Salaries Person Quotes

How can a person deal with anxiety? You might try what one fellow did. He worried so much that he decided to hire someone to do his worrying for him. He found a man who agreed to be his hired worrier for a salary of $200,000 per year. After the man accepted the job, his first question to his boss was, "Where are you going to get $200,000 per year?" To which the man responded, "That's your worry.

Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it’s to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential — as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth. You’ll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you’re doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I guarantee you’ll hear about them. To invent your own life’s meaning is not easy, but it’s still allowed, and I think you’ll be happier for the trouble.

A certain person wondered why a big strong girl like me wouldn't keep a job which paid a normal salary. I took my time to lead her and to read her every page. Even minimal people can't survive on minimal wage. A certain person wondered why I wait all week for you. I didn't have the words to describe just what you do. I said you had the motion of the ocean in your walk, and when you solve my riddles you don't even have to talk.

A salary does not make a person rich, but only gives him the opportunity to take care of his needs. It is not a means of becoming wealthy. It is a means of fulfilling our potential.

If we were not impressed by job titles, suits, and jargon, we would demand that financial advisors show us their personal bank statements before they tell us what we could or should do with our own money.

This is true in personal finance, where you’re told to have a six-month emergency fund and save 10% of your salary.

He made a good salary but he did not flaunt it. He’d been raised in Chicago proper by a Lithuanian Jewish mother who had grown up in poverty, telling stories, often, of extending a chicken to its fullest capacity, so as soon as a restaurant served his dish, he would promptly cut it in half and ask for a to-go container. Portions are too big anyway, he’d grumble, patting his waistline. He’d only give away his food if the corners were cleanly cut, as he believed a homeless person would just feel worse eating food with ragged bitemarks at the edges – as if, he said, they are dogs, or bacteria. Dignity, he said, lifting his half-lasagna into its box, is no detail.

While big corporations make huge, tax-free profits, taxes for the everyday working person skyrocket. While politicians take free trips around the world, those same politicians cut back food stamps for the poor. While politicians increase their salaries, millions of people are being laid off. This city is on the brink of bankruptcy, and yet hundreds of thousands of dollars are being spent on this trial. I do not understand a government so willing to spend millions of dollars on arms, to explore outer space, even the planet Jupiter, and at the same time close down day care centers and fire stations.

While “greed” is one of the most popular—and most fallacious—explanations of the very high salaries of corporate executives, when your salary depends on what other people are willing to pay you, you can be the greediest person on earth and that will not raise your pay in the slightest. Any serious explanation of corporate executives’ salaries must be based on the reasons for those salaries being offered, not the reasons why the recipients desire them.

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.

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.)

I began to realize how simple life could be if one had a regular routine to follow with fixed hours and a fixed salary and very little original thinking to do. The life of a writer is absolute hell compared with the life of a businessman. The writer has to force himself to work. He has to make his own hours and if he doesn’t go to his desk at all there is nobody to scold him. If he is a writer of fiction he lives in a world of fear. Each new day demands new ideas and he can never be sure whether he is going to come up with them or not. Two hours of writing fiction leaves this particular writer absolutely drained. For those two hours he has been miles away, he has been somewhere else, in a different place with totally different people, and the effort of swimming back into normal surroundings is very great. It is almost a shock. The writer walks out of his workroom in a daze. He wants a drink. He needs it. It happens to be a fact that nearly every writer of fiction in the world drinks more whisky than is good for him. He does it to give himself faith, hope and courage. A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it.

I didn’t have to be out there making a difference for thousands of people in order to matter. I could make my difference one person at a time. Starting with me. There was nowhere else in the world I’d rather be. And that was the secret, I realized. It didn’t matter what my salary was. Whether or not I had a corner office and an assistant. This feeling, this contentment, was what mattered most.

An educated person would know that holding a degree will not make you entitled to a better job nor a better salary than someone who has no degree.

had been a year earlier. Looking back, it had been a year of growth. Paul’s personality had enlarged, he’d gained further wisdom, if not salary,

Create from the heart, for nature rewards a person, not for the thing he wants to profit from, but for that which he does for fun.

