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I am at work, but only in the figurative sense of the word. I am, clearly, the most disinterested employee in the office. My productivity is abysmally low, as it has been for a while now. And it only seems to be heading in one direction – further South. I have not checked my office email for the past few weeks: I remain uninformed of meetings, conference calls and office announcements. Nor do I really care. I am not afraid, I don’t feel guilty, and I don’t give a damn. Much like Peter Gibbons in Office Space, I feel light, unburdened. I feel liberated.

My paycheck, my realization
I am an inconsequential entity. To my employers, my existence on their payrolls adds no value, for otherwise they would by now have noticed the loss of that value, and let me know they’d noticed. From this, there are two things of interest to note: that I add no value to the company, and that I continue to receive my salary despite adding no value. While the first is fairly self-explanatory and can directly be adduced to the gradual, continuous and continuing increase in my disinterest, disenchantment and disillusion with the employment, the second can only be explained by an amusing twist of bureaucratic irony – that the value I generated was so insignificant that my presence on their payrolls, as an asset or as a liability, was hardly ever noticed.

And from this realization are two lessons to be learnt: that the salary you draw is not a reflection of the value you add to the enterprise, but merely an acknowledgement of your mortgaging off your most valuable asset – your time; and that to estimate the true value you add to something or someone, it is essential to disengage the results from the monetary benefits accrued as compensation for your efforts.

Who adds more value?
If we were to go by common practices, it would not be incorrect to assume that the highest paid people would be expected to be the ones that add most value to the system. That the owner of a taxi adds more value than its driver, that the MBAs adds more value than the PhDs, that the multi-million-dollar-earning CEOs of Banking add more value than the rest of us combined (and see where that has got us). The President of the United States earns a salary of $400,000 – about as much as that of a novice hedge fund manager. Is the value they add to the system the same?

If income can not be held as a measure of generated value, what can? The answer to that is obviously subjective. It depends on personal opinion, on preference, on perspective. To me, for instance, the aid worker toiling away unnoticed at a refugee camp in a remote corner of Africa adds more value than me, my boss, and my boss’ boss combined. For she works under unforgiving conditions, with and for an alien people, receiving paltry monetary compensation (if any), detached from the conveniences of modern living, with little opportunity for relaxation, with no respite. To me, she adds inestimable value because she works towards the feeding of a hungry people, the recouping of an injured people, the survival of an endangered people. To me, she adds timeless value because the consequences of her actions will be felt now and later, during her efforts and after, for years, for generations.

How to add more value?
If true measure of generated value is to be based on consequence, rather than compensation, what can be done to maximise the positive consequences of our efforts? The answer to this question can be fairly intuitive: if consequence is the ends, the best possible way to achieve that ends is by optimizing the means – effort. To optimize effort one needs three things: intuition, interest and inclination. Intuition is a measure of capability or capacity. If one must set out to complete a task, one must hold the capacity to do so. Capacity can be intrinsic or extrinsic, inherent or acquired. Inherent capacity, often-times called talent, is the most potent for it requires no additional, artificial inculcation; all it may need is refinement, polishing, nurturing. Inclination is the feeling of wanting to willingly invest effort in an undertaking, the commitment to it, the drive to achieve the ends. Interest, being self-explanatory, is the most important of the three. For interest acts as the force that drives the other two: when the interest to achieve a consequence is established, the capacity to do so will always be discovered from within, and the commitment to the enterprise will arise organically.

The key to adding value, then, is to realize what it is that interests you most. The tools to turn that interest into consequence will then appear automatically. For, to invest energy and effort towards an enterprise that is of no interest to you, that is of no consequence to the system, is to fritter away the one asset that is universally depreciating, whose value is immeasurably infinitesimal – time. As for me, I’m an engineer who was never meant to be in engineering. And I don’t intend to stay here much longer.