TEDxSalford

Is doing what you do valuable?

What’s the weirdest or most ‘out there’ career you have ever heard of? Perhaps you have meet somebody who works as a stonemason, you know a guy (or gal) who makes their living winning pub quizzes, or you partied with a professional stuntman once?

I ask because after watching two time yo-yo world champion BLACK’s TED talk - which is both an uplifting tale about following one’s dreams and a pretty cool spectacle to boot – I started to think about how we value these more offbeat roles.

I mean, which roles in society are truly valuable? There are all kinds of ways this question could be answered.  A 2009 article from the BBC puts cleaners ahead of bankers; lazy students seek answers from the reputable and edifying ; and professionals worry enough about it to support an  professing to know the secrets.

Let me to take you down a line of thinking. It’ll be fun, I promise.

If we place BLACK’s skills next to those of, say, a doctor, and then ask a reasonable friend which of the two is more valuable you would probably get a response like this: “While I think what BLACK does is pretty neat, and it’s great that he’s doing something he loves, if you compare him to a doctor it’s obvious he’s just a novelty. Doctors save lives and that’s a much more valuable thing for society.”

It seems almost an indisputable fact that being a doctor is, for want of a better word, better than being a yo-yo champion. Conclusions like this are drawn from an evaluation of the benefits to peoples lives, on which a doctor has a much more tangible effect. But we can’t all be doctors. It’s a hypothetical absurdity to suggest a world in which we are; however, I do think that world illustrates a point. The value of our roles stems at least in part from their differences.

Stick with me.

Here’s the thing: If we were all doctors we would take the skills they have for granted, and that skill set would reduce in value because it would be something which we all already always possessed. After we reach a certain amount of doctors (a lot more than we have), the possible benefits for society reach a plateau where having more will make little difference; likewise if we could all do what BLACK does then we wouldn’t find his story engaging or his skills impressive. Lacking creates value. At least in one sense.

And in this sense, value seems to come from standing out against the crowd; to have it we must offer something which others cannot. Omnipresent doctors would be as valuable as oxygen. A surplus of benefits for life, but not at all valuable as something you could sell. You wouldn’t pay much for a bag of oxygen, unless it was in a Gucci bag, or you found yourself short in outer space.

Hopefully you can see the point I’m making: professions and skills are often valued like commodities, though we say we value doctors because of the benefits to health or society, our silly hypothesis has shown we actually value them in part because of their scarcity: their value is relative, not absolute.

Now I’m going to bring this full circle. Arguably, doctors are less rare than BLACK. So if we follow the logic that scarcity equates to value then it would suggest that what he does is more unique and therefore more valuable than what doctors do.

One counter-argument to this is wrong because what is valuable equates to what is good for sustaining life. But we have seen that an abundance of thing, no matter how crucial they are for life, causes it to lose value in our judgement. Perhaps the difficulty is in finding the right balance.

Like I said earlier, this is a train of thought. I want to stress that I’m a massive fan of doctors, I could have picked anything but that profession came to mind first.  If you spot anything, please feel free to point out the errors of my thinking and set me straight onto the path of enlightenment.

A philosopher once said that if you rub the faces from a coin, all you have left is a lump of metal. That might sound a bit like glib reductionism; it is reducing the complexities of economics to the symbolic exchange of metals, but a point we can take is this: there are all manner of seemingly simple things, such as currency, that assert their value but in reality this is often an abstraction. One we have consented to without realising.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. When we do realise that value isn’t so definite, our eyes open a little. Allowing people like BLACK to try to challenge our preconceptions through something as seemingly benign as a yo-yo.

One of the strongest drives for all of us is to create a little space where what we do has meaning and we can feel significant, empowered, and valuable. You can’t fault somebody who manages it.