“
This is a, uh, friendship ring right?”
“Yeah, don’t worry. If I propose, you’ll know it. For one thing, I’ll be hyperventilating.” A sly smile—surprisingly sexy—turned up his lips. “And it’ll be a ruby.”
“Rubies? No diamonds? Too expensive for the old writer’s salary, huh?”
He made a disparaging grunt at that. “No, I just think diamonds are common, that’s all. If I get married, it’ll be because something uncommon is occurring. Besides, you wear a lot of red, right? I know how important it is for your accessories to match.
”
”
Richelle Mead (Succubus Dreams (Georgina Kincaid, #3))
“
Most importantly, if you can at all avoid it, don't be normal. Strive, burn and do everything you can to avoid being the industry standard. Even the highest industry standard. Be greater than anything anyone else has ever dreamed of you. Don't settle for pats on the back, salary increases, a nod-and-a-smile. Instead, rage against the tepidness of the mundane with every fiber of whatever makes you, you. Change this place.
Please, do that for me.
”
”
pleasefindthis
“
Employees keep the business doing what it does. It's important to pay them accordingly.
”
”
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
Most employees don’t really want to be highly-paid; they just want to earn more than their peers, and, more importantly, more than their neighbours.
”
”
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
“
Every job is an important job. Businesses dont create jobs and choose to pay people wages or salaries unless that job is vital to the operations of the business. If the job wasn't important, the job wouldn't exist.
”
”
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
In my considered opinion, salary is payment for goods delivered and it must conform to the law of supply and demand. If, therefore, the fixed salary is a violation of this law - as, for instance, when I see two engineers leaving college together and both equally well trained and efficient, and one getting forty thousand while the other only earns two thousand , or when lawyers and hussars, possessing no special qualifications, are appointed directors of banks with huge salaries - I can only conclude that their salaries are not fixed according to the law of supply and demand but simply by personal influence. And this is an abuse important in itself and having a deleterious effect on government service.
”
”
Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina)
“
You will not remember much from school.
School is designed to teach you how to respond and listen to authority figures in the event of an emergency. Like if there's a bomb in a mall or a fire in an office. It can, apparently, take you more than a decade to learn this. These are not the best days of your life. They are still ahead of you. You will fall in love and have your heart broken in many different, new and interesting ways in college or university (if you go) and you will actually learn things, as at this point, people will believe you have a good chance of obeying authority and surviving, in the event of an emergency. If, in your chosen career path, there are award shows that give out more than ten awards in one night or you have to pay someone to actually take the award home to put on your mantlepiece, then those awards are more than likely designed to make young people in their 20's work very late, for free, for other people. Those people will do their best to convince you that they have value. They don't. Only the things you do have real, lasting value, not the things you get for the things you do. You will, at some point, realise that no trophy loves you as much as you love it, that it cannot pay your bills (even if it increases your salary slightly) and that it won't hold your hand tightly as you say your last words on your deathbed. Only people who love you can do that. If you make art to feel better, make sure it eventually makes you feel better. If it doesn't, stop making it. You will love someone differently, as time passes. If you always expect to feel the same kind of love you felt when you first met someone, you will always be looking for new people to love. Love doesn't fade. It just changes as it grows. It would be boring if it didn't. There is no truly "right" way of writing, painting, being or thinking, only things which have happened before. People who tell you differently are assholes, petrified of change, who should be violently ignored. No philosophy, mantra or piece of advice will hold true for every conceivable situation. "The early bird catches the worm" does not apply to minefields. Perfection only exists in poetry and movies, everyone fights occasionally and no sane person is ever completely sure of anything. Nothing is wrong with any of this. Wisdom does not come from age, wisdom comes from doing things. Be very, very careful of people who call themselves wise, artists, poets or gurus. If you eat well, exercise often and drink enough water, you have a good chance of living a long and happy life. The only time you can really be happy, is right now. There is no other moment that exists that is more important than this one. Do not sacrifice this moment in the hopes of a better one. It is easy to remember all these things when they are being said, it is much harder to remember them when you are stuck in traffic or lying in bed worrying about the next day. If you want to move people, simply tell them the truth. Today, it is rarer than it's ever been.
(People will write things like this on posters (some of the words will be bigger than others) or speak them softly over music as art (pause for effect). The reason this happens is because as a society, we need to self-medicate against apathy and the slow, gradual death that can happen to anyone, should they confuse life with actually living.)
”
”
pleasefindthis
“
A reporter once asked me why I think progressive men who earn significantly less than their breadwinning wives still won't quit their jobs to take care of their children. Why do they still hold on to their careers, even if taking care of the children would make more financial sense because the cost of childcare is higher than their net salary?
I think I know the answer to that now, and it sucks. Women are not expected to live a life for themselves. When women dedicate their lives to children, it is deemed a worthy and respectable choice. When women dedicate themselves to a passion outside of the family that doesn't involve worshiping their husbands or taking care of their kids, they're seen as selfish, cold, or unfit mothers. But when a man spends hours grueling over a craft, profession, or project, he's admired and seen as a genius. And when a man finds a woman who worships him, who dedicates her life to serving him, he's lucky. But when a man dedicates himself to taking care of his children it's seen as a last resort. That it must be because he ran out of other options. That it's plan Z. That it's an indicator of his inability to provide for his family. Basically, that he's a fucking loser. I think it's one of the most important falsehoods we need to shatter when talking about women's rights.
”
”
Ali Wong (Dear Girls: Intimate Tales, Untold Secrets, & Advice for Living Your Best Life)
“
It has always amazed me that these people who are trying to learn and understand the world around us before it is bulldozed out of existence, have to work on piteously low salaries or on minuscule and precarious grants, while they do one of the most important jobs in the world. For it is only by learning how the planet works that we will see what we are doing wrong and have a chance to save it and ourselves as well.
”
”
Gerald Durrell (The Aye-Aye and I)
“
Most people do not mind having a house that is smaller and/or a car that is cheaper than their neighbours’, as long as they each earn and have more money than their neighbours, and, equally important, their neighbours know that.
”
”
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
“
Salt was so important that Roman soldiers were given extra money to purchase it. This was referred to as a “salarium,” from which our word “salary” derives. Soldiers who performed their duties particularly well were said to be worth their salt!
”
”
Joe Schwarcz (Is That a Fact?: Frauds, Quacks, and the Real Science of Everyday Life)
“
Your tax dollars are paying the salary of an ATF manager who’s using taxpayer time and resources to direct his teams of taxpayer-supported public affairs officials to “push” propaganda in order to drown out an important, truthful story of public interest.
”
”
Sharyl Attkisson (Stonewalled: One Reporter's Fight for Truth in Obama's Washington)
“
Would you believe me if I told you that there’s an investment strategy that a seven-year-old could understand, will take you fifteen minutes of work per year, outperform 90 percent of finance professionals in the long run, and make you a millionaire over time? Well, it is true, and here it is: Start by saving 15 percent of your salary at age 25 into a 401(k) plan, an IRA, or a taxable account (or all three). Put equal amounts of that 15 percent into just three different mutual funds: A U.S. total stock market index fund An international total stock market index fund A U.S. total bond market index fund. Over time, the three funds will grow at different rates, so once per year you’ll adjust their amounts so that they’re again equal. (That’s the fifteen minutes per year, assuming you’ve enrolled in an automatic savings plan.) That’s it; if you can follow this simple recipe throughout your working career, you will almost certainly beat out most professional investors. More importantly, you’ll likely accumulate enough savings to retire comfortably.
”
”
William J. Bernstein (If You Can: How Millennials Can Get Rich Slowly)
“
It's beyond everything what's being done in the district, according to what this doctor tells me. He's a very intelligent fellow. And as I've told you before, I tell you again; it's not right for you not to go to the meetings, and altogether to keep out of the district business. If decent people won't go into it, of course it's bound to go all wrong. We pay the money, and it all goes in salaries, and there are no schools, not district nurses, nor midwives, nor drug-stores ---nothing [...] How can you think it a matter of no importance whether the peasant, whom you love as you assert...dies without help? The ignorant peasant-women starve the children, and the people stagnate in darkness, and are helpless in the hands of every village clerk, while you have at your disposal a means of helping them, and don't help them because to your mind it's of no importance." And Sergey Ivanovitch put before him the alternative: either you are so undeveloped that you can't see all that you can do , or you won't sacrifice your ease, your vanity, or whatever IT is, to do it.
”
”
Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina)
“
I am sure old men forget what it was to be young and to be wholly in love. Not even I can remember those breathless moments. That's why they give old men important jobs and big salaries and orchestras to lead. To pay us back for the terrible loss we have sustained.
”
”
James A. Michener (The Fires of Spring)
“
The strangulation of Germany’s economy hastened the final plunge of the mark. On the occupation of the Ruhr in January 1923, it fell to 18,000 to the dollar; by July 1 it had dropped to 160,000; by August 1 to a million. By November, when Hitler thought his hour had struck, it took four billion marks to buy a dollar, and thereafter the figures became trillions. German currency had become utterly worthless. Purchasing power of salaries and wages was reduced to zero. The life savings of the middle classes and the working classes were wiped out. But something even more important was destroyed: the faith of the people in the economic structure of German society. What good were the standards and practices of such a society, which encouraged savings and investment and solemnly promised a safe return from them and then defaulted? Was this not a fraud upon the people?
”
”
William L. Shirer (The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany)
“
It is a harsh reality that some of the most important and respectable jobs which deserve high salaries might be better off with low salaries. A politician, or a minister, or a teacher is sure to be working sincerely and selflessly for the good of the people when through and through there is little monetary reward guaranteed. This is how the charlatans are weeded out of the field.
”
”
Criss Jami (Healology)
“
I am sure, sir, I should never mistake informality for insolence: one I rather like, the other nothing free-born would submit to, even for a salary.” “Humbug! Most things free-born will submit to anything for a salary; therefore, keep to yourself, and don’t venture on generalities of which you are intensely ignorant. However, I mentally shake hands with you for your answer, despite its inaccuracy; and as much for the manner in which it was said, as for the substance of the speech; the manner was frank and sincere; one does not often see such a manner: no, on the contrary, affectation, or coldness, or stupid, coarse-minded misapprehension of one’s meaning are the usual rewards of candour. Not three in three thousand raw school-girl-governesses would have answered me as you have just done. But I don’t mean to flatter you: if you are cast in a different mould to the majority, it is no merit of yours: Nature did it. And then, after all, I go too fast in my conclusions: for what I yet know, you may be no better than the rest; you may have intolerable defects to counterbalance your few good points.” “And so may you,” I thought. My eye met his as the idea crossed my mind: he seemed to read the glance, answering as if its import had been spoken as well as imagined— “Yes, yes, you are right,” said he; “I have plenty of faults of my own: I know it, and I don’t wish to palliate them, I assure you.
