re not compensated outrageously and often give their lives to help people like you. Your friends are your peers, who are less altruistic in their investment, but can still be valuable investors. At this young age, the parents of your friends are also investing in you. Think of when you’re young and you have a soccer game, so your friends parent picks you up. There’s some cost to them to doing that, but they’re willing to make that investment in you.
This investment becomes less altruistic as you become more capable of self-sufficiency. By the time you’re an early teenager, your parents might expect you to start providing something in return, whether that be getting to school on your own or helping with household chores. This is your first opportunity to begin paying back, although it is generally less expected, and there is more tolerance for selfish behavior.
As you enter adulthood, you generally leave the “investment” round and enter a more transactional phase in life. People will expect things from you, but the expectation is that they must provide something as well. This rule, however, is an average, not a perfect summary. There will be times when you need unrequited help from friends and times that friends will lean on you with no immediate return. These can be seen as investments as well, something like “I am providing you the help you need now because I expect our relationship to be valuable in the future.” Now, on an interaction-to-interaction basis, nobody thinks like that, but it’s a good way to logically evaluate how you spend your time.
The birth of a child is the first time someone is locked in to a long term investment that we know will not pay off for a long time, if ever. At a bare minimum, there’s 15 years of investment, although more often 18, although more reasonably its through college at 22. This stage in life is when I see a shift toward the investor. You begin investing in the next generations, paying with your time and allocated resources to help the next generation. A Greek proverb I found on the comments section of Scott Galloway’s Ted Talk goes, “A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they shall never sit.” This is how I view the later stage in ones life. These relationships are what give life meaning.
The overall principle that Galloway promotes is to do everything better than you got it. For him, its being a better father, being a better husband, and caring about the people after him better than those who came before him. This principle can be summarized as Give More Than You Get. I’m sure that there’s more to explore here and some overlap between having this give more than you get attitude and being taken advantage of, but it seems to be a relatively effective method toward living a meaningful life.