Figuring Out If It’s Worth It

Adding additional responsibility to your plate is daunting if you are anything like I am. I avoid stress and responsibility like I avoid eye contact with strangers; often times more aggressively than necessary. The amount of motivation I need to take on a new challenge or responsibility or added stress is pretty astronomical right now. I’m honestly jealous of how little motivation I needed when I was a kid to actually do something. You realize the amount of bullshit we did in school for a damn tootsie roll? Literally the most dogsh*t excuse for a piece of candy would motivate an entire class to participate in the most directionless of activities. Today if someone told me to do something I didn’t want to do and offered me a tootsie roll if I did it, do you understand how irrationally angry I would get at them? Extremely, irrationally angry if you were making any bets.

There comes a point though, where the more responsibility you take on the bigger the reward you get when you eventually fulfill that responsibility. I’ve come to realize that the tipping point to take on a challenge or responsibility raises exponentially as an “adult”. The motivation needed to reach that tipping point inherently grows with it. We take on a job or career; the motivation is making enough money to keep ourselves and what’s left of our childhood dreams alive. Then we take on more responsibility in that field to get a promotion either for the sake of a promotion or in an attempt to make our lives more comfortable. Wash, rinse, repeat, and you’ve got the prototypical rat race of running through life eventually popping out the otherside with hopefully enough resources to take care yourself and your mounting medical costs until you inevitably die. I realize that’s kind of morbid but it’s the bare minimum of responsibility we have to take on in life. Along the way people pick up other responsibilities, like maybe volunteering somewhere, playing in a softball league, joining a book club or something equally meaningless, (but like a good meaningless).  These lesser responsibilities a worthy exchange in order for some people to take their minds off of their normal responsibilities (which is kind of hilarious contradiction but whatever).

Then you get into the big responsibilities like marriage and kids, and to a lesser extent college, which require huge amounts of motivation and a you get huge payoff. I’m neither married nor have kids so I’m obviously not at that particular point but it’s apparent that for some people they’ve met their “worth it” quota and pop the question or pop out a few babies. But, back to the central thesis (haha like I planned out any of this before I wrote it) how can you determine if something’s worth it? These major life events, you kinda know what you’re getting into, 50% of marriages end up in divorce, raising kids is awesome then sucks, then is awesome, then sucks, then is awesome and you hope they end up decent human being that are somewhat capable of taking care of themselves (just observations from my sister’s current experience). But other more unexplored territories are extremely hard to measure on your worth-it-meter.

People and friendships are particularly difficult to measure as far as, “is it worth it for me to try to be friends with this person?” I know it’s kind of an f’ed up way to look at it but do you really want to waste what little time you have pursuing one failed friendship or fruitless relationship after another? I don’t. And maybe that makes me a worse person than someone who instantly views everybody as potential life long friends. But I’m not willing to waste my time on people. I was talking about this with one of my friends at the gym and just how many people come in for a class, maybe even for a month or two and then disappear. Now my first thought was, "why invest anything into somebody for the first month if majority of people just leave?" His first thought was, “What if this is that person that doesn’t leave?” Which is a totally valid way to look at it. He didn’t want to miss the rewards of the first few months and what those rewards would mean for that friendship. I wish I could do that but our worth-it-meters were calibrated very differently.

In this age of the side hustle people are intentionally putting more responsibility on themselves in order to bring in a few more bucks. Like this blog (disclaimer I am definitely not making money off of the ten people that read it), I’ve intentionally put responsibility on myself to better my writing and communication skills. Other people take on responsibility driving for Uber or Lyft or renting out a room on AirBnB,  making crafts and selling them on Etsy; am I missing any other trendy, millennial ways to make money? For the past few months I’ve been tossing the idea around of starting my own side hustle but I’ve had trouble aligning it with my worth-it-meter.

I’ve been looking to get into the meal planning and preparation space for people that either don’t have the time to cook or are overwhelmed by the amount of information out there and can't commit to a healthy lifestyle. I’ve been able to really hammer down my diet and health since graduation and have learned a considerable amount about nutrition. I’m also a baller cook, just ask anyone who’s had one of my Thanksgiving turkeys (*spoiler alert* they’re always awesome). But the more I look into it and the more I understand about this space the more intimidated I get. I don’t have a dietetics degree or a biology degree. I’m not a trained chef. I’m not physically impressive where I can just flash a six pack on Youtube and suddenly I’m an expert on nutrition. There’s a lot of catching up I’ll need to do in order to make this come together and that’s where my worth-it-meter is having some trouble. Do I know how much work it’s going to take? No. Do I know how much money I’m going to make? No. Do I know if I’m even going to enjoy doing it? Nope. Am I going to do it? I’ll probably give it a shot.

I guess there’s only one way to know if something with a considerable amount of unknowns is worth it and that’s to give it a try. Maybe giving the side hustle I’m not totally qualified for but am willing to work for a shot is the right move. Maybe reaching out to that new person in my life without expectation is the right move. Maybe I shouldn't always carefully measure whether something is 100% worth it before you try it. Maybe it’s about getting that experience, understanding more of those unknowns, and then figuring out if I want to keep going down that road or I should cut my losses. Maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about. Maybe I’ve tricked you into reading this directionless thought experiment...

“Good job class now here’s a tootsie roll for doing something you didn’t want to do, please don’t get irrationally angry.”