”
”
Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre)
“
I have often witnessed this at hospital billing counters, where salaried or reasonably well to do people typically have a health insurance to take care of their bills, while a common man loses out. In such a pesky situation, these commoners are compelled to either take loans or sell their personal assets to be able to afford a reasonable medical treatment. Lack of home insurance has always been another concern. People lose out on their entire life’s savings when their homes get whisked away due to calamities.
”
”
Tapan Singhel
“
A visitor from Timbuctu about 450 years ago wrote as follows: 'In Timbuctu there are numerous judges, doctors and clerics all receiving good salaries from the king. He pays great respect to men of learning. There is a great demand for books in manuscript, imported from Barbary. More profit is made from the book trade than from any other line of business.' In a city which was renowned for its trade in gold, there was more profit to be made from books than from any other line of business! In other words, learning was valued more highly than gold!
”
”
Walter Rodney (The Groundings with My Brothers)
“
One final thing,” my older version said. He put a hand on my shoulder, touching me for the first time. “Do us both a favor and remember that people are more important.”
I scrunched my eyes with uncertainty. “More important than what?”
“More important… period. More important than pride. More important than ego. More important than being right or being first or being the best. More important than a job, a salary, a want, a desire. The people in your life are more important, son. Remember that. Promise me you will always remember that.”
“Okay,” I nodded, “I’ll remember.
”
”
Richelle E. Goodrich (Being Bold: Quotes, Poetry, & Motivations for Every Day of the Year)
“
The strangulation of Germany’s economy hastened the final plunge of the mark. On the occupation of the Ruhr in January 1923, it fell to 18,000 to the dollar; by July 1 it had dropped to 160,000; by August 1 to a million. By November, when Hitler thought his hour had struck, it took four billion marks to buy a dollar, and thereafter the figures became trillions. German currency had become utterly worthless. Purchasing power of salaries and wages was reduced to zero. The life savings of the middle classes and the working classes were wiped out. But something even more important was destroyed: the faith of the people in the economic structure of German society.
”
”
William L. Shirer (The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany)
“
All A players have six common denominators. They have a scoreboard that tells them if they are winning or losing and what needs to be done to change their performance. They will not play if they can’t see the scoreboard. They have a high internal, emotional need to succeed. They do not need to be externally motivated or begged to do their job. They want to succeed because it is who they are . . . winners. People often ask me how I motivate my employees. My response is, “I hire them.” Motivation is for amateurs. Pros never need motivating. (Inspiration is another story.) Instead of trying to design a pep talk to motivate your people, why not create a challenge for them? A players love being tested and challenged. They love to be measured and held accountable for their results. Like the straight-A classmate in your high school geometry class, an A player can hardly wait for report card day. C players dread report card day because they are reminded of how average or deficient they are. To an A player, a report card with a B or a C is devastating and a call for renewed commitment and remedial actions. They have the technical chops to do the job. This is not their first rodeo. They have been there, done that, and they are technically very good at what they do. They are humble enough to ask for coaching. The three most important questions an employee can ask are: What else can I do? Where can I get better? What do I need to do or learn so that I continue to grow? If you have someone on your team asking all three of these questions, you have an A player in the making. If you agree these three questions would fundamentally change the game for your team, why not enroll them in asking these questions? They see opportunities. C players see only problems. Every situation is asking a very simple question: Do you want me to be a problem or an opportunity? Your choice. You know the job has outgrown the person when all you hear are problems. The cost of a bad employee is never the salary. My rules for hiring and retaining A players are: Interview rigorously. (Who by Geoff Smart is a spectacular resource on this subject.) Compensate generously. Onboard effectively. Measure consistently. Coach continuously.
”
”
Keith J. Cunningham (The Road Less Stupid: Advice from the Chairman of the Board)
“
There is inherent drama to a major Supreme Court case in which the powerful institutional actors include the Court itself. Some will emerge as winners and some as losers. But it is important to recognize that outside the courtroom, in less dramatic ways, the Court continually interacts with the other branches. The Court submits its annual budget request to Congress, and the justices take turns going before the relevant congressional subcommittees to testify about the Court’s fiscal needs. Congress determines the salaries of the justices and all federal judges. When John Roberts became chief justice, he made it a priority to persuade the president and Congress of the need for a long-deferred pay raise for federal judges, a plea that fell on deaf ears.
”
”
Linda Greenhouse (The U.S. Supreme Court: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
“
The experience of stress has three components. The first is the event, physical or emotional, that the organism interprets as threatening. This is the stress stimulus, also called the stressor. The second element is the processing system that experiences and interprets the meaning of the stressor. In the case of human beings, this processing system is the nervous system, in particular the brain. The final constituent is the stress response, which consists of the various physiological and behavioural adjustments made as a reaction to a perceived threat.
We see immediately that the definition of a stressor depends on the processing system that assigns meaning to it. The shock of an earthquake is a direct threat to many organisms, though not to a bacterium. The loss of a job is more acutely stressful to a salaried employee whose family lives month to month than to an executive who receives a golden handshake. Equally important is the personality and current psychological state of the individual on whom the stressor is acting. The executive whose financial security is assured when he is terminated may still experience severe stress if his self-esteem and sense of purpose were completely bound up with his position in the company, compared with a colleague who finds greater value in family, social interests or spiritual pursuits. The loss of employment will be perceived as a major threat by the one, while the other may see it as an opportunity.
There is no uniform and universal relationship between a stressor and the stress response. Each stress event is singular and is experienced in the present, but it also has its resonance from the past. The intensity of the stress experience and its long-term consequences depend on many factors unique to each individual. What defines stress for each of us is a matter of personal disposition and, even more, of personal history. Selye discovered that the biology of stress predominantly affected three types of tissues or organs in the body: in the hormonal system, visible changes occurred in the adrenal glands; in the immune system, stress affected the spleen, the thymus and the lymph glands; and the intestinal lining of the digestive system. Rats autopsied after stress had enlarged adrenals, shrunken lymph organs and ulcerated intestines.
”
”
Gabor Maté (When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress)
“
Life does not offer gifts or rewards, but opportunities. Nobody is entitled to anything. Only behavior and labor defines us and what we have. Whenever you make a choice, you follow one path and move apart from another. If your job occupies more importance in your mind, time and actions, than your dream, then you will not accomplish your dream but maybe receive a raise in your salary instead and be happy with that loss. If you look at relationships as a toy store, if you look at your companion as easily replaceable, then you will very likely lose the one you have. If you rather enjoy life with your friends than with your companion, you will end up alone. If you insult the wise, you then end up surrounded by fools. If you neglect your wealth, you will likely end up poor. If you destroy love, you will end up feeling unloved. If you destroy the good that comes to you, you will end up experiencing evil. Life will always reflect your actions, words and thoughts. You are what you spend most of your time doing, saying and thinking. Your life is always a reflection of your priorities. If you spend your time partying, insulting and occupying your mind with nonsense from social media, music with degrading lyrics, and movies that promote antisocial values, you get zero from life.
”
”
Robin Sacredfire
“
Here are four more strategies to help you stack the deck in your favor when seeking a raise or a promotion: ✓ DO YOUR RESEARCH: Understand your market value and, more important, your value to the company. Be prepared to explain, candidly and concretely, what you feel you’re doing that you’re not being compensated for. Have confidence in your own worth. ✓ ASK TO BE PAID FOR THE JOB YOU’RE ACTUALLY DOING: If your responsibilities have increased but you haven’t been recognized since, say, you’ve taken over for the manager who left several months earlier, approach your new boss and say, “I’ve been effectively doing this person’s job since she departed and I’d like to formally assume her position.” Have a conversation. Express that you feel confident you can grow in this role and create value for the organization. ✓ PROVE YOUR WORTH: To earn an increase in salary, you need to be increasing your responsibilities and performing at a higher level than when you were hired. ✓ DON’T NEGOTIATE IF YOUR BOSS SAYS NO: Typically no means no when it comes to this type of discussion. If your boss says no, you have two choices: you either accept the rationale, think about it, and grow based on the feedback, or you leave. This is a good time to be reflective. Ask why you haven’t earned the increase. You may not walk away with a new title or more money, but hopefully you’ll learn something that will help you correct your course moving forward.
”
”
Ivanka Trump (Women Who Work: Rewriting the Rules for Success)
“
Ultimately, the World Top Incomes Database (WTID), which is based on the joint work of some thirty researchers around the world, is the largest historical database available concerning the evolution of income inequality; it is the primary source of data for this book.24 The book’s second most important source of data, on which I will actually draw first, concerns wealth, including both the distribution of wealth and its relation to income. Wealth also generates income and is therefore important on the income study side of things as well. Indeed, income consists of two components: income from labor (wages, salaries, bonuses, earnings from nonwage labor, and other remuneration statutorily classified as labor related) and income from capital (rent, dividends, interest, profits, capital gains, royalties, and other income derived from the mere fact of owning capital in the form of land, real estate, financial instruments, industrial equipment, etc., again regardless of its precise legal classification). The WTID contains a great deal of information about the evolution of income from capital over the course of the twentieth century. It is nevertheless essential to complete this information by looking at sources directly concerned with wealth. Here I rely on three distinct types of historical data and methodology, each of which is complementary to the others.25 In the first place, just as income tax returns allow us to study changes in income inequality, estate tax returns enable us to study changes in the inequality of wealth.26 This
”
”
Thomas Piketty (Capital in the Twenty-First Century)
“
My former girlfriend said: ‘You don’t deserve the house you have; it’s too good for you.’ I replied: “I found a house that matched all your criteria, to make you happy. If you lost it, and ended up sleeping in a filthy room in a shared apartment, is because you don’t deserve me, I was too good for you, you disappointed me by trying to find a guy that matches you better, and you made me very unhappy. Your priories were wrong.’ Life does not offer gifts or rewards, but opportunities. Nobody is entitled to anything. Only behavior and labor defines us and what we have. Whenever you make a choice, you follow one path and move apart from another. If your job occupies more importance in your mind, time and actions, than your dream, then you will not accomplish your dream but maybe receive a raise in your salary instead and be happy with that loss. If you look at relationships as a toy store, if you look at your companion as easily replaceable, then you will very likely lose the one you have. If you rather enjoy life with your friends than with your companion, you will end up alone. If you insult the wise, you then end up surrounded by fools. If you neglect your wealth, you will likely end up poor. If you destroy love, you will end up feeling unloved. If you destroy the good that comes to you, you will end up experiencing evil. Life will always reflect your actions, words and thoughts. You are what you spend most of your time doing, saying and thinking. Your life is always a reflection of your priorities. If you spend your time partying, insulting and occupying your mind with nonsense from social media, music with degrading lyrics, and movies that promote antisocial values, you get zero from life.
