What Are You Worth?

I read in the paper yesterday that a sole, unregistered, mystery winner had won the 50 million dollar NSW Gold Lotto this week and had not at that point been identified or come forward to claim their prize.  The same thing happened a few weeks ago with the big 110 million dollar bonanza, an unregistered winner from Ipswich took a few days to come forward and claim their share of the booty.  I had a ticket in that one and as hard as I tried, I could just not make that person from Ipswich be me.

We like to fantasize about winning a fortune don’t we?  Well at least I do.  I am not one of those people who says, ‘Oh I wouldn’t know what to do with that much money!’  I could spend it no worries, there are a few beach houses I would love to live in that could soak up a fair bit of it quite easily.  But it’s a fantasy for sure, our lives are much more valuable and important than cash.  Dedication, endeavour, fair reward for meaningful work, these are the things that bring us more deep satisfaction than immense wealth.

Every time the water cooler conversation, or perhaps these days it’s the coffee machine conversation, turns to lotto fantasies I start to think about worth.  What are we worth?  How important is money to us?  Of course, we have our net worth and it slowly increases, particularly those of us who have been working for multiple decades (sigh).  We gradually pay off houses and cars and little by little we build wealth.  It doesn’t really feel like it when you are raising kids, particularly when you are paying school fees or trying to get a kid through uni, but I suppose that is building a different sort of value in ourselves and our kids too.

But the ‘lotto win’ conversation always gets me wondering what we are worth.  Not how much we are worth financially but how much is our integrity worth.  They say everyone has a price, at what point would you compromise your integrity, your values, your core beliefs for money.  Is it $100?  Is it $1000?  Is it $1,000,000?  Is it just the price of a movie ticket?  Is the answer on a sliding scale or should it always be the same?  Does the answer change when someone is watching, like your friends or your children?

In my experience as a school leader and principal I can tell you that there are two things about which people always lie.  Drugs and money.  They will lie about other things and cave in but those are the big two that people just cannot seem to capitulate to the truth with in my experience.  Drugs aside, as they are a rare and very different thing in most of our day to day lives, it is fascinating to me what people will do for money, what they will compromise, what they will do for cash.  One has to wonder what lessons we teach our children when we tell the person at the ticket booth that they are still under a certain age to get a few dollars off a movie ticket or park entrance, that is we will openly tell a lie in front of them … for cash.  All our words about truthfulness and honesty blow away like a puff of smoke when our kids see us compromise our honesty for a couple of dollars.  $5, $50, $50,000.  I wonder if you have done it, if you thought above that your honesty and integrity was worth thousands or millions, but then we realise it is only worth a couple of bucks sometimes.  Stings a bit.

The right thing to do is always the right thing to do.

It’s just that simple.

Buen Camino