Yesterday I was sitting around with a couple of my friends and we just joking around like normal when someone made an interesting comment, which at first was just a joke. I think everyone else, except for me, passed it off as a joke, but for some reason it stuck with me. I am not sure who said it, hell; it might have been me, but the more I thought about it the more it became interesting.
Most of my friends are finance geeks, and we invariability always apply finance logic to everything. It could be anything from using derivative terminology to inappropriately describe the female members of our society, or it could be to justify some stupid thing. This time it was on the subject of friends.
So what was the exact comment? Well someone said something along the lines of "your always trying to rebalance your friend portfolio"
Well what does that mean? For those of you who don't know finance or portfolio theory , I won't go into. The basic idea in rebalancing a portfolio is to minimize risk you take and maximize return you get. Or another way put, you want to get the most for your money with the least amount of uncertainty. So if you have 10 stocks, how do you allocate your money so you get the most out of it? So how does this apply to friends. Well the reason I am fascinated with the idea is, how many of us actually sit back and think how to efficiently allocate our time (investment) amongest our friends (return). If you think about it, it really is the same problem that thousands of finance people are trying to solve everyday, but instead of stocks or bonds, it with people.
So think of it like this, you have 10 friends and you end up spending all your time with 3 of them, even though you end up getting very little out of the friendship. You would like to spend more time with the other 7 people since you get more out of it, but for whatever reason it just doesn't end up happening since you might have known these 3 people much longer or they live somewhere else or something. I mean I know I am not logical when I spend time with people or my friends, I kind of just go with the flow. I mean naturally you want to spend more time with people you have more fun with right?
More I think about it, more I realize, that I have no rhythm or reason behind what I do in terms of social aspects. Sometimes I feel I am in friendships that are kind of not going anywhere. I mean, I don't know, are friendships supposed to go somewhere? Am I wasting time with people that are obviously a bad investment?
Basically, the real question is, is my friend portfolio currently optimal. I can say with no uncertainty that its not. I mean it can't be, it hasn't been rebalanced in ages really. At work people rebalance client portfolios daily, or maybe even hourly. How long is the cycle time for friends? Weeks? Months? Years? I am not sure, perhaps you can shed some insight into that.
So what is the conclusion of all of this, well basically, I need to find need assets, friends, to add to my portfolio, or reinvest/ reallocate current time investment in current assets (friends) that are mutually beneficial for all. Maybe I'll make an excel spreadsheet and figure out who is a waste of my time and just cut them out of my life
3 comments:
I find actively cutting people out of your life mildly abhorrent. I understand that by making choices about who you are going to spend your time with will ultimately result in some people being cut out, but to say that you are actively cutting people out is to say that you can't recognize some way that said person does not benefit you. And I refuse to believe that people are completely worthless.
As money is to financial porfolios, time is to people portfolios. I think it's important to determine the people who bring value to you, and to spend time with those people...rather than spending time with people who have no value to you just because they are more accessible or for other reasons. Life is too short to spend it with people who you do not care about or do not add to your happiness. I don't think you should necessarily cut people out completely. But you should definitely prioritize your time. However you decided to balance your friend porfolio, just make sure that I'm always given the highest value. You can't go wrong with that. =P
I would also suggest that your model is fundamentally flawed. Time spent with friends isn't merely a resource spent; it's simultaneously a value.
Does simple expenditure give you pleasure as you convert money to stocks? Probably not.
Time with friends does, however, (hopefully) because you're engaging in activities even as you "build value" with said friends.
Finally, your time is going to be spent anyway. You can't just shove it in a bank for "later" (though I'll admit you could argue that spending it on schoolwork/work is an alternative means of converting time to value).
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