”
”
Robin Sacredfire
“
The Personal Job Advertisement These two activities are likely to have encouraged some clearer ideas about genuine career possibilities, but you should not assume that you are necessarily the best judge of what might offer you fulfilment. Writing a Personal Job Advertisement allows you to seek the advice of other people. The concept behind this task is the opposite of a standard career search: imagine that newspapers didn’t advertise jobs, but rather advertised people who were looking for jobs. You do it in two steps. First, write a half-page job advertisement that tells the world who you are and what you care about in life. Put down your talents (e.g. you speak Mongolian, can play the bass guitar), your passions (e.g. ikebana, scuba diving), and the core values and causes you believe in (e.g. wildlife preservation, women’s rights). Include your personal qualities (e.g. you are quick-witted, impatient, lacking self-confidence). And record anything else that is important to you – a minimum salary or that you want to work abroad. Make sure you don’t include any particular job you are keen on, or your educational qualifications or career background. Keep it at the level of underlying motivations and interests. Here comes the intriguing part. Make a list of ten people you know from different walks of life and who have a range of careers – maybe a policeman uncle or a cartoonist friend – and email them your Personal Job Advertisement, asking them to recommend two or three careers that might fit with what you have written. Tell them to be specific – for example, not replying ‘you should work with children’ but ‘you should do charity work with street kids in Rio de Janeiro’. You will probably end up with an eclectic list of careers, many of which you would never have thought of yourself. The purpose is not only to give you surprising ideas for future careers, but also to help you see your many possible selves. After doing these three activities, and having explored the various dimensions of meaning, you should feel more confident about making a list of potential careers that offer the promise of meaningful work. What should you do next? Certainly not begin sending out your CV. Rather, as the following chapter explains, the key to finding a fulfilling career is to experiment with these possibilities in that rather frightening place called the real world. It’s time to take a ‘radical sabbatical’.
”
”
Roman Krznaric (How to Find Fulfilling Work (The School of Life))
“
Performance measure. Throughout this book, the term performance measure refers to an indicator used by management to measure, report, and improve performance. Performance measures are classed as key result indicators, result indicators, performance indicators, or key performance indicators. Critical success factors (CSFs). CSFs are the list of issues or aspects of organizational performance that determine ongoing health, vitality, and wellbeing. Normally there are between five and eight CSFs in any organization. Success factors. A list of 30 or so issues or aspects of organizational performance that management knows are important in order to perform well in any given sector/ industry. Some of these success factors are much more important; these are known as critical success factors. Balanced scorecard. A term first introduced by Kaplan and Norton describing how you need to measure performance in a more holistic way. You need to see an organization’s performance in a number of different perspectives. For the purposes of this book, there are six perspectives in a balanced scorecard (see Exhibit 1.7). Oracles and young guns. In an organization, oracles are those gray-haired individuals who have seen it all before. They are often considered to be slow, ponderous, and, quite frankly, a nuisance by the new management. Often they are retired early or made redundant only to be rehired as contractors at twice their previous salary when management realizes they have lost too much institutional knowledge. Their considered pace is often a reflection that they can see that an exercise is futile because it has failed twice before. The young guns are fearless and precocious leaders of the future who are not afraid to go where angels fear to tread. These staff members have not yet achieved management positions. The mixing of the oracles and young guns during a KPI project benefits both parties and the organization. The young guns learn much and the oracles rediscover their energy being around these live wires. Empowerment. For the purposes of this book, empowerment is an outcome of a process that matches competencies, skills, and motivations with the required level of autonomy and responsibility in the workplace. Senior management team (SMT). The team comprised of the CEO and all direct reports. Better practice. The efficient and effective way management and staff undertake business activities in all key processes: leadership, planning, customers, suppliers, community relations, production and supply of products and services, employee wellbeing, and so forth. Best practice. A commonly misused term, especially because what is best practice for one organization may not be best practice for another, albeit they are in the same sector. Best practice is where better practices, when effectively linked together, lead to sustainable world-class outcomes in quality, customer service, flexibility, timeliness, innovation, cost, and competitiveness. Best-practice organizations commonly use the latest time-saving technologies, always focus on the 80/20, are members of quality management and continuous improvement professional bodies, and utilize benchmarking. Exhibit 1.10 shows the contents of the toolkit used by best-practice organizations to achieve world-class performance. EXHIBIT 1.10 Best-Practice Toolkit Benchmarking. An ongoing, systematic process to search for international better practices, compare against them, and then introduce them, modified where necessary, into your organization. Benchmarking may be focused on products, services, business practices, and processes of recognized leading organizations.
”
”
Douglas W. Hubbard (Business Intelligence Sampler: Book Excerpts by Douglas Hubbard, David Parmenter, Wayne Eckerson, Dalton Cervo and Mark Allen, Ed Barrows and Andy Neely)
“
Fairchild Parent rewarded Fairchild Child’s success the way all East Coast companies of the era did: it kept a sizable chunk of the profits to fund other company operations, and it promoted the people at the top of the division to a fancier position and a better salary for a job well done. Back in New Jersey, it didn’t cross anyone’s mind that this was exactly the wrong response to an egalitarian company that shared both risk and reward among all of its employees, whose executives had moved to California precisely to get away from the Old World of business, and which needed to plow most of its profits back into product development to stay ahead of the competition in a fast-moving take-no-prisoners industry.
”
”
Michael S. Malone (The Intel Trinity: How Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, and Andy Grove Built the World's Most Important Company)
“
Here are eight tips for writing effective cover letters. Address the cover letter to a specific person, ensuring the correct name, title, company, and address. This shows respect for the person you are sending the résumé to. “To Whom It May Concern” salutations should be used only if you can’t determine the name of the hiring person or the company (for instance, when responding to a blind ad). If you were referred by someone, be sure this is included in the first sentence of the cover letter: “Jennifer Wells suggested I contact you in regard to an accounts receivable position you have open …” It’s an attention grabber. If asked to include salary history or requirements, you must address this or risk being disqualified. Provide a healthy range, such as “Over the past five years I have earned between $35,000 and $48,000. However, I am open to any reasonable offer consistent with my ability to produce results and meet your performance expectations.” If asked for salary requirements, use the same strategy: “I am aware that the salary range for a loss prevention manager in the Houston area averages between $75,000 and $110,000. Given my experience and, most importantly, my ability to make significant contributions to your company, I would hope to be on the upper end of this scale.” If you are sending the résumé out electronically, the cover letter can be inserted as the e-mail itself; just attach your résumé. If you prefer that your cover letter is the first page of the attachment, that’s fine. But the general guideline is not to attach multiple files. Make it easy on the hiring manager and send only one attachment or file to open (unless you have a good reason to do otherwise). Do not rehash what is on the résumé. This is disrespectful of the reader’s time. If you have done a good job with your résumé, you want the cover letter to quickly entice the hiring manager to read your résumé. Cover letters should not be preachy. Sales managers know that sales are the heartbeat of any company; you don’t have to lecture them on this. Nurse supervisors know the importance of compassionate patient care; you don’t have to tell them what they already know. Keep the letter short and concise. The cover letter is not the place to preach or teach. It’s the place to invite recipients to read your résumé! Finally, the four most important words on the cover letter are “I respect your time.” The following cover letter is a sample template to use in these challenging and troubled times. Notice the first four words of the second paragraph.
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Jay A. Block (101 Best Ways to Land a Job in Troubled Times)
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Higher salaries were not the only way the government strove to staunch the bleeding. In the past, before admin salaries were raised, government leaders intervened when officers they considered key were targeted. Dr Goh Keng Swee, then still in the Cabinet, once told me: "We only let you take those we were prepared to release." In one celebrated case, in the early 1960s, he personally stepped in to stop one important hire. The paper's British management had recruited Herman Hochstadt, a rising young officer who later became permanent secretary. The morning he was to start work, even before he could settle in his chair at Times House, he found that Dr Goh had demanded his return to the civil service.
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Cheong Yip Seng (OB Markers: My Straits Times Story)
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the most important document of Leo’s pontificate, his bull Rerum novarum, issued on May 15, 1891. The subject of that bull was one with which few popes had dealt before: the proper relations between laborers and their employers. In the bull, Leo shows that he is aware of the inequities that have resulted from the contrast between “the enormous fortunes of a few individuals, and the extreme poverty of the masses.” Therefore, he writes, the time has come “to define the mutual rights and obligations of the rich and the poor, of capital and labor.” Such relations have become all the more tragic since labor organizations have disappeared in recent times, and “a small group of very rich people have been able to throw upon the masses of poor laborers a yoke that is little better than slavery itself.” Although it is an error to believe that between the rich and the poor there can only be class war, it is true that the defense of the poor merits special attention, for the rich have many ways to protect themselves, while the poor have no other recourse than the protection of the state. Therefore, laws should be such that the rights of the poor are guaranteed. In particular, this refers to the right of every laborer to a salary sufficient to sustain him and his family, without being forced to work beyond a fair limit. All this is to be done because “God seems to lean in favor of those who suffer misfortune.
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Justo L. González (The Story of Christianity: Volume 2: The Reformation to the Present Day)
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If your firm gives you a choice of departments, think carefully about which practice area will best suit your personality. Keep in mind that your specialty will affect not only the type of legal services you’ll perform, but also the skills and knowledge you’ll develop. And it’s important to remember that at a large firm, you’ll likely only get one choice. There are very few attorneys at large firms who have more than one specialty, or change specialties down the road. As a result, the first choice you make is likely to affect the work you do for years to come.
If, for some reason, you get stuck with a specialty you don’t like, make a change as soon as possible. The longer you wait, the harder it is to jump to another specialty. For one thing, as lawyers gain seniority, their firms may resist the change for fear of a loss of expertise that took the firm years to nurture and develop. Even if your firm does let you change specialties down the road, it may reduce your seniority or salary to reflect your newly acquired inexperience in your new practice area.
Changing specialties further on in your career can also impair your marketability in the legal community. After all, if you make a change when your salary has reached a high level, other firms who culd hire you might choose not to, feeling they can get attorneys more experienced in the specialty for less money. Because your future potential in your new specialty is less valuable to a new employer than your past experience in your old specialty, it’s very easy to get “pigeon-holed” in a particular practice area after just a few years in practice.
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WIlliam R. Keates (Proceed with Caution: A Diary of the First Year at One of America's Largest, Most Prestigious Law Firms)
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This isn’t, however, just a public relations challenge for organizational leaders;
corporate social responsibility is a very real issue for job seekers. For the 2007
Cone’s Millennial Cause Study, 68 percent of Generation Y’ers stated that they currently do or will refuse to work for a company that does not have a strong corporate social responsibility record, and 75 percent will pay particularly close attention, both for employment and consumer choices, to companies who have strong
CSR records. Numerous studies have found that a company’s CSR record will affect
an organization’s ability to recruit and retain qualified employees (i.e., Chesloff,
2010; Greening & Turban, 2000). Murray’s (2008) survey found that one third of
the respondents felt working for a caring and responsible employer was more important than the salary that they earned, and nearly one half would turn away from
an employer with a negative corporate social responsibility history.
