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