Value of Vice

"I haven't a particle of confidence in a man 

who has no redeeming petty vices."

Mark Twain, Biography 

Hey,

Apply for a job and you will be asked about your strengths. Employers who don't intend to pay much more than 15 cents a minute have a keen interest to get all they can out of your strengths. Check your favorite weaknesses and vices at the time clock. Your nasty habits are not welcome and you'll have to pee in a cup to understand the severity of it.

Entrepreneurs and self-employed individuals, on the other hand, must utilize all forces and faculties they can mobilize. Emotionally volatile personalities like Steve Jobs will not last long as Walmart cashiers. For Jobs' job, however, his nasty habits worked well. I am not defending Mr. Jobs treating people poorly--he couldn't use his iPhone to call his biological dad once during his lifetime? No iPad available to answer his dad's emails? If there weren't massive emotional problems and weaknesses, I don't know what weakness really is--but I digress. I want you to become aware that weakness is a valuable element of true success.

Simplistic thought models can only forbid weakness and vice, inadvertently increasing potentially damaging consequences. For instance, prohibition established and strengthened organized crime. Serious crime feeds off and thrives on taxpayer money. At all times in history and in all countries. Outlaw stuff and automatically you are creating new income sources for outlaws. I hope I don't surprise any saintly soul here.

Fortunately, not all vices have been forbidden yet. You still get to eat as many m&ms as you please. Unless the nannies of the world get their will and further embarrass this fine country, like former NYC mayor Bloomberg who outlawed salt in restaurants, eating disorders remain in order. By the way, a Bloomberg pet, NY City councilman and busybody Ben Kallos (or is it spelled Callous?) eagerly pursues the outlawing of toys in Happy Meals. 

My advice: keep your vice! Allow your nasty and naughty habits to exist and thrive. Drag them out of their closets and shadows. 

Instead of suppressing weakness or ignoring it, exploit this well-oiled motivator. Employers often have to develop incentives, artificial ways to get their money's worth out of employees they have hired for their strengths. 

Motivation is only necessary for people who don't do what they want to do. 

Fortunes are paid to behavioral psychologists who motivate the naturally unwilling without paying them a proper market based spot price for their services.  

Show me a smoker or any decent alcoholic who needs motivation. "Good Lord, my glass is half empty. That means I'll have to order another beer in a few minutes." First off, for all you vacuous cliche jockeys, 'half-empty' is not any more negative than 'half-full'.  Half-empty can be an extremely positive expression in the context of vice and weakness. Only in the shoddy make-believe world of so-called positive thinking has half-full become a favored thing. 

Secondly, weakness wastes zero energy on motivation. 100% of your weakness can be used for fun and profit. Hence weakness is the superior strength. Motivation is always a squandered overhead expense. You believe I am joking? Do you think the "All-Inclusive Luxury and Executive Addiction Treatment" center Seaside Palm Beach in Florida is kidding? If you have a weakness, you are not alone and you have an insider understanding of your favorite habit that you can utilize to serve others. You know enough to serve people so they can get deeper into it, out of it, and you have what it takes to cater to the entire spectrum of desires in between. Either way, that's where Lindsay Lohan's money went, and there is endlessly more where that came from.

I don't sound like I have a lot of morals? My dear, before you judge me, please have a look around you and then deep into yourself. Every Starbucks barista, IHOP waitress, or bagel baker caters to the addictive personality. If you judge me, you are judging them simultaneously. Whether you are a binky manufacturer in Middleton, Wisconsin, or drug lord in Columbia, technically you give people what they believe they desperately need. How the economy works and how hundreds of millions of people choose to live already has hardly anything to do with my set of morals.

Let's take it a step further. Acknowledging and consciously working with vice and weakness may do more for the healing of societal problems than vilification and suppression.

For optional expansion of your existing entrepreneurial endeavors or for potential new business ventures, perhaps you want to consider employing your habits, may they be "good" or "bad." There may not be a better engine to get you up and keep you going than weaknesses your dear parents disapproved of most. 

Perhaps there is also no better motivator for your potential clientele to keep coming and paying than the plethora of vices that their human habitat frowns upon most.  

Vespasian, Roman Emperor--and builder of the Colosseum--said to his son about gold coins derived from his urine tax (urine was used as laundry detergent),

"Non olet," and indeed, money doesn't stink.