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Daniel P. Modaff (Organizational Communication: Foundations, Challenges, and Misunderstandings)
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In order for a person to work at a church legally as an independent contractor, we believe it is prudent to consider the following guidelines: · The church cannot substantially direct the person’s duties; the church can only give them overall tasks to complete. · The church cannot control or set their hours that they work. · Since their “company” provides the service, they can send anyone to do the job. · They cannot have an office at the church that is their primary office. · It cannot be their only source of income. · The church needs to have a written contract in place including cost, delivery of Services, duration (i.e. six months, one year, etc.) and a termination clause. · They cannot participate in any employee benefits plans (insurance, retirement plans, etc). · The contractor must provide annual proof of worker’s comp and liability insurance naming the church as additionally insured or the church could be held liable in the event of a claim. · The church must issue a 1099 at the end of the year for all contract wages paid if the total amount for the year exceeds $600.00 to one contractor. We strongly recommend that no payments are made until an accurate and fully completed W-9 is completed by the contractor and on file at the church. Given these requirements, many workers such as those in the nursery, kitchens, and other service areas are not 1099 contractors, but employees. Regarding interim pastors, there is disagreement over whether they should receive a W-2 or 1099. Factors such as length of service, who supervises them, and whether they are a contractor, come into play in the decision on how to report their salary. For the best practice we recommend always using the W-2 to report salaries, but seeking tax and legal counsel would be wise to avoid any future IRS issues. While there are advantages to the church to pay independent contractors who regularly work for the church such as avoiding the need to pay the employer's part of the FICA tax and the ease of terminating their services, we would recommend against their regular use. We recommend against the use of independent contractors (that regularly work at the church) because we believe it can create the following problems for the church: · Less control over the position · Leaves the church open to an IRS challenge, which the church only has a 50/50 chance of defending, not to mention the cost and hassle of litigation · In the event of insurance claims, the church may encounter issues with worker’s compensation coverage or liability insurance coverage such as sexual misconduct, etc. · The church is open to contract disputes with the independent contractor · Based on how the individual/company is filing their taxes, it could bring an unwanted tax audit to the church Our conclusion is that we do not see enough cost-saving advantages for the church to move in this direction. It also creates unnecessary red flags for the IRS. The other looming question is, why is this such an important issue for such a small incremental (if any) tax break for the individual? Because the independent contractor will have to pay employer FICA, we don’t see any large tax advantage for this shift. They can claim mileage and some home office expense (maybe), but it just does not amount to enough to place the church at risk. Here are some detailed guidelines
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Jeffrey A. Klick (Pastoral Helmsmanship)
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An accurate budget must be built on a base of thorough research. You must do research on your community to find out what it will cost to get a church off the ground. You need to solidly answer questions such as:, What will the cost of living in this community be?, What will my salary be? How about salaries for additional staff?, How much will it cost to rent space for the church to meet in?, How much will it cost to operate a business in this city (office rent, phones, computer equipment, copy equipment, and so on)?
Talk with other pastors in the community. Find out what their start-up costs were and what they are currently spending to maintain and operate the church. Other pastors can be a valuable resource for you on many levels.
The worst mistake you can make is to start the budget process by viewing economic realities through a rose-colored lens. If you speculate too much or cut corners in this area, you’ll end up paying dearly down the road. Remember, God never intended for you to go it alone. There are people and resources out there to help you prepare. Ask others for help.
God receives no glory when you are scraping the bottom to do His work. So don’t think too small.
Church planting is an all or nothing venture. You can’t just partially commit. You have to fully commit, and often that means with your wallet.
Don’t underestimate the importance of having a base of prayer partners. You need prayers as desperately as you need money.
You need prayers as desperately as you need money.
An unhealthy launch may occur when a new church begins as the result of a church split, when a planter is disobedient in following God, or when there is a lack of funding or solid strategy.
Finding the right teammates to help you on this journey is serious business. The people you bring on to your staff will either propel you down the road toward fulfilling the vision for your church or serve as speed bumps along the way.
You should never be afraid to ask potential staff members to join you—even if it means a salary cut, a drastic position change or a significant new challenge for them.
When you ask someone to join your staff, you are not asking that person to make a sacrifice. (If you have that mentality, you need to work to change it.) Instead, you are offering that person the opportunity of a lifetime.
There are three things that every new church must have before it can be a real church: (1) a lead pastor, (2) a start date, and (3) a worship leader.
Hire a person at the part-time level before bringing him or her on full time.
When hiring a new staff person, make sure he or she possesses the three C's: Character, Chemistry & Competency
Hiring staff precedes growth, not vice versa.
Hire slow, fire fast.
Never hire staff when you can find a volunteer.
Launch as publicly as possible, with as many people as possible.
There are two things you are looking for in a start date: (1) a date on which you have the potential to reach as many people as possible, and (2) a date that precedes a period of time in which people, in general, are unlikely to be traveling out of town.
You need steppingstones to get you from where you are to your launch date. Monthly services are real services that you begin holding three to six months prior to your launch date. They are the absolute best strategic precursor to your launch. Monthly services give you the invaluable opportunity to test-drive your systems, your staff and, to an extent, even your service style. At the same time, you are doing real ministry with the people in attendance. These services should mirror as closely as possible what your service will look like on the launch date.
Let your target demographic group be the strongest deciding factor in settling on a location: Hotel ballrooms, Movie theaters, Comedy clubs, Public-school auditoriums, Performing-arts theaters, Available church meeting spaces, College auditoriums, Corporate conference space.
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Nelson Searcy (Launch: Starting a New Church from Scratch)
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Between state building and economic growth Having a state is a basic precondition for intensive economic growth. The economist Paul Collier has demonstrated the converse of this proposition, namely, that state breakdown, civil war, and interstate conflict have very negative consequences for growth.20 A great deal of Africa’s poverty in the late twentieth century was related to the fact that states there were very weak and subject to constant breakdown and instability. Beyond the establishment of a state that can provide for basic order, greater administrative capacity is also strongly correlated with economic growth. This is particularly true at low absolute levels of per capita GDP (less than $1,000); while it remains important at higher levels of income, the impact may not be proportionate. There is also a large literature linking good governance to economic growth, though the definition of “good governance” is not well established and, depending on the author, sometimes includes all three components of political development.21 While the correlation between a strong, coherent state and economic growth is well established, the direction of causality is not always clear. The economist Jeffrey Sachs has maintained that good governance is endogenous: it is the product of economic growth rather than a cause of it.22 There is a good logic to this: government costs money. One of the reasons why there is so much corruption in poor countries is that they cannot afford to pay their civil servants adequate salaries to feed their families, so they are inclined to take bribes. Per capita spending on all government services, from armies and roads to schools and police on the street, was about $17,000 in the United States in 2008 but only $19 in Afghanistan.23 It is therefore not a surprise that the Afghan state is much weaker than the American one, or that large flows of aid money generate corruption.
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Francis Fukuyama (The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution)
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No fundamentalist undercurrent ran through the national culture before the first war. Sufism had always been the predominant Muslim sect, and Wahhabism was a foreign, wartime import. A few times a year, Arab Wahhabis came through the village in search of recruits. They promised rations, shelter, an eternity in Paradise, and, until that day of glorious martyrdom, a monthly salary of two hundred and fifty U.S. dollars. Few young men followed the monochromatic Wahhabi faith, but many were quite willing to be radicalized for a monthly salary that eclipsed what they would otherwise earn in a year. The war of independence so quickly conflated with jihad because no one cared about the self-determination of a small landlocked republic. Arab states would gladly fund a war of religion, but not one of nationalism. And in this way it didn’t matter who won the war between the Feds and fundamentalists: the notion of a democratic and fully sovereign Chechnya would be crushed regardless.
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Anthony Marra (A Constellation of Vital Phenomena)
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■ Types are (sets of) things we can talk about.
■ Relations are (sets of) things we say about the things we can talk about.
(There is a nice analogy here that might help you appreciate and remember these important points: Types are to relations as nouns are to sentences.) Thus, in the example, the things we can talk about are employee numbers, names, department numbers, and money values, and the things we say are true utterances of the form “The employee with the specified employee number has the specified name, works in the specified department, and earns the specified salary.”
It follows from all of the foregoing that:
1. Types and relations are both necessary (without types, we have nothing to talk about; without relations, we cannot say anything).
2. Types and relations are sufficient, as well as necessary—i.e., we do not need anything else, logically speaking.
3. Types and relations are not the same thing. It is an unfortunate fact that certain commercial products—not relational ones, by definition!—are confused over this very point.
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C.J. Date (An Introduction to Database Systems)
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Page 61-2
... Rome expanded rapidly ... and became master over the entire Mediterranean Basin. It then had unlimited resources in terms of land, money, and slaves. It collected taxes or tribute throughout its empire and was able to transfer to the central capital massive quantities of foodstuffs and manufactured items. The peasants and the artisans of Italy saw their economic base disappear as this Mediterranean economy was "globalized" by the political domination of Rome. The society was polarized between, on the one hand, a mass of economically useless plebeians and, on the other, a predatory plutocracy. A minority gorged with wealth oversaw the remaining proletarianized population. The middle-classes collapsed, a process that brought about the end of the republic and the beginning of the political form known as "empire" in conformity with the observations made by Aristotle about the importance of intermediate social classes for the stability of political systems.
Since one could not eliminate the plebeians, intractable but geographically central as they were, they came to be nourished and distracted at the empire's expense with "bread and circuses."
Page 64-5:
The positive American trade balance, when only "advanced technology" is counted, dropped from 35 billion dollars in 1990 to 5 billion in 2001 and had disappeared entirely to become one more element in the overall trade deficit in January 2002.
This fall in economic strength is not compensated for by the activities of American-based multinationals. Since 1998 the profits that they bring back into the country amount to less than what foreign companies that have set up shop in the United States are taking back to their own countries.
Page 68:
In conformity with classical economic theory, the general opening up of commercial exchange has brought about an increase in inequality throughout the world. This general exchange tends to introduce into each country the same disparities in revenue that exist at the level of the whole planet. ... The compression of worker revenues caused by free trade revives the traditional dilemma of capitalism that has now spread across the globe: low salaries do not allow for the absorption of increases in production.
Page 17: In developed countries a new class is emerging that comprises roughly 20 percent of the population in terms of sheer numbers but controls about half of each nation's wealth. This new class has more and more trouble putting up with the constraint of universal suffrage.