It was a different feeling: it is hard to focus on a conversation, especially when it is mathematical, when you have just personally earned several hundreds of times the annual salary of the researcher trying to tell you that you are "wrong," by betting against his representation of the world.

Cancer, he’d said near the end, is the great equalizer. It doesn’t care who you are or what kind of salary you make. It doesn’t give one damn if you are a good person or a bad one. It is the ultimate villain because it’s not capable of mercy. It only knows how to destroy and that’s exactly what it does. Destroys everything.

Tears sprang, unbidden, to my beady, plebeian eyes. That so much beauty was possible in the heart of this stone-and-concrete city, that it should be owned by one person, while I paid almost half my salary and almost all my waking hours for not even a hundredth of this space—it hurt. How could this be what my life had become about?

Remember that the measure of a man has nothing to do with your stature, your salary, or your success; it’s a matter of the heart. Being a man means taking responsibility. It means protecting the weak, defending the truth, providing for those under your care, selflessly serving and loving your wife, providing a genuine example for your children, and leaving every person and place a little better off than you found them. This is the duty of every man.

These are big questions, and many people aren’t sure where to begin—but they do know what kind of results they want: to get six-pack abs or to feel less anxious or to double their salary. That’s fine. Start there and work backward from the results you want to the type of person who could get those results. Ask yourself, “Who is the type of person that could get the outcome I want?

Among us English-speaking peoples especially do the praises of poverty need once more to be boldly sung. We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise any one who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. If he does not join the general scramble and pant with the money-making street, we deem him spiritless and lacking in ambition. We have lost the power even of imagining what the ancient idealization of poverty could have meant: the liberation from material attachments, the unbribed soul, the manlier indifference, the paying our way by what we are or do and not by what we have, the right to fling away our life at any moment irresponsibly—the more athletic trim, in short, the moral fighting shape. When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank-account and doomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion. It is true that so far as wealth gives time for ideal ends and exercise to ideal energies, wealth is better than poverty and ought to be chosen. But wealth does this in only a portion of the actual cases. Elsewhere the desire to gain wealth and the fear to lose it are our chief breeders of cowardice and propagators of corruption. There are thousands of conjunctures in which a wealth-bound man must be a slave, whilst a man for whom poverty has no terrors becomes a freeman. Think of the strength which personal indifference to poverty would give us if we were devoted to unpopular causes. We need no longer hold our tongues or fear to vote the revolutionary or reformatory ticket. Our stocks might fall, our hopes of promotion vanish, our salaries stop, our club doors close in our faces; yet, while we lived, we would imperturbably bear witness to the spirit, and our example would help to set free our generation. The cause would need its funds, but we its servants would be potent in proportion as we personally were contented with our poverty. I recommend this matter to your serious pondering, for it is certain that the prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers.

The decisions I’ve made in my personal life have helped me resist the temptations I face in my professional life. I was lucky early in my career and was given wise counsel to cap my salary and live below my means. Money itself isn’t evil, but the love of it is the root of all kinds of evil. So these things helped me to stay grounded. I

There you are: a normal person. A little person. You’re just like everyone else—you go to work, you return from work. You get an average salary. Once a year you go on vacation. You’re a normal person! And then one day you’re suddenly turned into a Chernobyl person. Into an animal, something that everyone’s interested in, and that no one knows anything about.

The standard burn rate for a game studio was $10,000 per person per month, a number that included both salaries and overhead costs, like health insurance and office rent.

Significance unfortunately is a useful means toward a personal ends in the advance of science - status and widely distributed publications, a big laboratory, a staff of research assistants, a reduction in teaching load, a better salary, the finer wines of Bordeaux. Precision, knowledge, and control. In a narrow and cynical sense statistical significance is the way to achieve these. Design experiment. Then calculate statistical significance. Publish articles showing "significant" results. Enjoy promotion. But it is not science, and it will not last.

It is only if the primary or only reason you do what you do is to make money that you will envy every random person who made or makes a lot of money (or money that exceeds what you made or make).

Most self-indulgent of all Nazis, and is in sharp contrast to late H. Himmler, who lived in personal want at low salary. Herr Goring representative of spoils mentality, using power as means of acquiring personal wealth. Primitive mentality, even vulgar, but quite intelligent man, possibly most intelligent of all Nazi chiefs. Object of his drives: self-glorification in ancient emperor fashion.