Shalom,

Egbert

P.S.: Obviously, there is no need for you to hang onto your vices and weaknesses for dear life and/or for the purpose of making money. Feel free to use them and lose them. It's a good idea to make it a choice and not to be victim of your strengths or your weaknesses. Unfortunately many minimum wage workers are victimized by what they consider their strength.

P.P.S.: For Fun and Profit, order my Money Seminar: Industrial Strength. A deck of 52 Mini-Poker Cards plus 2 Jokers. Of course you may play Poker with it--and possibly win or, well, lose money--but it is meant to raise your awareness for your personal relationship with money. It's Money Psychology at its best and you'll benefit from having it in your pocket wherever you go. I promise, you and your Poker friends have never looked at money from this angle before. Send $29 to egbertsukop@gmail.com via PayPal, make sure you leave your mailing address, and I'll get a deck for you printed. Since it'll be shipped from Hong Kong, it may take about 2 - 3 weeks to arrive. 

Money is neither cause of nor solution to your money problems.

Oh, and visit EndWages.com too!

"In my early manhood and in middle life I used to vex myself with reforms every now and then. And I never had occasion to regret these divergencies for, whether the resulting deprivations were long or short, the rewarding pleasure which I got out of vice when I returned to it always paid me for all that it cost."

Autobiography of Mark Twain

Gracefully Playful

"Laughter is the closest thing to the grace of God." 

Karl Barth

Dear Friend,

Do you make money joyfully?
Can you lose money gracefully? 
Do you negotiate over money playfully?
Can you ask for money without guilt or emotional threats? 
Could you maintain your humanity with a few dollars to your name?
Could you maintain your humanity in the possession of great wealth?

I am not known as a Bible-thumper or a little old church lady but this Matthew 18:3 quote has been on my mind for decades, "Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven."

One of this thought's practical applications is your relationship with money. Treat money with the gravitas of a life-and-death issue and, whether you have stockpiles of that stuff or you are broke, your enjoyment of money and your relationships in the context of money is limited. Serious matters don't lighten up by adding zeroes to the equation.

On the other hand, if you soar through your monetary experiences in life on your sense of humor--even gallows humor, if nothing else will do--you will be better off and happier, rain or shine. Viktor Frankl trained fellow death camp inmates in Auschwitz how to be graceful and apply humor under the most horrifying circumstances. What Mr. Frankl accomplished while facing torture and death, I am confident you can practice in the face of financial adversity as well, with only $30 left in your pocket for instance. 

People don't get to control their lives. A pimple on your nose never shows up at the right time and it will not do you the favor and vanish on schedule. It would be nice if all went like clockwork. Here is problem A, and you just have to respond with solution B. Done. No, not all problems can be solved. Some issues have a solution but it can take months and even years longer than you may have planned. 

What if it is more important to experience a problem rather than solve it? What if the problem is a person? What if the problem you "have" (it has you, does it not?) deserves your gratitude and not the attitude of an addict or an executioner to get rid of it asap? Could it be that the urge to control stems from the fear of mystery that life continues to be, parallel to all technical accomplishments and scientific research?

I don't like problems either but no matter how many you will solve, there will be plenty of new ones. I promise. The wealthy have as many problems as the broke do. It's not common knowledge but the rich have significantly more money related problems than so-called poor people. Sheer ignorance makes people believe that more money automatically translates to less money problems. That is pure superstition. If you don't believe me, try it: get rich, and then drop me a line whether it proves to be all it's cracked up to be.

The Number One reason people don't have the money they desire is the emotional baggage they attach to this phenomenon. There are endless expectations of what money is, supposedly, and what it is not, of how different it must be to have lots of it compared to not having enough, about how much easier life would be with money than without. Ask Robin Williams how that played out for him. Or Jim Carrey, or Nicolas Cage, or Ted Turner, or Lindsay Lohan and tens of thousands of people who had to learn the hard way that paper with ink printed on it cannot have the power to turn unpleasant emotions into enjoyable ones. Well, the coveted non-commodity fame is nothing to make peeps happy, either.