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Emmanuel Todd (After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order (European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism))
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Jobs noticed that when the heart gave him an intuition, it was for him a command that he had to follow, regardless of the opinions of others. The only thing that mattered was finding a way to give shape to the intuition. For Jobs, the vegan diet, Zen meditation, a life immersed in nature, abstention from alcohol and coffee were necessary to nourish his inner voice, the voice of his heart and strengthen his ability to intuit the future. At the same time, this caused great difficulties. He was sensitive, intuitive, irrational and nervous. He was aware of the limitations that his irrationality caused in handling a large company, such as Apple Computer, and chose a rationalist manager to run the company: John Sculley, a famous manager he admired but with whom he entered continually in conflict, to the point that in 1985 the board of directors decided to fire Jobs from Apple, the company he had founded. Apple Computer continued to make money for a while with the products designed by Jobs, but after a few years the decline began and in the mid-1990s it came to the brink of bankruptcy. On December 21, 1996, the board of directors asked Jobs to return as the president’s personal advisor. Jobs accepted. He asked for a salary of one dollar a year in exchange for the guarantee that his insights, even if crazy, were accepted unconditionally. In a few months he revolutionized the products and on September 16, 1997 he became interim CEO. Apple Computer resurrected in less than a year. How did he manage? He believed that we should not let the noise of others’ opinions dull our inner voice. And, more importantly, he repeated that we must always have the courage to believe in our heart and in our intuitions, because they already know the future and know where we need to go. For Jobs, everything else was secondary.
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Ulisse Di Corpo (Syntropy, Precognition and Retrocausality)
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1. A Rich Life means you can spend extravagantly on the things you love as long as you cut costs mercilessly on the things you don’t. 2. Focus on the Big Wins—the five to ten things that get you disproportionate results, including automating your savings and investing, finding a job you love, and negotiating your salary. Get the Big Wins right and you can order as many lattes as you want. 3. Investing should be very boring—and very profitable—over the long term. I get more excited eating tacos than checking my investment returns. 4. There’s a limit to how much you can cut, but no limit to how much you can earn. I have readers who earn $50,000/year and ones who earn $750,000/year. They both buy the same loaves of bread. Controlling spending is important, but your earnings become super-linear. 5. Your friends and family will have lots of “tips” once you begin your financial journey. Listen politely, then stick to the program. 6. Build a collection of “spending frameworks” to use when deciding on buying something. Most people default to restrictive rules (“I need to cut back on eating out . . .”), but you can flip it and decide what you’ll always spend on, like my book-buying rule: If you’re thinking about buying a book, just buy it. Don’t waste even five seconds debating it. Applying even one new idea from a book is worth it. (Like this one.) 7. Beware of the endless search for “advanced” tips. So many people seek out high-level answers to avoid the real, hard work of improving step by step. It’s easier to dream about winning the Boston Marathon than to go out for a ten-minute jog every morning. Sometimes the most advanced thing you can do is the basics, consistently. 8. You’re in control. This isn’t a Disney movie and nobody’s coming to rescue you. Fortunately, you can take control of your finances and build your Rich Life. 9. Part of creating your Rich Life is the willingness to be unapologetically different. Once money isn’t a primary constraint, you’ll have the freedom to design your own Rich Life, which will almost certainly be different from the average person’s. Embrace it. This is the fun part! 10. Live life outside the spreadsheet. Once you automate your money using the system in this book, you’ll see that the most important part of a Rich Life is outside the spreadsheet—it involves relationships, new experiences, and giving back. You earned it.
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Ramit Sethi (I Will Teach You to Be Rich: No Guilt. No Excuses. No B.S. Just a 6-Week Program That Works.)
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This may be the fundamental problem with caring a lot about what others think: It can put you on the established path—the my-isn’t-that-impressive path—and keep you there for a long time. Maybe it stops you from swerving, from ever even considering a swerve, because what you risk losing in terms of other people’s high regard can feel too costly. Maybe you spend three years in Massachusetts, studying constitutional law and discussing the relative merits of exclusionary vertical agreements in antitrust cases. For some, this might be truly interesting, but for you it is not. Maybe during those three years you make friends you’ll love and respect forever, people who seem genuinely called to the bloodless intricacies of the law, but you yourself are not called. Your passion stays low, yet under no circumstance will you underperform. You live, as you always have, by the code of effort/result, and with it you keep achieving until you think you know the answers to all the questions—including the most important one. Am I good enough? Yes, in fact I am. What happens next is that the rewards get real. You reach for the next rung of the ladder, and this time it’s a job with a salary in the Chicago offices of a high-end law firm called Sidley & Austin. You’re back where you started, in the city where you were born, only now you go to work on the forty-seventh floor in a downtown building with a wide plaza and a sculpture out front. You used to pass by it as a South Side kid riding the bus to high school, peering mutely out the window at the people who strode like titans to their jobs. Now you’re one of them. You’ve worked yourself out of that bus and across the plaza and onto an upward-moving elevator so silent it seems to glide. You’ve joined the tribe. At the age of twenty-five, you have an assistant. You make more money than your parents ever have. Your co-workers are polite, educated, and mostly white. You wear an Armani suit and sign up for a subscription wine service. You make monthly payments on your law school loans and go to step aerobics after work. Because you can, you buy yourself a Saab. Is there anything to question? It
doesn’t seem that way. You’re a lawyer now. You’ve taken everything ever given to you—the love of your parents, the faith of your teachers, the music from Southside and Robbie, the meals from Aunt Sis, the vocabulary words drilled into you by Dandy—and converted it to this. You’ve climbed the mountain. And part of your job, aside from parsing abstract intellectual property issues for big corporations, is to help cultivate the next set of young lawyers being courted by the firm. A senior partner asks if you’ll mentor an incoming summer associate, and the answer is easy: Of course you will. You have yet to understand the altering force of a simple yes. You don’t know that when a memo arrives to confirm the assignment, some deep and unseen fault line in your life has begun to tremble, that some hold is already starting to slip. Next to your name is another name, that of
some hotshot law student who’s busy climbing his own ladder. Like you, he’s black and from Harvard. Other than that, you know nothing—just the name, and it’s an odd one. Barack.
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Becoming
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Important Warning
Before you raise a red flag and say, “I can’t do this,” remember: being shy about sharing your strengths can result in not getting offers. If you get offers, they will be at lower salaries.
For example, I have a friend, who I’ll call Jonathan. I coached him on the value of achievement stories. I also recommended him to a staffing firm. He told me later that they never called him back.
They never called him back, because he never spoke of his achievements.
Staffing firms are paid to provide great candidates to prospective employers. If someone can’t promote themselves — if someone cannot explain why they are a great candidate — they’ll never get a call back, whether it’s from a staffing firm, a hiring manager, or anyone else.
While I understand that my friend probably views Achievement Stories as bragging, I overcame this hurdle. When I talk about accomplishments, I say:
“I’m blessed with the ability to…”
“I’ve been fortunate enough to…”
“Leadership appreciates how…”
“Co-workers appreciate how…”
This is an ideal way to communicate your achievements, because hiring managers prefer humble candidates. But they do want to hear about your achievements.
”
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Clark Finnical (Job Hunting Secrets: (from someone who's been there))
“
What If I Don’t Want To Brag?
I’ve mentioned this before and I’ll mention it again because it is critical…
Before you raise a red flag and say, “I can’t do this,” remember: being shy about sharing your strengths can result in not getting offers. If you do get offers, chances are they will be at lower salaries.
I have a friend who I’ll call Jonathan. I coached him on the importance and value of achievement stories. I also recommended him to a staffing firm.
He told me later that after his interview, the staffing firm never called him back. They never called him back, because he never spoke of his achievements.
Staffing firms are paid for providing great candidates to prospective employers. If someone can’t promote themselves — if someone cannot explain why they are a great candidate — they’ll never get a call back, whether it’s from a staffing firm, a hiring manager or anyone.
While I understand that my friend probably views Achievement Stories as bragging, I overcame this hurdle by describing my accomplishments this way:
“I’m blessed with the ability to…”
“I’ve been fortunate enough to…”
“Leadership appreciates how…”
“Co-workers appreciate how…”
This is an ideal way to communicate your achievements because hiring managers prefer humble candidates.
”
”
Clark Finnical (Job Hunting Secrets: (from someone who's been there))
“
But perhaps most importantly, the website also featured a section labeled “Data: What we’ve learned from your work so far.” This page put the individual players’ efforts into a much bigger context—and guaranteed that contributors would see the real results of their efforts. Some of the key results of the game included these findings: • On average, each MP expensed twice his or her annual salary, or more than £140,000 in expenses on top of a £60,675 salary. • The total cost to taxpayers of personal items expensed by MPs is £88 million annually. And the game detailed: • The number of receipts and papers filed by each MP, ranging between 40 and 2,000 • The total expense spending by party and by category (kitchen, garden, TV, food, etc.) • Online maps comparing travel expenses filed with actual distance from the House of Commons in London to the MPs’ home districts, making it easy to spot MPs grossly overcharging for travel (for example, MPs from nearby districts who filed £21,534 versus £4,418, or £10,105 versus £1,680) Bringing these numbers to light helped clarify the true extent of the crisis: a far more pervasive culture of extravagant personal reimbursement than originally suspected.
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Jane McGonigal (Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World)
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now: he had a kind wife who had a very good government job and he had a house with new furniture, purchased on his wife’s salary, and a car that went with his wife’s job. All of that was far more important than being noticed by women, and yet, and yet…
”
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Alexander McCall Smith (The House of Unexpected Sisters (No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, #18))
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Brendan makes $200,000 a year in his pool cleaning business. As a single-member LLC, he would pay over $18,000 in payroll taxes on the entire $200,000 profit. If Brendan used an S corporation and paid himself a $72,000 a year salary and flowed the rest through as profits without payroll taxes, his payroll taxes would be $11,000 per year. As such, Brendan could save $7,000 a year, year in and year out, by using an S corporation over an LLC. Who says choice of entity isn’t important?
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Garrett Sutton (Start Your Own Corporation: Why the Rich Own Their Own Companies and Everyone Else Works for Them (Rich Dad Advisors))
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I care about your: mind, words, heart, actions, attitude and effort.
I don’t care about your: age, appearance, salary, weight or social status.
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Brittany Burgunder
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Difference Between Freelancing & Outsourcing
What is Freelancing?
The term freelancer was first published in 1819 in a book by a writer named Walter Scott. Since then, various speculations about freelancing started. What is Freelancing? Why do freelancing? What is required to be efficient in freelancing? All kinds of questions started to arise.
The word free means 'Free' and the word lance means 'Instrument' by which something is done. That is, the full meaning of Freelancing stands for “Doing something that is free or independent”.
Freelancing is basically a profession where you can earn money by doing various types of work over the internet. Be it inside the country or outside the country.
What is Outsourcing?
"Outsourcing" is the short form of the English word Outside Resourcing. The term outsourcing was first coined around 1989 and was first seen as a business strategy. Later in the 1990s, this subject was included as an important component of business economics. Since then people started to have various interests in outsourcing.
Out means 'Outside' and source means 'Source'. In other words, the whole meaning of Outsourcing is "To bring work from an external source".
Outsourcing means the process of taking the work of an organization or company from an external source. For example – “Can't find any qualified person within the company to do a job in your company. So you offer some money to an outside freelancer to do the job and he agrees to do the job. Well, that's called Outsourcing”.
