ARE YOU OVER-PAYING?

Henry Thoreau wrote: “the cost of a thing is the amount of what I call life, which is required to be exchanged for it immediately or in the long run.” We are fools when we overpay for a thing in terms of what it takes out of our very existence. Yet that is precisely what Gilbert and Sullivan did. They knew how to create cheerful words and merry music, but they knew distressingly little about how to create gaiety in their own lives. They created some of the loveliest light operas that ever delighted the world: patience, pinafore, the Mikado. But they couldn’t control their tempers. They embittered their years over nothing more than the price of a carpet! Sullivan ordered a new carpet for the theater they had bought. When Gilbert saw the bill, he hit the roof. They battled it out in court, and never spoke to one another again as long as they lived. When Sullivan wrote the music for a new production, he mailed it to Gilbert; and when Gilbert wrote the words, he mailed it to Sullivan. Once they had to take a curtain call together, but they stood on opposite sides of the stage and bowed in different directions, so they wouldn’t see one another. They hadn’t the sense to put a stop-loss order on their resentment, as Lincoln did.

Once, during the Civil War, when some of Lincoln’s friends were denouncing his bitter enemies, Lincoln said: “You have more of a feeling of personal resentment than I have. Perhaps I have too little of it; but I never thought it paid. A man doesn’t have the time to spend half of his life in quarrels. If any man ceases to attack me, I never remember the past against him.”

When Benjamin Franklin was seven years old, he made a mistake that he remembered for seventy years. When he was a lad of seven, he fell in love with a whistle. He was so excited about it that he went into the toy shop, piled all his coppers on the counter, and demanded the whistle without even asking its price. “I then came home,” he wrote to a friend seventy years later, “and went whistling all over the house, much pleased with my whistle.” But when his brothers and sisters found out that he had paid far more for his whistle than he should have paid, they gave him the horse laugh: and, as he said, “I cried with vexation.”

Years later, when Franklin was a world-famous figure, and Ambassador to France, he still remembered that the fact that he paid too much for his whistle had caused him “more chagrin than the whistle gave him pleasure.” But the lesson it taught Franklin was cheap at the end, “As I grew up,” he said, “and came into the world and observed the actions of men, I thought I met with many, very many, who gave too much for the whistle. In short, I conceive that a great part of the miseries of mankind are brought upon them by false estimates they have made of the value of things, and by giving too much for their whistles.”

Whenever we are tempted to throw good money after bad in terms of human living, let’s stop and ask ourselves these three questions:

1.   How much does this thing I am worrying about really matter to me?

2.   At what point shall I set a “stop-loss” order on this worry and forget it?

3.   Exactly how much shall I pay for this whistle? Have I already paid more than it is worth?

 

 

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