7/40 - Give Me A Nickel

Warren Buffett's long-time business partner Charlie Munger once said, "Show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome." Said another way, people do what they are incentivized to do. Everywhere we look today, there are incentives to do more of the thing that gives us the positive feedback we are looking for. It is baked into every social media site and cultural story that we are told, "do this, get this."

I learned about incentives early on in my life. But when I was six, I went hard after an incentive plan that I don't think was supposed to play out the way it did.  

In first grade, my optometrist didn't just give me glasses, she also gave me an eye patch. I had a lazy left eye that was letting my right eye do all the work. So she told me and my parents I needed to strengthen my lazy eye by covering my dominant right eye. It was not a comfortable patch as I remember it.  But trying to get into the swing of things, I think I one day colored it black to try and look like a pirate. That ended up backfiring on me when I started to sweat and the marker ink started running down my face.

Knowing that I needed to do this for my long-term eye health, my parents thought it would be a good idea to incentivize me to wear my patch the four hours a day that the doctor had recommended. They offered me a nickel for each hour I wore the patch.

I was only in first grade, but apparently, my early capitalist tendencies were showing.

I wore the patch all of the time. None stop. From when I woke up until I went to bed. I knew every hour I wore it was another nickel to my name.

Later that year, I opened my first bank account at the age of 6 with over $100 that I'd earned one nickel at a time.