Pat Phelan, who very kindly bought me dinner last night (and is, by the way, looking positively svelt these days, the bastard) asked a question on his blog today about filtering all those things we’ll broadly call stewardship offers. These are the people and organisations who want to solicit you to be a mentor, give you seats on their boards, or have you as their official or unofficial go-to guy for business and strategy advice. They do not, however, want to pay you.

I have to say that I am the original Girl Who Can’t Say No, so frankly Pat should take whatever I have to offer with regards to this question and chuck it directly out the window. I spend at least as much time doling out advice, contacts and expertise on things I’m not being paid to do as I spend doing things I am being paid to do — sometimes for clients, sometimes just for random people who have been referred in or wandered by. I have a terrible time turning anyone away, and I sincerely enjoy getting to meet, talk to and yell at a wide range of really fabulous people, but recently I’ve begun looking at things through the lifeboat analogy.

You’re on a lifeboat, with the Titanic sinking gracefully in the background. You only have so many people you can fit on the boat. Your family, your closets friends and your business are going to take up most of those seats, and that leaves only so many spots left over. With the handful of seats you have available, you then have to make what are frankly tough choices.

Do you take the strongest passengers, those with the greatest chance of making it, or do you take the weakest survivors, those who need help the most? Do you leave behind the people you think are most likely to make it without you, or do you leave behind the ones most likely to go under anyway? Do you invest your capacity in awesome business models or awesome people? Do you grab the folks nobody has ever heard of because you like them and see something good there, or do you pimp out and jump on board with the ones getting good press, good buzz and something that smells suspiciously like a pending VC offer?

However you decide to triage, the fact is that there will be some people to whom you simply cannot offer a seat. And the reality is that if you try to take on board every poor bastard waving his hand in the water, you’re going to sink. The lifeboat will go down in the form of a divorce, a heart attack or a receivership — and take everyone with it.

Were I Pat Phelan, I’d restrict myself to one of each: one Little Start Up That Could, one Next Big Thing, and one I’m Hitching My Star to This Ride Because It’s Good for Me, Never Mind Them. I don’t believe anyone can really truly nurture more than that unless it is their full time job. But because I’m a sucker, I’d maybe also book a day a month for everyone else who knocked on my door, to meet and talk and then walk away.

And most importantly, I’d start making the mountains come to Mohammed, because if my name’s Pat Phelan, I spend entirely too much time on planes as it is.