Women scored a salary that was 18 percent higher when they negotiated the salary for someone else. Men pretty much negotiated the same salaries whether it was for themselves or for someone else, and the levels were pretty consistent with what the women negotiated when they represented someone else. It appears that the women executives were particularly energized when they felt a sense o responsibility to represent another person's interests.

Queen Gaia would consider it a personal favor if you would live at the palace for the summer and assist her in a matter of some delicacy. In return, you would be paid a salary and your parents’ tea shop would be awarded the royal seal of approval.

They came to me because they had finally realized, after years of observation and experience, that the highest-paid personnel in engineering are frequently not those who know the most about engineering. One can, for example, hire mere technical ability in engineering, accountancy, architecture or any other profession at nominal salaries. But the person who has technical knowledge plus the ability to express ideas, to assume leadership, and to arouse enthusiasm among people—that person is headed for higher earning power.

The one person with whom she didn’t seem particularly upset: herself. No one who drew a salary from the campaign would tell her that. It was a self-signed death warrant to raise a question about Hillary’s competence—to her or anyone else—in loyalty-obsessed Clintonworld.

When you run up against someone else’s shamelessness, ask yourself this: Is a world without shamelessness possible? No. Then don’t ask the impossible. There have to be shameless people in the world. This is one of them. The same for someone vicious or untrustworthy, or with any other defect. Remembering that the whole class has to exist will make you more tolerant of its members. Another useful point to bear in mind: What qualities has nature given us to counter that defect? As an antidote to unkindness it gave us kindness. And other qualities to balance other flaws. And when others stray off course, you can always try to set them straight, because every wrongdoer is doing something wrong—doing something the wrong way. And how does it injure you anyway? You’ll find that none of the people you’re upset about has done anything that could do damage to your mind. But that’s all that “harm” or “injury” could mean. Yes, boorish people do boorish things. What’s strange or unheard-of about that? Isn’t it yourself you should reproach—for not anticipating that they’d act this way? The logos gave you the means to see it—that a given person would act a given way—but you paid no attention. And now you’re astonished that he’s gone and done it. So when you call someone “untrustworthy” or “ungrateful,” turn the reproach on yourself. It was you who did wrong. By assuming that someone with those traits deserved your trust. Or by doing them a favor and expecting something in return, instead of looking to the action itself for your reward. What else did you expect from helping someone out? Isn’t it enough that you’ve done what your nature demands? You want a salary for it too? As if your eyes expected a reward for seeing, or your feet for walking. That’s what they were made for. By doing what they were designed to do, they’re performing their function. Whereas humans were made to help others. And when we do help others—or help them to do something—we’re doing what we were designed for. We perform our function.

A word of advice. Don't take up that sentimental attitude over the poor. See that she doesn't, Margaret. The poor are poor, and one's sorry for them, but there it is. As civilisation moves forward, the shoe is bound to pinch in places, and it's absurd to pretend that any one is responsible personally. Neither you, nor I, nor my informant, nor the man who informed him, nor the directors of the Porphyrion, are to blame for this clerk's loss of salary. It's just the shoe pinching—no one can help it; and it might easily have been worse." Helen quivered with indignation. "By all means subscribe to charities—subscribe to them largely—but don't get carried away by absurd schemes of Social Reform. I see a good deal behind the scenes, and you can take it from me that there is no Social Question—except for a few journalists who try to get a living out of the phrase. There are just rich and poor, as there always have been and always will be. Point me out a time when men have been equal—" "I didn't say—" "Point me out a time when desire for equality has made them happier. No, no. You can't. There always have been rich and poor. I'm no fatalist. Heaven forbid! But our civilisation is moulded by great impersonal forces" (his voice grew complacent; it always did when he eliminated the personal), "and there always will be rich and poor. You can't deny it" (and now it was a respectful voice)—"and you can't deny that, in spite of all, the tendency of civilisation has on the whole been upward." "Owing to God, I suppose," flashed Helen. He stared at her. "You grab the dollars. God does the rest." It was no good instructing the girl if she was going to talk about God in that neurotic modern way.