Money is easiest to acquire when it is entirely meaningless. You can ask for it without hidden emotional threats or false promises when it means as much to you as marbles did in the sandlot. Even less than that. When money is hardly more than colorful paper in your perception and you have dropped any and all projections about its alleged powers. "Would you be so kind and pass the broccoli, please?" You don't hesitate to say that at any dinner table until you get the broccoli, and you don't get cotton mouth or sweaty palms over asking for what you want. 

The meaning of money, whatever that describes for you, is the very reason not to have as much as you desire. The meaning of money prevents you from asking for it with ease, again and again and again. When you drop the meaning of it, the fear of asking for money disappears. You don't have as much money as you want because you are afraid to ask for more. You are afraid of being perceived as materialistic, crude and yes, greedy. Meaning. Lose the meaning and you can ask for money all day long.  

Unless people lighten up about money--whether they possess boatloads of it or they stare into an abyss of debt makes no difference--life will be a somber place. Money can't help. Now, money doesn't hurt and I wish you'd get more, much more of it than you have now. But please, laugh first and laugh often! Mostly about yourself and how silly life can be. The greed I am talking about is the joy you are experiencing about being you. 

Newborn babies are adored by many adults. Babies don't perform. They just are. They eat, they pee, they sleep, they cry, they giggle. People think that's adorable and they love to serve these little Gods in diapers. Perhaps you aren't magnetically adorable like the average infant because you are not highly pleasing to yourself by simply being. You may believe you have to cultivate strengths and use them to perform first, before you deserve to receive positive attention of any kind.

The hoops we believe we have to jump through, the contortions we think we must master, and the warped mind games we eagerly adopt are what's between us as struggling adults and a child who is loved and cherished by all for no reason other than for being present. I have observed elation in the face of a person who is holding a baby on her arm. If you feel anything other than elated while being engaged in your daily affairs, perhaps you are after something that you can gain only by recognizing that you are no less than an individual in whose presence people can feel and have felt bliss. Some time ago, they did. What should stop others from feeling elated again in your presence? You? Yes, by torturing your poor brain about the things you ought to do, so others will want to be with you and bring more money. Except, that thorny route doesn't work too well.

The first thing there is for you to do is..... nothing. Be. Be pleasing to yourself. Take a bath, perhaps, and a nap. Then, maybe, you wish to do something. Consult your to-do-list, go shopping, smoke pot, or take the garbage out? No! It could be that you wish to do something of utmost simplicity. Take a walk. Squint into the sun. Invent the perpetuum mobile. As I said, something simple.

Be kind, be gentle, be graceful with yourself. Enjoy a carefree moment of being. New ideas will spring from there and new joys cannot be averted. Perhaps even fresh and crisp new federal reserve bank notes, legal tender. Don't forget about money's tender character!

Good day,

Egbert


P.S.: For Fun and Profit, order my "Money Seminar: Industrial Strength." A deck of 52 Mini-Poker Cards plus 2 Jokers. Of course you may play Poker with it--and possibly win or, well, lose money--but it is meant to raise your awareness for your personal relationship with money. This is Money Psychology at its best and you'll benefit from having it in your pocket wherever you go. I promise, you and your Poker friends have never looked at money from this angle before. Send $29 to egbertsukop@gmail.com via PayPal, make sure you leave your mailing address, and I'll get a deck for you printed. Since it'll be shipped from Hong Kong, it'll take about 2 - 3 weeks to arrive. 

Money is neither cause of nor solution to your money problems.

Oh, and visit EndWages.com too!

"When everything is easy one quickly gets stupid."

Maxim Gorky (1868 - 1936)

Greed Just Is

"I like to think that my arrogance, impetuosity, impatience, selfishness and greed are the qualities that make me the lovable chap I am."

Richard Hammond 

Dear Friend,

Greed is not half as bad as it's cracked up to be. Merriam-Webster's dictionary defines greed as "a selfish and excessive desire for more of something (as money) than is needed." If you own a baseball cap, a smartphone, or a dog, your desires exceed basic needs. In case you have $72.51 left in your bank account and $6 in your wallet, you have more money than you need. Had you needed the cash, you would have spent it by now. Do you have access to a computer? Most homeless people do. Can you read this? Dumb question! Obviously, and therefore you must be greedy. If you own a laptop, a PC, and perhaps a tablet, your "desire for more of something" is indeed excessive.

