Today’s post is a participation of the Season of Gratitude series going on at Balanced Life Center. This series benefits the the Heifer International charity by raising $5 for every blog post towards the charity. Today’s post is about using the correct scorecard to measure happiness and gratitude.

If you are worth $100 million, would you be satisfied? Apparently, Max Levchin isn’t. A few years ago at the age of 27, the co-founder of PayPal found himself immensely wealthy when his company was bought by eBay. There were a lot of ways he could have spent his time and money, but instead he chose to spend his time on making more money by creating a company called Slide that is kinda like Flikr for Web 2.0. How much time does he spend? He has 18-hour work days. How much more money to define success? According to Levchin, “at least $1.54 billion,” which was the price eBay paid for PayPal.

Based on my setup of Levchin’s story, one predictable path for this post is to preach about how money won’t buy happiness and to instead to value having friends and loved ones. An alternate, yet still predictable path for me is to espouse how happiness shouldn’t be about achieving goals, but instead enjoy the process of getting there. Although there are some truths in both of these statements, I’m not going say that his goal is wrong. If there’s anything I want to point out that is wrong with Levchin’s goal, it’s that he’s using the wrong metrics!

Avoid the Arbitrary Scorecard
First, market valuation is so arbitrary - recently, Oracle tried to buy BEA for $6.7 billion, and the BEA execs said the price was too low, but no other bidder emerged and now BEA may never be able to be sold for the original asking price. When numbers are in those rarified heights, there’s only two or three companies that are willing to buy, and you don’t need a degree in economics to know that a market size of two is not a very efficient market. Second, having success at that level is a combination of smarts AND luck. You can control how to use your smarts, but you cannot control luck. Sure, you can argue that success also depends on the ability to to identify market potential, the vision to create a marketable solution, the strategic acumen to leverage competitive advantage, etc…, but all that can be boiled down to smarts and luck.

At this point, you might be saying, “Al, aren’t you going to also slam Levchin for using motives that are superficial, egotistical, and self-serving?” No. As a matter of fact, I say more power to him! Although I do not share the same values for success, his pursuit of happiness does not interfere with mine, and vice-versa. Plus, I’m in no position to tell him that he should stop at $100 million. If I was asked what value I would stop at to be content with money, I would say $10 million, which Levchin already achieved ten-fold. I can only speculate whether I would feel content with that kind of money. In addition, many innovations that benefited the world were motivated by egotistical and self-serving motives. I admit I use ego myself as motivation to help me set a high level of standard for my own work.

Competitive drive can help to create innovation that benefit the world. The chase for the Nobel Prize was what led Watson and Crick to unlock the secrets of DNA’s double-helix before Linus Pauling at CalTech discovered it. Their discovery helped advance the frontiers of the life sciences and medicine, but it was not altruistic ideals that motivated Watson and Crick to feverishly work on their research, but instead it was the fear that Linus Pauling would beat them to the punch and would get all the glory.

Einstein Won a Nobel Prize for That???
Speaking of the Nobel Prize, Albert Einstein is actually an excellent counter-example. Einstein’s scientific achievements include special relativity which shattered the laws of classical physics and forever changed how we look at space and time, as well as general relativity which revolutionized the meaning of gravity. However, his Nobel prize was in the obscure discovery of the law explaining the photoelectric effect, which basically is the phenomenon of light being able to generate electricity. If he never bothered to explain the photoelectric effect, his other achievements would have still easily established him as the greatest scientific mind in modern history, but yet the committee overlooked all the other significantly greater achievements. Einstein was so dissatisfied with how he got the Nobel Prize that it was ranked at the bottom of the list of awards that he valued.

OK, if I haven’t made you lose your patience yet with my trivia and general babble, then let me now get to my point. Pick the right scorecard. If you pick the wrong scorecard, you will likely miss your true goal and instead be frustrated by trying to achieve something unattainable or something that isn’t satisfying. If you pursue money so that it will help your family and friends be happy, don’t use money as the scorecard, but instead go back to the roots and use the level of happiness with your family and friends as the real scorecard… using money as your scorecard could actually decrease the true score that really matters.