7 Methods to Determine Your Value

You might be surprised by your value, too.

How valuable are you?

Here's a fun question. Try and figure out how valuable you are. Go ahead, take a few brief seconds and get an answer in your head.

Got it?

Did you really do it, or did you just keep reading without actually trying to figure it out? Come on, you can do it. Stuck? Here's some ideas (and how I score on each one):

• Use income to determine your value.
  This one is simple. If you make $120,000 per year, you're more valuable than if you make $30,000. If you make $200,000, you're more valuable than if you make $120,000. The simplicity of this is beautiful, and as a side bonus it means you can incessantly be trying to up your income your whole life! A mad scramble to earn more at whatever cost, therefore validating your existence, can completely consume you! Bonus! My score on this is actually in the negative, according to the IRS (meaning I lost money, instead of earning it).
• Base your value on your net worth.
  Take everything you own and determine what it's worth, then subtract any debts you owe. If, like me, you have $4.13 in the bank, a car worth $1000, don't own a home, and clothes that the goodwill guy won't even give you a donation receipt for, then start with $1000. Subtract debts (several student loans for overpriced, antiquated education systems), and you have your net worth, which in my case is well below zero.
• Base your value on your position.
  Are you a manager? How about a CEO? Maybe a shift lead? No? Not to worry, there's hope. Hey, even just a regular employee is higher on the scale than a full-time volunteer. To put a value on this, just list every possible position that there might be in order, from highest to lowest, then start numbering them from the bottom up. The higher your number, the higher your value! In my case, my value is a -1 using this method.
• Use your credit score as a value indicator.
  Do you have high credit score? Congratulations, you're valuable! Not so great? Oh, sorry. You're not as valuable. You'd better work hard to appease the credit gods and make sure that the number rises. Don't ever, ever do anything to lower your credit score. It could ruin your future, you invaluable scum! Don't you know anything? Credit scores are important, because they determine the outcome of your entire life! Because without good credit, you're not a good person. Based on this method, my score is about a D.
• Use social hierarchy to determine your value.
  You may be poor and unemployed, but you're the life of any party you go to! You can liven up a room like nobody's business! That's what it means to use social hierarchy to determine your value. You take the “intangibles” - things like your intelligence, good looks, charisma, knowledge, or ability to drink beer dispensed from a helmet – and use them to define how valuable you are. The great part about this is that nearly anything can count in this category. Are you unapproachable by the opposite sex but can recite all of Frodo's lines in the extended edition Lord of the Rings trilogy? That's valuable! My social hierarchy value is inflated because I am an overlooked, hardship-burdened missionary doing important work for others.
• Value-ize your friendships.
  Thanks to modern advancements, this method has moved out of obscure into a hard, fast number that is easy to find out. In the old days, you would count your friends, and then take into account their value, and base your value off of that. Now, however, it's very scientific. The actual number is arrived at by dividing your total number of facebook friends by a constant, like .89721, and then multiplying that into the number of people you follow on twitter divided by the number of people who follow you. If the math is a little too confusing, you can just use the total friend count on facebook to give you a ballpark figure of your value. My exact value (using the formula above) is 380.113699.
• Make something up.
  My favorite of the above methods. In this, you take what you think is your value, and assign any number to it at all. In this case, my number is 9.8 novemvigintillion (that's 98 with 90 zeros after it). Of course, it could also be Red (kind of like the terror alert system), or a funny sound. The options are limitless!

As you can probably tell, it's a hard question to answer. I've found on my own journey that this question – the one about how valuable I am - is actually one of the key questions I can ask myself. How valuable am I? The answer to that question determines what kind of life you will begin to assemble for yourself. If you believe you are worthless, the life you build will be generally shallow and miserable. If you believe that you are extremely valuable, the life you build will be one that reflects your greatness.

If I lived my life on the basis of the value scores above, my life would be terrible. Half of the methods resulted in a negative score! I've observed, from my own life, that when I believe in my value, and believe that I am exceedingly valuable, that I accept the opportunities that come my way, I accept the gifts and “coincidences” that bring me closer to what I want out of life. I spend less time disbelieving and more time enjoying the richness that life offers. I'm also less accepting of when other people treat me poorly, and willing to stand up for myself and my dignity.

Putting a number to your value is essentially meaningless. It's a futile exercise. Why? Because you are infinitely valuable. Yes, you, in all your screwed-up glory and all your failed attempts and missteps. You have more to offer this world than you can imagine. The possibilities of who you are and what you can become are mind-staggering. The more confident you are in that, the more bold you will be in giving yourself to the world, the more you will be able to step outside the safety of standard behavior, and the better place we all will live in. You are valuable, and the world – me included – needs you.

Live it up.