Difference Between Freelancing & Outsourcing:
Hope you have a clear idea about what is freelancing and what is outsourcing and that there are no questions in your mind about these topics. Now let's discuss the differences between freelancing and outsourcing in detail –
1. Origin: Freelancing started around 1998 and its journey started from GURU, a freelancing marketplace then known as SOFTmoonlighter.com. On the other hand, the term outsourcing was first coined around 1989 and was first seen as a business strategy.
2. Relation: A freelancer gets his payment from an outside source after doing the work. On the other hand, an outsourced contractor provides both the work and the payment at the end of the work to the freelancer.
3. Activities: Freelancers do not have to follow any rigid rules when it comes to working. They can work or start whenever they want, as long as they can submit work before their deadline. He will get payment only if he can submit the work on time or he will not be paid.
4. Payment: A freelancer will agree to receive the exact amount of payment before doing a job, and will get the same amount as the contract at the end of the job. But he will not get any monthly salary. On the other hand, similarly, an outsourced contractor pays the freelancers at the end of the contracted work. In this case, the outsourced contractors also do not keep the freelancers as any kind of salaried employees.
5. Advantages: A freelancer is everything when it comes to freelancing. He decides his own schedule. No one can force him to work, he can work whenever he wants and quit when he wants. A freelancer does not have to give office hours from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and can work any time within 24 hours. You can work at home, so there is no need to go to the office to work.
6. Disadvantages: There are some risks involved in freelancing. There is no guarantee that you will be offered any work or that you will be paid. Since you are not entering into a contract in person, the possibility of non-payment or fraud remains. In the case of freelancing, every month's income is not the same, you can earn as much money as you work. Moreover, you may not always find the job you want.
If this article of mine is of any use to you or you like it, then definitely share it and help others to know.
Please Visit Our Website (Bhairab IT Zone) to read more Articles related to Freelancing and Outsourcing, Thank You.
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Bhairab IT Zone
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The people who worked there were young, too. In my early thirties, I was one of the oldest members of staff. Perhaps because of this, I made an extra show of my enthusiasm for the role. My white-hot passion for multimedia marketing. My fanatical fervour for company-client relations. I stayed later than anyone else. Talked louder. Worked harder. Or at least, more overtly. I’d buzz about the building like a Benzedrine-addled bumblebee, spewing worn-out idioms to anyone in earshot. Shooting from the hip. Thinking outside the box. I was such a fucking idiot. We all were. And the inflated sense of self-importance. My God. Because you see, we weren’t just there to make a salary. Or to pimp advertising space. Or to make our shareholders richer. Oh no. We were out there making a real difference to the world. We were shaping relationships. We were curating memories. We were facilitating meaningful connections in a noisy world. Jesus. It was like a cult. And I hadn’t just drunk the Kool-Aid. I’d filled a paddling pool and was doing backstroke in the stuff. To think we actually thought what we were doing mattered. In the way that food matters. Or shelter. Or water. Or clean air. What a terrible joke we were. Of course, once the outbreak happened, it quickly transpired we weren’t as essential as we’d assumed. The company folded. Too many dead. Or not enough people alive to make it worthwhile. Whatever
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Liam Brown (Skin)
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What is the way forward?" one might ask, as I did. Well, better education, that's part of it, but most important, being willing and open enough to accept this education. That can be challenging, especially if the old way is getting results, ribbons, salary checks, names in the horse magazine headlines, and photos on the covers.
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Denny Emerson
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The salary is…” He shakes his head. “For such an important job, it’s a crime how badly they pay you guys.
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Freida McFadden (One by One)
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he was important in the brilliantly modern way that teachers, firefighters, and nurses are important: essential workers who earn fancy days of appreciation on the calendar, words of praise in every politician’s mouth, and murmurs of thanks from people at restaurants. Indeed, discussions of the intense value of these professions crowd out other more mundane conversations. Like ones regarding salary increases. As a result, Painter didn’t make much
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Brandon Sanderson (Yumi and the Nightmare Painter)
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Quaker prohibitions (no music, no dancing, no novels, no theater, no destruction of animal life for pleasure), the peculiar Quaker customs (no separate salaried ministers, no officiated marriages, baptisms, or funerals, the use of singular “thee” and “thou” instead of the inaccurate plural “you”), and Quaker social activism (refusal to pay taxes for support of ministers, abolitionism, equality of women, pacifism) are all founded on simple positive religious principles. “God has given to all,” says Clarkson, “besides an intellectual, a spiritual understanding. . . . This spirit may be considered as the primary and infallible guide—and scriptures but a secondary means of importance.”5
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Robert D. Richardson Jr. (Emerson: The Mind on Fire)
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The discontent and bitterness so palpably displayed by the salaried class in the United States is not completely without cause, however. It simply proves that having more material comforts than Ancient and Medieval Emperors will not be sufficient in itself, provided one has to sacrifice something far more important in return. They will remain perpetually dissatisfied because they have obtained these goods at the cost of their ability to go through the Power Process.
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Chad A. Haag (The Philosophy of Ted Kaczynski: Why the Unabomber was Right about Modern Technology)
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At MySQL, there were 400 employees in 40 countries, with 95% of the development staff working from home. The challenges this model presented, from time zone differences to communication technologies to project coordination to legal and commercial logistics, were immense. But it offset these costs with hard savings on real estate, salaries, and improvements in productivity. Most importantly, allowing workers to work remotely is like selling from the Internet: you’re no longer limited by your local geography.
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Stephen O’Grady (The New Kingmakers: How Developers Conquered the World)
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As Cochran recalls in a blog post he wrote about his experiment for the Harvard Business Review, these simple statistics got him thinking about the rest of his company. Just how much time were employees of Atlantic Media spending moving around information instead of focusing on the specialized tasks they were hired to perform? Determined to answer this question, Cochran gathered company-wide statistics on e-mails sent per day and the average number of words per e-mail. He then combined these numbers with the employees’ average typing speed, reading speed, and salary. The result: He discovered that Atlantic Media was spending well over a million dollars a year to pay people to process e-mails, with every message sent or received tapping the company for around ninety-five cents of labor costs. “A ‘free and frictionless’ method of communication,” Cochran summarized, “had soft costs equivalent to procuring a small company Learjet.” Tom Cochran’s experiment yielded an interesting result about the literal cost of a seemingly harmless behavior. But the real importance of this story is the experiment itself, and in particular, its complexity.
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Cal Newport (Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World)
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The most important thing to keep in mind before you start negotiating is WHY you deserve a raise. Take a piece of paper and start jotting down the stuff you have done for the company, the things you’ve accomplished, the projects you’ve spearheaded, the tough tasks you’ve managed to hurdle through (and with flying colors), and the difficult clients you’ve managed to please. Every time a seed of doubt tries to wiggle its way into your mind, take out that list and read it. That list should act as your very own personal reminder of why you deserve a raise.
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Geoffrey Wright (How to Ask for a Raise: Negotiating Your Salary Increase with Ease and Confidence to Get the Raise You Want and Deserve)
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Learning to fail is an important part of success. I’d like everyone reading this to fail at something. Get out there and try the impossible. Set your sights high and do something that you’re almost certain is beyond your skill level. Call the girl. Meet with a millionaire. Pitch your art project to a retail store. Negotiate a large salary increase. Push yourself to accomplish something enormous. You may fail a hundred times. But it only takes one success to completely change your life.
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Markus Almond (Motivational Quotes To Get The Blood Moving)
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So it’s important to state what we want: equality, not just less inequality by some vague amount. Henceforth any inequality will need to be justified. This is not such an enormous conceptual leap from where we are now. Significantly, some of the most straightforward objections to excessive wealth have come from successful entrepreneurs. For example, the late Klaus Zapf, an energetic and successful entrepreneur who built up Germany’s biggest removals firm yet lived in a small flat on a modest, worker’s salary, is quoted as saying: ‘I don’t need money; it just makes us unequal’.92 There
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Bob Hughes (The Bleeding Edge: Why Technology Turns Toxic in an Unequal World)
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It is very difficult for wealth seekers to understand the motives of powerseekers. A wealth seeker tried to improve his condition by, we hope, producing goods or services of value to trade for what he wants. This process of production and trade is satisfying in itself, and it moves the wealth seeker in the direction he wishes to travel.
The powerseeker is willing to trade his wealth for the privilege of forcing others to bend to his will. If you watch closely in every election, you will see people investing thousands or millions of their own dollars for campaigns to acquire political jobs paying small salaries that can never repay the investment.
Are these people trying to get government jobs to get rich? Or are they after something else, for the ability to impose their plans on others?
If you are not a powerseeker, war is just a big waste (unless you are an arms maker). Bur war is the most thrilling and, therefore, most satisfying expression of political power. If you are a powerseeker, war is nirvana.
Very important: war is not the route to nirvana; it is nirvana. War is the end in itself, the big payoff.
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Richard J. Maybury
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When you study the type of careers that make others remark, “That’s the type of job I want,” this trait almost always plays a central role. Once you understand this value of control, it changes the way you evaluate opportunities, leading you to consider a position’s potential autonomy as being as important as its offered salary or the institution’s reputation.
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Cal Newport (So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love)
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graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 1968, and my first job was working for the Department of Housing and Urban Development. My starting salary was low, but I was inspired by the civil rights movement and the War on Poverty to regard public service as an important calling. I went on to graduate school, joined the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania and ultimately became the president of Harvard University. Should Bryn Mawr have been judged based on what I was paid in my first year at HUD? Faust's
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Sarah Kendzior (The View From Flyover Country: Essays by Sarah Kendzior)
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Low interest payday cash loans.
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Higher interest rates on a loan may be extremely hard to deal with. The idea of a payday loan sounds virtually too great to become accurate. You are likely to acquire the cash in your savings or existing account. On payday, the quantity from the loan and also the interest are deducted out of your salary. In this manner, the loan as well as the recovery are set on autopilot. In most situations, these payday loans are for quick periods. There is certainly a significant distinction inside the rate of interest charged by banks and by private payday loan companies. People without a job would need to supply some other security of repayment. Consumers with undesirable credit generally do not get a bank loan. Banks usually look at your credit worthiness to determine regardless of whether you deserve a loan or not. Of most loans, a payday loan will be the most effective and easiest technique to get revenue swiftly.
It is best to stay clear of obtaining extra than one payday loan in the very same time. Consumers using a payday loan must keep a fantastic eye on payments due. You should realize that the rates of interest are abnormally higher. A terrific a lot of people usually do not comprehend the workings of a payday loan. Men and women in some countries are told that payday loans are not superior for them. Occasionally it is actually preferable to reevaluate a payday loan. Your income level is of very important significance any time you ask to get a payday loan. You need to watch out, as the interest can commence finding really massive pretty quickly. The most effective point to do is pay the interest plus a small with the principal quantity every single week. A payday loan is some thing to assist you over your instant challenges. You may have noticed that banks take a while to approve a loan. People are often shocked to see this come about. You have to return the principal quantity as promptly as you can actually. You must be sure that you take out a payday loan as a last resort only. Payday loan organizations are bobbing up all more than the nation. It's thought of fraudulent in some locations for agencies to charge very higher rates of interest on loans. People who have issues in paying their month-to-month bills can opt for a payday loan. A payday loan is related together with your weekly or monthly paycheque. You might need to pay a value in exorbitant interest rates if you usually do not pay up in time. A payday loan is excellent for instant payment of bills.
