When you produce any resource (money, a home, a good name), it must be maintained. All resources come with the labor, work, and action to maintain them. Poorly maintained resources can cause instability, threats, and breakdowns. The cost of regular maintenance is minimal compared to the cost of a significant breakdown; however, all maintenance has a cost.

Does High Performance Require High Maintenance?

Not for those who keep their maintenance scorecard low.

What is My Maintenance Scorecard?

Your maintenance scorecard is a tally of the labor of maintaining many areas of life: health, work, career, money, relationship, family, home, and more.

The Gist

When you produce any resource (money, a home, a good name), it must be maintained. All resources come with the labor, work, and action to maintain them. Poorly maintained resources can cause instability, threats, and breakdowns. The cost of regular maintenance is minimal compared to the cost of a significant breakdown; however, all maintenance has a cost.

We rarely consider this cost (especially when building abundant resources), and hence, threaten these resources.

To produce surplus (and free your resources for other concerns), you must consider where you can maintain through others.

How Am I Doing? *

For each item below, rate yourself on a scale of 1 to 10.

1 being the least amount of time, energy and resources spent maintaining the area of life (e.g., this item is primarily maintained through others – this maintenance includes automation, systems, and environmental structures).

10 being a high amount of time, energy, and resources spent maintaining the area of life (this item is maintained only by me – and I must get involved when things cease to function).

For any item that is not applicable, do not score yourself.

1. Meal preparation and dietary needs
2. Exercise and personal fitness
3. Your physical well-being
4. Your emotional well-being
5. Expanding education; your ability to trade knowledge for income
6. Maintaining your intellectual property
7. Gaining access to the resources and knowledge of others
8. Producing income or revenue
9. Promoting your valued identity
10. Managing your membership commitments to associations and institutions
11. Managing your personal finances and taxes
12. Managing your business finances and taxes
13. Managing your professional licenses and standards
14. Managing your personal relationship commitments
15. Managing your family commitments (including extended family)
16. Your home(s) or other dwellings
17. Your more significant assets: properties, holdings, or businesses
18. Developing your fitness to accomplish your higher aspirations

Score Yourself

For each item above, rate yourself on a scale of 1 to 10. Do not rate yourself if the item is not applicable. Then take the average of the total (add up the numbers and divide by the number of items you rated).

Average: 1-3, congratulations, you’ve built transactions that are maintained through others.

Average: 4-6, you may need to consider how to build transactions that are maintained through others.

Average: Over 7, unfortunately, you are likely trying to go it alone and have built transactions that are maintained by you.

Are you doing too much? Not enough? How do you know?

Whether you realize it or not, there’s labor that goes into maintaining every area of your life. While this may or may not sound obvious, those of us who have things figured out (the wealthy/successful) know that there isn’t enough time or energy to maintain everything by ourselves. If you look closely at how the highest achievers get their results and maintain their various areas of life, you’ll see that they rarely do it alone.

The key is maintenance through others, and by going this route, you not only get the luxury of not having to do the work yourself but also the success rate and top results that only a specialist in their field can achieve.

What do we mean by “Maintain Through Others”?

Here are some examples of areas of life that might be maintained through others:

• You offload labor, work, or maintenance activities to associates, team, or employees – or to automation.
• You hire financial managers or accountants to manage your finances and personal/business taxes.
• You work with personal trainers to help you achieve your fitness goals.
• You educate your children through public or private schooling.
• Nutritionists or dieticians can tell you what to eat vs. learning on your own.
• Olympic athletes enlist the help of internationally recognized expert coaches to keep them at the top of their sport.

The Poverty of Independence

Time is one of our most limited resources, and while you may be able to do everything, this will eventually result in burnout and overwhelm. Going the solo route will ultimately catch up with you and begin to impact your other areas of life, like the time you’re able to spend with your family and the impact of stress on your health. If you stop and take the time to look, you’ll notice there’s an abundance of help around you. Our curriculum teaches students how to build transactions to satisfy their aims. If you’re doing too many things and managing all aspects of your life, then you simply won’t have the bandwidth to achieve your chief aims in life.

For many, there is specific net worth or yearly salary that is the center of their chief aim in life. However, those familiar with the Influence Ecology curriculum know that focusing on only one area of life may produce hardship in other areas. For example, we all know someone who has trashed their health or a relationship in service of their income or career. The way we teach it, there are fifteen areas or Conditions of Life™, and money is just one of them. If you’re solely focused on money, then the other areas will suffer. When you eventually meet your money aims, you’ll still feel dissatisfied in other areas of your life.

We’ve provided all fifteen Conditions of life below. Imagine being satisfied with all of them. This is the very purpose of our curriculum. To start, we recommend that you think accurately about satisfying your aims for money, career, health, and activity (the doing of life). If these conditions are threatened, it’s tough to satisfy the others.

Conditions of Life™

1. Health
2. Activity
3. Career
4. Money
5. Relationship
6. Education
7. Sociality
8. Ethics
9. Knowing
10. Fitness
11. Aesthetics
12. Environment
13. Politics
14. Legacy
15. Spirituality/Self-Actualization

Our programs are designed to help us a) think accurately about our aims in each Condition of Life™, b) build transactions to satisfy those aims, and c) build and maintain the surplus to survive any threat.

To hear more from our customers, listen to the Influence Ecology podcast.

• This list, while not comprehensive, is meant as a tool to discover where and how you might be wasting labor, work, and action to maintain your current lifestyle. This does not include the maintenance for larger aspirations – as these will require additional resources and maintenance.

Our programs address the exchanges with others for this maintenance. We also recognize that some activities are enjoyable in and of themselves, and some maintenance may satisfy your aspirations for the kind of activity you enjoy. Gardening is an excellent example of something many enjoy laboring to maintain. Finally, as your aims are your aims, a low or high score in an area is not meant to signify satisfaction or dissatisfaction but rather to illuminate an opportunity where some are could be maintained through others.

AUTHOR

John Patterson
Co-founder and CEO
INFLUENTIAL U
John Patterson co-founded and manages the faculty and consultants of Influential U global. Since 1987, he has led workshops, programs, and conferences for over 100k people in diverse professions, industries, and cultures. His history includes corporate curriculum design focusing on business ecosystems, influence, leadership, and high-performance training and development.