I Will See It When I Belive It
In my aimless youth, coming out of high-school with no idea where I was going and no money to pay for college, I went to those ever-present teenager-targeting sirens: the military recruiters.
They all promised my choice of MOS (Military Occupational Specialty, that is to say, jobs within the service). All four branches offered in-service correspondence college courses and monetary assistance with college after my term of service. I was immediately attracted to the Army (for the neat Military Intelligence MOSs) or the Air Force (for significantly higher standard of living). But by far most interesting pitch, the most interesting recruitment strategy belonged to the Marines.
I am not a macho man. The “best of the best” shtick gained them no traction with me, but first pitch he came at me with had nothing to do with that. The Marine recruiter sat down with me and set out an array of tiles etched with words like pride, discipline, education, and money. He asked me to select from among the tiles which attributes, which assets, I though were the most important benefits I might be looking to get out of my military service.
As nearly as I can remember, I selected: “education”, “skills”, and “new experiences”. He then laid into me with a pitch about the fact that I was definitely a good candidate for marine enlistment because the tiles I chose were “intangibles”. He went on to explain that marines received the best of the intangible, internal, personal benefits.
In the end, he never really came close to selling me on marine enlistment; being a marine seemed like it would be hard, and hard certainly wasn’t what I was looking for at the time. But I have, from time to time, returned to that seemingly vital definition he drew between “tangible” and “intangible” benefits.
Here is a question for you young entrepreneurs: did you become (or are you looking to become) an entrepreneur in pursuit of the tangible benefits? Did you do it for money? Did you do it for the assets? The resume adornment? As a way to kill time? Or did you do it for the intangibles? Did you do it for control over your destiny and your daily life? Did you do it prove something? To experiment? To “say you had done it”?
Unlike that recruiter, unlike many people in the world today, I just do not see the bright line of distinction between the “tangible” and the “intangible”. I cannot ignore the incestuous way the two groups feed into, reinforce, and cause each other. I do not see how you can have pride without a good resume or money without a smart use of your time.
Are the tangibles and the intangible so starkly different for you? Do you feel that they are two terribly different classifications of “thing”. Or do see them as cause and effect. Are they simply the immediate and long-term sides of the same “things”. I think entrepreneurs must inevitably come to understand that tangible and intangible are nothing more than words, and that the things we have and the things we gain are real, regardless of whether you can touch them or not.
2 Comments
Danny
November 9th, 2006 at 4:16 pm
In my mind, intangibles encompass tangibles.
Intangibles like ambition to “make it in life” often includes tangibles such as money, material possessions and titles.
That being said, I think you can have intangibles without tangibles for the most part.
However, money is normally a part of something grander and bigger in scope.
Money is a means to an end (intangible), which is the bigger picture.
I think the intangibles are what everyone really wants, but sometimes get distracted and move focus to life’s “bonuses” such as money and material items.
Evan Prieskop
November 10th, 2006 at 7:47 am
I know what you are saying, and you are in good company. From Plato on up through the existentialists, the idea of the tangible world as a reflection and outgrowth of the intangible is well documented. Honestly, I was attempting to challenge the traditional, Platonic elevation and separation between the two. I believe that it is easy to fall into the trap of believing that because the intangible is so vague and transient, that it is also somehow more pure or virtuous than the corporeal world.
At least consider that the intangible things, those goals and emotions and concepts which exists entirely at the cognitive level, are not just quantitatively but actually qualitatively indistinguishable from the physical world. As money is a symbol for value, devoid in and of itself of any real world value, so, at the neurological level is all of reality nothing more than perceived ideation—axons firing and electrochemistry churning.
Then again, maybe I am just full of crap.
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