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Neil Young
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At the time of hyperinflation it’s terrible for the people, particularly for low-income people and small savers, because they see that in a few hours or in a few days they are being told their salaries got destroyed by the price increases, which take place at an incredible speed. That is why the people ask the government, ‘Please do something.’ And if the government comes with a good stabilization plan, that is the opportunity to also accompany that plan with other reforms … the most important reforms were related to the opening up of the economy and to the deregulation and the privatization process. But the only way to implement all those reforms was, at that time, to take advantage of the situation created by hyperinflation, because the population was ready to accept drastic changes in order to eliminate hyperinflation and to go back to normality.”40
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Naomi Klein (The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism)
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My own experience bears this out. My husband and I tried to take care of our first daughter without enough help, and the effects on our mental health were grim. We were not living in poverty, and I suffered no complications, but we were grossly inexperienced at taking care of babies, had no close family living nearby and were miserable. We were much smarter about paying for extra allomothering the second time around. The salary we paid Marie, our lovely night nurse, to help care for my second daughter may be the best investment I’ve ever made, and it opened my eyes to the importance of allomothering in raising human children.
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Abigail Marsh (The Fear Factor: How One Emotion Connects Altruists, Psychopaths and Everyone In-Between)
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Let us turn now to a study of a small Newfoundland fishing village. Fishing is, in England at any rate – more hazardous even than mining. Cat Harbour, a community in Newfoundland, is very complex. Its social relationships occur in terms of a densely elaborate series of interrelated conceptual universes one important consequence of which is that virtually all permanent members of the community are kin, ‘cunny kin’, or economic associates of all other of the 285 permanent members.
The primary activity of the community is cod fishing. Salmon, lobster, and squid provide additional sources of revenue. Woodcutting is necessary in off-seasons. Domestic gardening, and stints in lumber camps when money is needed, are the two other profitable activities. The community's religion is reactionary. Women assume the main roles in the operation though not the government of the churches in the town. A complicated system of ‘jinking’ – curses, magic, and witchcraft – governs and modulates social relationships.
Successful cod fishing in the area depends upon highly developed skills of navigation, knowledge of fish movements, and familiarity with local nautical conditions. Lore is passed down by word of mouth, and literacy among older fishermen is not universal by any means. ‘Stranger’ males cannot easily assume dominant positions in the fishing systems and may only hire on for salary or percentage. Because women in the community are not paid for their labour, there has been a pattern of female migration out of the area. Significantly, two thirds of the wives in the community are from outside the area. This has a predictable effect on the community's concept of ‘the feminine’. An elaborate anti-female symbolism is woven into the fabric of male communal life, e.g. strong boats are male and older leaky ones are female.
Women ‘are regarded as polluting “on the water” and the more traditional men would not consider going out if a woman had set foot in the boat that day – they are “jinker” (i.e., a jinx), even unwittingly'. (It is not only relatively unsophisticated workers such as those fishermen who insist on sexual purity. The very skilled technicians drilling for natural gas in the North Sea affirm the same taboo: women are not permitted on their drilling platform rigs.)
It would be, however, a rare Cat Harbour woman who would consider such an act, for they are aware of their structural position in the outport society and the cognition surrounding their sex….Cat Harbour is a male-dominated society….Only men can normally inherit property, or smoke or drink, and the increasingly frequent breach of this by women is the source of much gossip (and not a negligible amount of conflict and resentment). Men are seated first at meals and eat together – women and children eating afterwards. Men are given the choicest and largest portions, and sit at the same table with a ‘stranger’ or guest.
Women work extremely demanding and long hours, ‘especially during the fishing season, for not only do they have to fix up to 5 to 6 meals each day for the fishermen, but do all their household chores, mind the children and help “put away fish”. They seldom have time to visit extensively, usually only a few minutes to and from the shop or Post Office….Men on the other hand, spend each evening arguing, gossiping, and “telling cuffers”, in the shop, and have numerous “blows” (i.e., breaks) during the day.’
Pre-adolescents are separated on sexual lines. Boys play exclusively male games and identify strongly with fathers or older brothers. Girls perform light women's work, though Faris indicates '. . . often openly aspire to be male and do male things. By this time they can clearly see the privileged position of the Cat Harbour male….’. Girls are advised not to marry a fisherman, and are encouraged to leave the community if they wish to avoid a hard life. Boys are told it is better to leave Cat Harbour than become fishermen....
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Lionel Tiger (Men in Groups)
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CONCLUSION: THE CENTRAL BANKER AS JUDGE This breakdown of the Ulysses/punch-bowl function of the Federal Reserve doesn’t mean that separating some of the Fed’s functions from the day-to-day of electoral politics is unnecessary in the face of deflationary, rather than inflationary, pressures. In fact, the very opposite could be true: if there is a partisan movement in favor of economic policies that could result in a deflationary spiral, we would face the Great Depression redux. Keeping the power to trigger such a consequence away from partisan politics seems like a desirable goal for the institutional design of central banks. But it also requires a different theoretical frame. It may be that the frame for independence is one that we already widely accept in society: judicial independence. The U.S. Constitution gives the federal judiciary life tenure and effective budgetary independence (that is, while they can’t print their own money or raise it independent of congressional appropriations, the Congress cannot constitutionally lower judicial salaries). The reason is so that, to the fullest extent possible, any determinations that favor politicians occur either because the law compels it or because the judge and the politician share the same worldview. The idea that the judge is currying favor with the politician in hopes of further appointment or out of fear of getting her salary removed are taken off the table. It’s not a perfect system, but it is one that most recognize as an important balance between democratic values (the politician gets to appoint the judges from the polity) and some degree technocratic, objective judgment (the judges decide the cases, not the politicians).26 The crisis and the reactions to unconventional monetary policy suggest that the Fed is often performing a delicate adjudicative function, not a simply technocratic one. The problem with the technocratic, Ulysses-contract view of central banking are the two fractured constituencies mentioned above. While most economists have endorsed the Fed’s approach to postcrisis monetary policy, the “technocratic” view has been far from uniform. And, again, the populists aren’t clearly clamoring for prosperity by way of inflation, contra that Ulysses/punch-bowl view. At least in a crisis, and arguably in other times as well, the central bank isn’t
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Peter Conti-Brown (The Power and Independence of the Federal Reserve)
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(Answer: If 1 percent of the population controls most of the disposable wealth, what we call “the market” reflects what they think is useful or important, not anybody else.) But even more, it shows that most people in pointless jobs are ultimately aware of it. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever met a corporate lawyer who didn’t think their job was bullshit. The same goes for almost all the new industries outlined above. There is a whole class of salaried professionals that, should you meet them at parties and admit that you do something that might be considered interesting (an anthropologist, for example), will want to avoid even discussing their line of work entirely. Give them a few drinks, and they will launch into tirades about how pointless and stupid their job really is.
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David Graeber (Bullshit Jobs: A Theory)
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You think I'm a loser!" Dagou yells. "Am I a loser for keeping us alive when all the decent places are moving to the strip? I keep your business going. You pay me almost nothing. My salary is a joke. I want an equal share of the profits."
"Big man," sneers Leo.
Ming knows Dagou will turn to Winnie a second before he does it. He always runs to their mother.
"He grown up now," Winnie says. "Let him have his share."
"You stay out of this! You gave up the business when you left it for this menstruation hut!"
The table erupts. "Lay off it." "Don't talk to her like that!" "This is a Spiritual House."
Leo pushes back his chair.
Standing, he has the look of a beast on its hind legs: hairy, primitive, his long arms hanging almost to his knees. It isn't just the dark, unshaven hair sprouting in patches on his cheeks. There is something hungry yet remote in his close-set eyes. Everyone can see it. Some of them shrink back and turn away. Ming knows this eerie quality well. It has been there in his father for as long as he can remember. Long ago, he learned to escape its worst, to allow other members of the family to confront it. Now he climbs up into a place of refuge in his mind. A kind of hunting blind, where he can watch and wait.
From above, Ming watches his brother. Dagou has the blank expression of someone who is only just becoming aware of what he's done.
"'Don't talk to her like that,'" their father jeers. "Mama's boy! And you..."
He grins wickedly at Winnie. Despite her vow of tranquility, she appears ready to bolt from her chair. The nuns seated on either side hold on to her arms.
"You think he's still your diaper-filling lamb. You haven no idea what a dog he is. Ask him why he needs money now. Ask him. Ask him."
Dagou looks around the table. "It's true I've fallen in love," he announces. "My whole life is changing." He pauses importantly. People stare at their plates.
"Christ," says their father. "All this fuss over a decent fuck."
The nuns gasp. Now Dagou's chair creaks, and he also rises to his feet. He is enormous and he swells with rage. His shoulders tense. He points at his father and his finger is shaking. It could be that he has decided, once and for all, to take down Big Chao. As the Sons of Liberty rose against King George. As the sons turned on Chronos, as he himself turned upon Uranus. So it will be in the family Chao.
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Lan Samantha Chang (The Family Chao)
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The first of the great Roman roads, the Via Salaria, Salt Road, was built to bring this salt not only to Rome but across the interior of the peninsula. This worked well in the Roman part of the Italian peninsula. But as Rome expanded, transporting salt longer distances by road became too costly. Not only did Rome want salt to be affordable for the people, but, more importantly as the Romans became ambitious empire builders, they needed it to be available for the army. The Roman army required salt for its soldiers and for its horses and livestock. At times soldiers were even paid in salt, which was the origin of the word salary and the expression “worth his salt” or “earning his salt.” In fact, the Latin word sal became the French word solde, meaning pay, which is the origin of the word, soldier.
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Mark Kurlansky (Salt: A World History)
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The enormous salaries paid to sports stars and entertainers lead people to believe that they are the most important people in our society, or have the most important jobs. I believe they are as important as anyone else, but we must ask ourselves what will maintain the pinnacle position of our nation in the world: the ability to shoot a twenty-five-foot jump shot, or the ability to solve a quadratic equation.