Byron had said teaching was an underpaid and underappreciated profession. He’d said it drained the life out of people. He’d said the system takes advantage of teachers and sets them up to fail, so why would any intelligent, reasonable person with an aptitude for science or mathematics or engineering ever willingly accept a teacher’s salary to do a teacher’s job?

Gibbs is perhaps the most brilliant person most people have never heard of. Modest to the point of near-invisibility, he passed virtually the whole of his life, apart from three years spent studying in Europe, within a three-block area bounded by his house and the Yale campus in New Haven, Connecticut. For his first ten years at Yale he didn’t even bother to draw a salary.

The thick communities have a distinct culture—the way the University of Chicago, Morehouse College, the U.S. Marine Corps do. A thick institution is not trying to serve its people instrumentally, to give them a degree or to simply help them earn a salary. A thick institution seeks to change the person’s whole identity. It engages the whole person: head, hands, heart, and soul.

According to the Times notice, Mr. Bauman called his employees into a meeting and asked them to accept a 10 percent reduction in salary so that he wouldn’t have to fire anyone. They all agreed. Then he quietly decided to give up his personal salary until his company was back on safe ground. The only reason his staff found out was because the company bookkeeper told them. Bauman

Then, as to money, however many engagements Florine may have, her salary does not cover the costs of her stage toilet, which, in addition to its costumes, requires an immense variety of long gloves, shoes, and frippery; and all this exclusive of her personal clothing. The first third of such a life is spent in struggling and imploring; the next third, in getting a foothold; the last third, in defending it.

When I interviewed with the Chief of Family Medicine at a large medical corporation on the West Coast, he explained that, since he was part of a team of people who arranged for pharmaceutical companies to issue cash grants, he was in a position to offer me a particularly enticing salary. “What are the grants for?” I asked. “We have a quality improvement program that tracks physician prescribing patterns. We call it ‘quality’ but it’s really about money.” And that’s all it’s about. It works like this. In his organization, any patient with LDL cholesterol over 100 is put on a cholesterol-lowering medication. Any person with a blood pressure higher than 140/90 is put on a blood pressure medication. Any person with “low bone density” is put on a bone-remodeling inhibitor. And so on. The doctors who prescribe the most get big bonuses. Those who prescribe the least get fired. With a hint of incredulousness in his voice, he explained, “So far, every time we’ve asked for funding for our program, the drug companies give it to us.” If this is where healthcare is headed, then these hybrid physicians-executives will instinctively turn their gaze to our children and invent more creative methods to bulldoze an entire generation into the bottomless pit of chronic disease.

I would never sabotage you, Mya.” He wiped away one of my stray tears with his fingertips. “Of course, deep down I did want you to stay, but I had nothing but nice things to say about you. I even said they’d be foolish not to hire you, but—” “But?” I glared at him. “But what?” “But if they thought the low-ass salaries they were offering were good enough for you, they needed to increase them exponentially or move along to someone else. I thought you deserved more.” “Is that all?” “No,” he said, looking into my eyes. “I also needed to personally interview each of the CEOs myself. Needed to make sure each one was a good fit for you, and that whoever you worked for next was already married.” I opened my mouth to ask him if he was being serious, but he beat me to it. “Yes,” he said, smirking. “Yes, I ‘seriously’ did need to do that.” “What does the CEO being married have to do with anything, Michael? What if I have no interest in seeing you after I quit?” “You do, so we’re not even going to entertain that line of conversation.” He rolled his eyes. “If the CEO is already married, I won’t have to worry about ‘this’ happening at your next place of employment, and I can be somewhat less jealous.” “How selfish of you.” I couldn’t believe him, but for some reason I couldn’t help the smile that was forming on my face.

And now this talk of bringing the UN back into the picture. But that old UN girl - it turns out that she just ain't what she was cracked up to be. She's been demoted (although she retains her high salary). Now she's the world's janitor. She's the Filipino cleaning lady, the Indian jamardini, the postal bride from Thailand, the Mexican household help, the Jamaican au pair. She's employed to clean other people's shit. She's used and abused at will.

