why am i here?

As I was looking at a graph of the life time value of different segments of our donors I began to think about my life time value.  Why am I here fighting for this cause at this organization in this position?  And what about the value of my life outside of my professional impact?  How will my annual contributions to society, my friends and my family add up as the years pass?  So being a direct response geek i started to draw my lifetime value.  Here is what i came up with (remember i said i was direct response geek not an artist).

myLTV

The lifetime metric represented my age of course but the value metric is what I had to spend some time defining for myself.  At the risk of referencing a sadly popularized Broadway musical, how do you measure the value of your life?  For me it came down to relationships and experiences.  What relationships do I most value and want to impact - friends, family professional peers, society, myself.  And what are the experiences I want or need to live through to make me a better person and increase the cumulative impact of my life - professional growth through education, exposure to industry experts and becoming an expert myself, connections to the cause I am professionally attached to as well as those that mean the most to me, personal growth through fun, faith, sacrifice, self evaluation, love and loss (never forgetting the fun).

So ideally as we age all those relationships and experiences would add up incrementally increasing our lifetime value each  year.  But we all know that we don't live in an ideal world and none of us live ideal lives.  So after I drew the straight line of my ideal LTV I added the red line of my LTV... my value is all over the place and I have no doubt will continue to be throughout my life.  But as I live and learn, experience new things and build relationships I want to focus on that unicorn (or Pelican Brief for our Julia Roberts fans) of the perfect mix of relationships and experiences that are going to make my lifetime value ideal.