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Ben Carson (America the Beautiful: Rediscovering What Made This Nation Great)
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The larger truth that I failed to see turned out to be another of those paradoxes—like the discounters’ principle of the less you charge, the more you’ll earn. And here it is: the more you share profits with your associates—whether it’s in salaries or incentives or bonuses or stock discounts—the more profit will accrue to the company. Why? Because the way management treats the associates is exactly how the associates will then treat the customers. And if the associates treat the customers well, the customers will return again and again, and that is where the real profit in this business lies, not in trying to drag strangers into your stores for one-time purchases based on splashy sales or expensive advertising. Satisfied, loyal, repeat customers are at the heart of Wal-Mart’s spectacular profit margins, and those customers are loyal to us because our associates treat them better than salespeople in other stores do. So, in the whole Wal-Mart scheme of things, the most important contact ever made is between the associate in the store and the customer. I
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Sam Walton (Sam Walton: Made In America)
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Guess what the first consideration was of the graduating class of 2014 when looking for a job.1 Nature of the work. Salary and the friendliness of co-workers come in second and third, to complete this completely dysfunctional job-seeker trifecta. The problem with this scenario is that there is no way to know the real “nature of the work” before you have gotten very close to actually getting the job. It’s impossible. Since so many job descriptions are dysfunctional and inaccurate, most people rule out a job as not being “right” for them before they’ve even applied (and before they actually know what they’re rejecting). It’s a nasty chicken-and-egg problem that can severely shrink your potential opportunities. That’s why the most important reframe when you are designing your career is this: you are never looking for a job, you are looking for an offer.
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Bill Burnett (Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life)
Vamsee Puligadda (1000 Most Important Salesforce (SFDC) Interview Questions and Answers: Crack That Next Interview With Higher Salary In Less Preparation Time)
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A simple test can be used to determine where someone is in the motivational hierarchy. If the absolute sum of a raise in salary an individual receives is important to him, he is working mostly within the physiological or safety modes. If, however, what matters to him is how his raise stacks up against what other people got, he is motivated by esteem/recognition or self-actualization, because in this case money is clearly a measure.
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Andrew S. Grove (High Output Management)
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Behavioral economists have shown the effectiveness of this technique in another important domain: saving for the future. In one of the most powerful demonstrations of this persuasion strategy, Nudge co-author Richard Thaler and his research colleague Shlomo Benartzi showed that they could drastically boost participation rates in 401( k) plans. Using what they called the “Save More Tomorrow” program, rather than asking workers to participate in the program immediately, they instead asked workers to commit to putting a portion of their future salary increases into the plan. Although this program was successful for many reasons, one central reason is that it effectively shifted workers’ thoughts about the program from the concrete terms associated with it (e.g., “I’ll have less money in my paycheck each month”) to more abstract terms about how it would help them achieve their broader values and goals (e.g., “I should do this because it’s important and the right thing to do for my family”).
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Steve J. Martin (The Small Big: Small Changes That Spark Big Influence)
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In study after study, the overwhelming majority of men aged twenty to forty-five say that having a work schedule that lets them spend more time with their family is more important than doing challenging work or even earning a high salary.
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Armin A. Brott (The Expectant Father: The Ultimate Guide for Dads-to-Be (The New Father Book 1))
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Specifically, they argue that digital technology drives inequality in three different ways. First, by replacing old jobs with ones requiring more skills, technology has rewarded the educated: since the mid-1970s, salaries rose about 25% for those with graduate degrees while the average high school dropout took a 30% pay cut.45 Second, they claim that since the year 2000, an ever-larger share of corporate income has gone to those who own the companies as opposed to those who work there—and that as long as automation continues, we should expect those who own the machines to take a growing fraction of the pie. This edge of capital over labor may be particularly important for the growing digital economy, which tech visionary Nicholas Negroponte defines as moving bits, not atoms. Now that everything from books to movies and tax preparation tools has gone digital, additional copies can be sold worldwide at essentially zero cost, without hiring additional employees. This allows most of the revenue to go to investors rather than workers, and helps explain why, even though the combined revenues of Detroit’s “Big 3” (GM, Ford and Chrysler) in 1990 were almost identical to those of Silicon Valley’s “Big 3” (Google, Apple, Facebook) in 2014, the latter had nine times fewer employees and were worth thirty times more on the stock market.47 Figure 3.5: How the economy has grown average income over the past century, and what fraction of this income has gone to different groups. Before the 1970s, rich and poor are seen to all be getting better off in lockstep, after which most of the gains have gone to the top 1% while the bottom 90% have on average gained close to nothing.46 The amounts have been inflation-corrected to year-2017 dollars. Third, Erik and collaborators argue that the digital economy often benefits superstars over everyone else.
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Max Tegmark (Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence)
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The only private partnership I can talk about authoritatively is the one in which I was a partner from 1992 to 1999, when the firm went public: Goldman Sachs. Partners there owned the equity of the firm. When elected a partner, you were required to make a cash investment into the firm that was large enough to be material to your net worth. Each partner had a percentage ownership of the earnings every year, but the earnings would remain in the firm. A partner’s annual cash compensation amounted only to a small salary and a modest cash return on his or her capital account. A partner was not allowed to withdraw any capital from the firm until retirement, at which time typically 75%–80% of one’s net worth was still in the firm. Even then, a retired (“limited”) partner could only withdraw his or her capital over a three-year period. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, all partners had personal liability for the exposure of the firm, right down to their homes and cars. The focus on risk was intense, and wealth creation was more like a career bonus rather than a series of annual bonuses.
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Steven G. Mandis (What Happened to Goldman Sachs: An Insider's Story of Organizational Drift and Its Unintended Consequences)
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IQ test scores in childhood will predict many important things in adulthood—higher intelligence predicts higher education level, higher socio-economic status, higher salary, better health, greater civic participation,[4] lower impulsivity, and longer lifespan.[5] Lower intelligence predicts higher criminality, and shorter-term future-orientation.[6] In other words, people who are more intelligent tend to live for the future whereas people who are less intelligent tend to live for the now.
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Edward Dutton (At Our Wits' End: Why We're Becoming Less Intelligent and What it Means for the Future (Societas Book 64))
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Did you ever tell your previous employer any of your thoughts on ways they could improve?” If he says “Yes, but they never listened to anyone,” or “Yeah, but they just said ‘Mind your own business,’” this may tell more about the style of his approach than about managers at his last job. Most employers react well to suggestions that are offered in a constructive way, regardless of whether or not they follow them. Another unfavorable response is, “What’s the use of making suggestions? Nothing ever changes anyway.” Some applicants will accuse former employers of stealing their ideas. Others will tell war stories about efforts to get a former employer to follow suggestions. If so, ask if this was a one-man undertaking or in concert with his coworkers. Sometimes an applicant will say his co-workers “didn’t have the guts to confront management like I did.” “What are some of the things your last employer could have done to keep you?” Some applicants will give a reasonable answer (slightly more pay, better schedule, etc.), but others will provide a list of demands that demonstrate unreasonable expectations (e.g., “They could have doubled my salary, promoted me to vice president, and given me Fridays off”). “How do you go about solving problems at work?” Good answers are that he consults with others, weighs all points of view, discusses them with involved parties, etc. Unfavorable answers contain a theme of confrontation (e.g., “I tell the source of the problem he’d better straighten up,” or “I go right to the man in charge and lay it on the line”). Another bad answer is that he does nothing to resolve problems, saying, “Nothing ever changes anyway.” “Describe a problem you had in your life where someone else’s help was very important to you.” Is he able to recall such a situation? If so, does he give credit or express appreciation about the help? “Who is your best friend and how would you describe your friendship?” Believe it or not, there are plenty of people who cannot come up with a single name in response to this question. If they give a name that was not listed as a reference, ask why. Then ask if you can call that friend as a reference.
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Gavin de Becker (The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence)
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4. Be ready to handle the subject of salary. If the subject of salary comes up during the interview, the general rule is to try and avoid it until an offer has been made. This is because the greatest leverage you have is after the job offer but before acceptance. However, you may have no choice but to discuss salary when asked about your salary requirements or salary history. You must know, in advance, the salary range for the job you are seeking and then provide a realistic range; “I would expect the job to pay between $30,000 and $40,000, and I believe, based on my value to your company, we can agree to an amicable number.” Or “Over the past five years, my salary has been between $80,000 and $93,000. I plan to make a significant contribution to your sales efforts, so my starting salary is less important than the ability to demonstrate to you that I can produce results. And I am sure when you see the results I can produce, my salary will reflect those contributions.” Once again, I emphasize that if you know your value and how you can contribute in a notable way, you’ll feel in control when negotiating a win-win compensation arrangement.
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Jay A. Block (101 Best Ways to Land a Job in Troubled Times)
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In this, he was important in the brilliantly modern way that teachers, firefighters, and nurses are important: essential workers who earn fancy days of appreciation on the calendar, words of praise in every politician’s mouth, and murmurs of thanks from people at restaurants. Indeed, discussions of the intense value of these professions crowd out other more mundane conversations. Like ones regarding salary increases.
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Brandon Sanderson (Yumi and the Nightmare Painter)
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The Importance of Bookkeeping Services for Doctors
Managing the financial side of a medical practice can be challenging for doctors, as they are often focused on providing quality patient care. However, maintaining accurate financial records is essential for the success of any healthcare practice. Bookkeeping services tailored specifically for doctors help ensure that their financial transactions are organized, compliant, and manageable, allowing them to focus on what they do best—caring for patients.
Why Doctors Need Specialized Bookkeeping Services
Doctors face unique financial complexities, such as billing for medical services, managing insurance claims, handling payroll for staff, and keeping track of medical supplies and equipment. Additionally, they must ensure compliance with healthcare regulations and tax laws. Professional bookkeeping services designed for doctors take these unique needs into account, helping physicians streamline their financial operations. As a result, they can avoid errors, reduce administrative burdens, and improve cash flow.
Accurate Billing and Cash Flow Management
One of the key challenges doctors face is managing billing and cash flow. With a constant flow of patients and complex insurance claims, maintaining an accurate record of all transactions is essential. Bookkeeping services ensure that billing is handled efficiently, minimizing delays in receiving payments. This service also helps manage insurance claims, reducing errors that could lead to delayed reimbursements. By keeping track of revenue and expenses, bookkeepers ensure that doctors maintain a healthy cash flow.
Tax Compliance and Planning
Doctors often qualify for specific tax deductions related to medical equipment, staff salaries, and office expenses. However, navigating the complexities of healthcare tax regulations can be difficult. Bookkeeping services help doctors stay compliant by keeping their financial records organized and accurate, making it easier to file taxes and take advantage of available deductions. Additionally, bookkeepers can assist in planning for tax obligations throughout the year, ensuring that there are no surprises during tax season.
Financial Reporting for Growth
Bookkeeping services also provide doctors with valuable financial reports that offer insights into their practice’s performance. By analyzing income, expenses, and cash flow trends, doctors can make more informed decisions about expanding services, hiring staff, or investing in new equipment. These reports give a clear picture of the financial health of the practice, enabling better long-term planning.
In conclusion, specialized bookkeeping services for doctors are essential for maintaining accurate financial records, ensuring tax compliance, and improving cash flow. By outsourcing bookkeeping tasks, doctors can focus more on patient care while gaining peace of mind that their financials are in order.
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