BizLife Video | 3.1A   Ripples and Ponds

Money can do a lot; it can provide you with shelter, food, entertainment, and also opportunities, it all depends on what you choose to do with it.

The tricky thing about choices is that there are always consequences, good or bad, and that can be especially true with money.  How you manage your resources and budgeting is very important; and even decisions that seem small or insignificant may actually have long lasting and wide reaching effects.

Think about this – if you throw a stone into a pond, what happens?  That small stone hitting the water causes ripples that spread far and wide from where it landed, and anything floating on the pond is also affected in some way, even if it’s only small.  A leaf that was minding its own business is now on the move, heading toward the shore. Is this a good thing or bad for the leaf? Does it affect the shore? Only time will tell…

Let’s look at some of the ripples that your choices could cause!  

Let’s say you’ve finished school for the day and you’ve got homework and studying to do, but your friends want to get online and shoot some zombies.  No one is going to argue that shooting zombies is far more fun, but if you ever want to get that leaving cert, maybe choose to get your studying out of the way first, and save the living dead for another time.  

Or maybe it’s a choice between two jobs?

Sometimes opportunities arise that can impact our future in big ways and cause us to have to make difficult decisions.

Aoife loves film and wants to direct her own some day and she learns that a production company is looking for interns, but the position is unpaid.  At the same time, the chipper down the street is looking for help. Standing over a fryer all day doesn’t really appeal to her, but it’s a steady, reliable pay cheque that will allow her to save up for a car and cover going to see some of those films.  On the other hand, a film company internship would help her realize her dreams of seeing a film of her own on the big screen someday, but she’ll have to make a lot of sacrifices.

What if she decides to do both?  Maybe she can work part-time in the evenings at the chipper and work the weekend for the film company?  But like all choices, she has to think of the ripple effects – where will she find time to study? When will she find time for friends and socializing, which are also important.  

Would putting off buying a car be worth the chance to learn the skills she’ll need later, or will having a car give her greater flexibility later to do what she wants?  Should she save up for the car and wait until she’s finished school and can get into a film program at university?

It may seem obvious that your decisions make a difference to lots of pieces of your own life, but what do they do to others? Anything? What about the effect your game playing has on your friends? Does your willingness to skip homework and shoot zombies affect their grades too? What if the enthusiasm you each have for gaming turn into a passion for coding and help you get started on a career in the gaming industry? Is your video gaming a waste of time or an investment in your future?

And….does your gaming affect your parents? Can they sleep and be ready for work if you’ve got friends in till late?

Your decisions may also affect more than your immediate circle – what about your rugby team? Do you play as well when you’re tired from burning the candle at both ends? Just how far do your ripples go, anyway?

It may seem like a lot to think about, but deciding how to use your resources is all about priorities and considering just what ripples your decisions are going to make.

We’ve talked about your personal resources and goals and choices, but it’s not just individuals that have those things. Any kind of group also has resources and goals and choices, from a family to a sports club to a town to a nation, and the ripples that result from their decisions can affect a much larger pond, but there is another aspect to resources, and that is a lack of them.

Scarcity of resources is one of the most basic, and at the same time, largest motivators in human history – literally.  It caused our early ancestors to develop an upright gait in order to travel further in search of food and water. It has caused mass migrations in history and in modern times, and is one of the leading causes of conflict across the world.  Resources run out, things take a bad turn.

Scarcity isn’t just about droughts and famines, though, it’s just a fact of life.  Scarcity just means that resources are finite, which is why communities need to band together to manage that scarcity.

Let’s say there’s a local charity – a dog shelter.  Charities are notoriously short of resources because everything that they bring in is from volunteers, and sometimes getting people to just give over money, even for a good cause, can be difficult; they have to think of their own resources and can they spare enough to support someone else.

The shelter has expenses – buildings, food, water, electricity, those sort of things.  Their staff are volunteers, so that’s one thing off their minds, but even that is a scarcity because people can only volunteer so many hours in a month because they still have to work their own jobs and provide resources for themselves and their families.

So what can the shelter do to increase their resources?  They call on the community to donate some, or they can create more by thinking creatively.

In order to bring in more, the shelter might do community fund-raising through sales of things like t-shirts, special dog tags, hold raffles, or hold sponsored walks, or other activities like that, effectively increasing  their own resources, and possibly having more impact as well.

On an even larger scale of community, a country is essentially one large community that has to pool its resources in order to keep things running.  People pay taxes to keep the government funded, the roads paved, and schools open.

In addition to this, nations can trade with each other, increasing access to even more resources that aren’t available at home – or that are …SCARCE…(see what I did there?)

But countries also have to be mindful of their resources, because if you trade away the majority of your food, people starve.  So just like you, they have to make the right choices and find the right balance, and just like in your life, even a country can’t control everything that affects their resources. Drought, storms, the economy – all of these can affect the amount and type of resources available to a country, so lots of choices are actually affected by just what’s there to choose from.

So whether you’re just deciding whether or not to pursue a career in film or work at the chipper to save for a car, shoot zombies with your friends or study, or start a new trade deal for additional petroleum stocks, the basics are still the same – all choices require decisions, all decisions cause ripples, and we need to be mindful of what affect those ripples have on things on your pond.