Last week I had the privilege of speaking to some folks about…well…about being different I guess you could say. The talk borrowed it’s title from the 1965 rock hit by The Who, “talkin bout my generation”. We had some fun with the absurd idea that Baby Boomers act as one monolithic movement and I tried to refocus the talk on how my perspective has been shaped by certain events of the last 50+ years and by the extraordinary wisdom that I found by listening to the mavericks and unsung heroes from other generations.

I concluded with, of all things, a graph showing approaches to customer satisfaction…now bear with me, this is no ordinary marketing 101 business curve. If we remove the word customer from the description and refer to this as a set of personal satisfaction curves, it gives us a whole new perspective on making choices.

Simply put there are three ways to allocate your resources with the goal of achieving satisfaction.
In order to avoid being disappointed we must all allocate a certain amount of our resources to the Disappointer curve. BUT, once you’ve acheived your maximum level of satisfaction there is no reason to put any additional effort into it as it will not make us any happier in our work. As a would be author, I place my day job on this curve.

The Pleaser curve says that the more you do the more satisfied you are, so the only way to achieve more satisfaction is to constantly do more and more. Occasionally I will allocate some resources to this approach because it’s a great way to build self confidence. I know if I put the energy into a project I will certainly feel satisfied with the result. But for the long haul this is not where I want to spend a majority of my time.

The Delighter curve represents the high risk high reward expenditure of resources. If you choose the right expenditure of resources you will find a near expontential level of satisfaction. But if you choose to direct your energies in the wrong area you could find yourself very disatisfied and having to work twice as hard to get back to where you started.

Personally, I like to consider the possibilities afforded, merely, by allocating my resources someplace else…but then I’m different