No worries, though, you are in good company: "Greed is a basic part of animal nature. Being against it is like being against breathing or eating," said Ben Stein. And Milton Friedman: "Well first of all, tell me, is there some society you know of that doesn't run on greed? You think Russia doesn't run on greed? You think China doesn't run on greed? What is greed?"

Is greed good, as Gordon Gecko, Michael Douglas' infamous fictional character in the movie Wall Street claimed? Reality isn't that simplistic. Is skin good? Electricity? Knives? How about the weather? Fire? Water? Are people good? Jupiter?

Greed just is. 

Like the color crimson, greed is neither good nor bad and yet it is both and everything in between. Why are people so obsessed with answers? Perhaps they are suffering from Schoolmaster's Syndrome. That's the inane idea that when two or more people fail to agree on the same truth, at least one of them ought to feel uncomfortable in the other's company. 

I have met people who believe they can be objective. I have witnessed individuals pretending to know what's good for other individuals, even for a society or, God forbid, for the entire world. There are busybodies who are so confident about their shoddy truth, they want their version to become law. 

What if greed just is? Like glass or hair? Hair can be awesome on one's scalp. Found in a bowl of lentil soup or when it grows out of ears, not so much. Still, mobs don't eagerly assemble and start Occupy Nose Hair movements over it.

What's so wrong with freedom? Why are people afraid somebody else may enjoy vices that aren't blessed by all? Since when have people become frightened of their own freedom to live as they please? Out of the blue, people invent random opinions, declare them to be perfect rules, and then they go out judging the world accordingly. As Nanny Bloomberg did when he outlawed salt in New York City and banned food donations to the homeless. When the homeless starve to death in NYC, at least their cholesterol level and their blood pressure are excellent. 

If you miss Nazis thugs and the killer bureaucrats of the Soviet Union so much that you believe individual freedom can't be thoroughly enjoyed unless you work for authoritarian employers and vote for authoritarian politicians, the most unholy of alliances that tells you what to do, what to wear, and what not to eat, then the proverbial American brand of freedom has deteriorated to a scam. For centuries, U.S. soldiers have been swindled out of their lives by the Bloombergs who will trade this country's hard earned freedom for a grain of salt. Beware of those who know what's best for you. Servants of The Greater Good disregard real people's lives and freedoms. When you know what's appropriate for others, they know what you ought to do. 

That's the moment when freedom dies.

People become well-meaning moms and they do so in droves, treating everybody else like 4-year-old nincompoops. America used to be a cocky guy, a "Rebel Without A Cause" like James Dean or John Wayne. That was then. Now, America has become like octomom on food stamps.

During the Cold War authoritarian regimes were considered enemies. Today, college graduates can't wait to work for one. Start a business and you'll be perceived as greedy and ambitious. The same folks who pipe up about the evils of outsourcing, are busy outsourcing ambition and greedy behavior to sales crews of the companies they work for because, neutered and spayed as employees are, they rather sell their souls to the man instead of becoming greedy entrepreneurs themselves. Naturally, they'll get their church's dispensation for Poker night and the purchase of their lottery ticket. Such activities can't possibly have anything to do with greed.

Can you afford to talk bad about greed? 

How generous can you afford to be and for how long without being seen as greedy and selfish, without asking for more money than you need? Altruism cannot exist without selfishness. Greed is a prerequisite for sustained generosity. People who liberally display their disdain for greed are often stingy, self-righteous, and patronizing fellows. They aren't necessarily as open about their true motives as outspokenly greedy people. I trust the intentions of greedy bastards. They tend to be honest. On the other hand, the slime bag who insists on getting paid but claims, "Oh, I'm not doing it for the money," is highly suspicious to me. 

I promote blatant lust for life and voracious hunger for more of all that's desirable in your perspective. More discovery, awareness, even love (if you insist), more beauty, an aesthetically pleasing world, more friends, more of a society in which people make it easier for each other to live with joy. Yeah, I am greedy and I grant you the same.

Other people's perceived greed and their desire for more money than they may need is exclusively a problem for individuals who have fallen for the zero-sum fallacy, for the factually wrong idea that the money supply is limited: "If you have it, I can't have it. If evil rich people have it, that's the very reason the poor don't have it. The existence of the rich is the cause for poverty. When the government buys fighter planes, there's no money left to build new kindergartens and schools. And so on..."

