Let me see if this sounds familiar.  You go to the dentist for a cleaning.  The hygienist goes through the cleaning and looks your teeth over.  At the end the dentist or hygienist tells you that you have several problems. You need to brush more and floss more, and you also need to get a special toothbrush.  Then your furnace goes out, so you call the HVAC man to come in.  He fixes the problem and tells you that you need to make sure you get your ducts cleaned annually, your furnace maintained annually and that you need to change the filter every month.  Then you take your car in for an oil change and the mechanic tells you that you need to make sure you come in every 3,000 miles instead of 5,000 miles, that you need to use a special gasoline additive and that you aren’t rotating your tires often enough.  I could go on and on…

And now some fool with a blog is telling you – Accounting, Who Needs It?  You do.

The number of things you need to take care of sometimes seems infinite and I haven’t even brought up making choices about the fun things in life like playing tennis, going to movies, taking trips and going out to dinner, etc.  Finally, consider all the major decisions you need to make, such as choice of career, finding a romantic partner, buying a house or making a large investment and it is easy to start feeling overwhelmed about the enormity of it all.

How does one choose from everything life has to offer and everything life requires of us?  How does one even find the time to make the choices?  My answer, which I plan to pursue in several posts, is wrapped up in one word: value.

Value – that which one acts to gain and/or keep.

It’s pretty simple isn’t it?  All you need to do is learn to value properly and everything will fall into place.  Because if a value is what you are acting to gain and/or keep, then figuring out what you value will take care of every possibility, the things you desire in life and the things that are required to maintain your life.  The tough part in this is figuring out what it is you value, but once you do and once you go through the process I will give you in this series of posts you will find out just how easy life can be and how happy you will be as a result.

Before I go through this process, however, let me discuss the one branch of philosophy that underlies it, morality.  Everything I will be talking about will be predicated on each person doing the best they can for themselves, i.e. each person being selfish.  From our infancy each of us has had drummed into us the idea that the worst thing we can be is selfish.  Well I am here to tell you that the truth is exactly the opposite, the best thing we can be is selfish.  Through future posts, indeed through everything I write in these blogs I hope to convince you of this basic fact of morality, but hopefully for now you will keep an open mind and understand I really am advocating that each person be selfish.

With that said, let me presage the next post I write on this subject by letting you know that its basic theme will be the necessity of making sure your values are objective.