e utopia Principles
Finding Value
The good news is that we have managed to become so efficient at physical production and distribution of food, clothing, housing and other of life’s necessities that we have time available in our busy lives to focus on building up Good Places. We don’t live life the way people prior to about 1850 did - working sixty to eighty hours per week in order to have one or two sets of clothing, maybe one pair of shoes, very basic food, poor health care, and so on. A relatively poor person living in a developed, 21st Century society has much more physical amenities than even a fairly wealthy person did two or three hundred years ago. Because our work today can be so efficient, we can have organizations where we spend a lot of our time in an economic activity to pay our bills. We can also spend time building up who we are as individuals, so that we are not just spending all our time just to be the absolute most efficient we can at work. And we can spend some of our time building up the community and the world we live in. In our organizations we can spend our time and effort in three areas: 1) an economic activity to support our living in the world and the rest of the activities of the organization; 2) building up who we are as individuals - first off training, so that we know what our jobs are, but then also education and development for who we are as people; 3) some kind of service that people don’t pay us for but that makes the world a better place by the work that we do. Whatever we do at work we get pretty good at. The most likely area of service for an organization is in some way to provide what they are good at to people who can’t afford it. This might not necessarily be your main service. It could perhaps be some of your internal support services that would benefit some kind of Good Place effort outside your own organization. A well balanced organization is active in these three areas: an economic activity, building up the members of the organization through training, education and development, and service to the community outside the organization. All organizations must be economically viable (meaning that they bring in more money than they spend, among other financial considerations). But the true value at any organization is the people, not the money. This includes people outside of the organization.
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