That, my love, is rubbish. It's as false as the idea that the healthy must be the cause for the sick to be sick.

Can you be thrilled for GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt to have made $19,776,716 in 2013 and for Laurence Fink who pocketed $75,751,665 as CEO of BlackRock? If that's a challenge for you, don't ever expect others to get excited about you generating more money than they do. Frowning upon greed may be worse for the poor than being greedy. If you don't support those who make more money than they need--the grabby and the greedy--you are an enemy of the poor, condemning those who barely survive on what they need to remain forever in that wretched state of making precisely what they need and spend. Can I tempt you to promote abundance? How about experiencing joy over other people's abundance first, before you'll make it? Could you bring yourself to bless a random stranger's wealth and the riches of a friend or family member (without asking them for a loan a week after they strike it rich)? 

Welcome other people's greed. Develop guilt free lust for more and more money! If you think you have enough, give more of it away.....and make more and give more money to other people. Goodness, the real issue is that people who speak out against greed don't like to give money to other people. Hatred of greed is synonymous with the hatred of limitless generosity.

Popular witch hunts try to identify a deed of greed, attempt to catch the greedy in the act, wish to bring these notorious evil doers to justice, or stop them from future greeding and deeding. What a frivolous waste of time. Hatred of greed and the greedy is an obnoxiously silly expression of societal hypocrisy. 

Introduce me to an altruistic person and he will prove in no time how greedy he truly is, desiring an excess of attention, approval, and growing stockpiles of emotional food for his self-righteousness. Show me a pure altruist and a fascist won't be far. Also, I suggest we outlaw water. That stuff kills thousands of innocent people every year. Water, dear friend, is more dangerous a vice than greed. The sun gives people cancer. What is greed compared to that?

For hundreds of years we have been told that greed, avaritia, is one of the seven deadly sins. Wanting more is bad and deadly. Meanwhile, we have built a society that functions exclusively on producing more of everything. More is the foundation of maintained economic health. Extract the sins from our economy and you kill its engine.

Individuals have been methodically neutered, spayed, and declawed. That's what made them perfect for corporate consumption. Now, corporate entities employ behavioral psychologists, so artificial and controllable incentives can be re-introduced into the process that substitute for people's amputated raw ambition. Employees need to be taught how to want more, how to strive for improved quality and quantity, without wanting and asking for more money. How can they be injected with toothless greed? Pretty insane, non?

I am not telling you what to do or what not to do. I don't give advice. I don't answer questions. My job is to deprive you of worn-out answers and of ridiculous cliches that have never served you. I am here to ask new questions that instigate you to discover new answers. Your individual answers.

Greed is not the problem of this ailing economy. Apathy, lethargic mediocrity, and despondency come closer to describe these energetically malnourished people who are dragging themselves through their work week. Admit it, there is zero excitement in the stuff you need: toilet paper, tooth paste, diapers, and three pairs of new socks. Need is dull and not the fabric of goals and dreams. Desire and the ideas that make your heart beat faster are all beyond need. They all come alive in the greed department, above the gray reality of needed things.

Go ahead, let the people drown in a sanctimonious morass of virtue. Or be joyful and greedy, and show this society ways out of gloom and doom that come straight out of your personal treasure chest of fun. 

You choose. Do something this week that you have never done before and ask yourself, as Jim Morrison did, "Where's your will to be weird?"

Shalom,

Egbert



P.S.: For Fun and Profit, order my "Money Seminar: Industrial Strength." A deck of 52 Mini-Poker Cards plus 2 Jokers. Of course you may play Poker with it--and possibly win or, well, lose money--but it is meant to raise your awareness for your personal relationship with money. This is Money Psychology at its best and you'll benefit from having it in your pocket wherever you go. I promise, you and your Poker friends have never looked at money from this angle before. Send $29 to egbertsukop@gmail.com via PayPal, make sure you leave your mailing address, and I'll get a deck for you printed. Since it'll be shipped from Hong Kong, it'll take about 2 - 3 weeks to arrive. 

Money is neither cause of nor solution to your money problems.

Oh, and visit EndWages.com too!

"I am one of those for whom superfluity is a necessity."

Theophile Gautier (1811 - 1872)