While the existing practitioners in a given field may be adequately (or even excessively) rewarded for their performance level, there may nevertheless be a case to be made for raising salaries in a particular field, in order to attract a higher caliber of person, capable of a higher level of performance, than the current norm in that field. This argument might be made for school teachers but it applies even more so to politicians and judges. Yet people who are preoccupied with merit are highly susceptible to demagogues who denounce the idea of paying politicians, for example, more money that they clearly do not deserve, in view of their current dismal performances. To get beyond this demagoguery requires getting beyond the idea of considering pay solely from the standpoint of retrospective reward for merit and seeing it from the standpoint of prospective incentives for better performances from new people.

The one and only personality trait the effective ones I have encountered did have in common was something they did not have: they had little or no ‘charisma’ and little use either for the term or what it signifies.” Supporting Drucker’s claim, Brigham Young University management professor Bradley Agle studied the CEOs of 128 major companies and found that those considered charismatic by their top executives had bigger salaries but not better corporate performance. We

- Sometimes on the phone he was his old self: complaining about parking tickets, or calling Nathan sarcastic names like ‘Mr Salary’. They hated each other and I mediated their mutual hatred in a way that made me feel successfully feminine. Other times, Frank was replaced by a different man, a blank and somehow innocent person who repeated things meaninglessly and left protracted silences which I had to try and fill. I preferred the first one, who at least had a sense of humour.

THREE COMMUNICATION LESSONS FROM THE MOST FASCINATING BRANDS       1.   Don’t focus on how you are similar to others, but how you are different. Leading brands stand out by sharpening their points of difference. The more clearly and distinctly a brand can pinpoint its differences, the more valuable it becomes. If a brand can carve out a very clear spot in people’s minds, the product or service ceases to be a commodity. As we’ll see in Part II, different personality Advantages can be more valuable than similar ones. 2.   Your differences can be very small and simple. The reality is, most products are virtually indistinguishable from their competitors. Yet a leading brand can build a strong competitive edge around very minor differences. Similarly, you don’t need to be dramatically different than everyone else—your difference can be minute, as long as it is clearly defined. The more competitive the market, the more crucial this becomes. 3.   Once you “own” a difference, you can charge more money. People pay more for products and people who add distinct value in some way. And just as customers pay more for fascinating brands, employers pay higher salaries for employees who stand out with a specific benefit. If you are an entrepreneur or small business owner, your clients and customers will have a higher perceived value of your time and services if they can clearly understand why you are different than your competitors. The more crowded the environment, the more crucial these lessons become.

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.

Here is a typical story about Mr. John Jones. Mr. Jones works in an office. He had hoped for a little raise but his hope, as hopes often are, was disappointed. The salaries of some of his colleagues were raised but not his. Mr. Jones could not take it calmly. He worried and worried and finally suspected that Director Brown was responsible for his failure in getting a raise. We cannot blame Mr. Jones for having conceived such a suspicion. There were indeed some signs pointing to Director Brown. The real mistake was that, after having conceived that suspicion, Mr. Jones became blind to all signs pointing in the opposite direction. He worried himself into firmly believing that Director Brown was his personal enemy and behaved so stupidly that he almost succeeded in making a real enemy of the director. The trouble with Mr. John Jones is that he behaves like most of us. He never changes his major opinions. He changes his minor opinions not infrequently and quite suddenly; but he never doubts any of his opinions, major or minor, as long as he has them. He never doubts them, or questions them, or examines them critically—he would especially hate critical examination, if he understood what that meant. Let us concede that Mr. John Jones is right to a certain extent. He is a busy man; he has his duties at the office and at home. He has little time for doubt or examination. At best, he could examine only a few of his convictions and why should he doubt one if he has no time to examine that doubt? Still, don’t do as Mr. John Jones does. Don’t let your suspicion, or guess, or conjecture, grow without examination till it becomes ineradicable. At any rate, in theoretical matters, the best of ideas is hurt by uncritical acceptance and thrives on critical examination. 2. A mathematical example. Of all quadrilaterals with

You’re more interested, finally, in living life again in your writing than in making money. Now, let’s understand—writers do like money; artists, contrary to popular belief, do like to eat. It’s only that money isn’t the driving force. I feel very rich when I have time to write and very poor when I get a regular paycheck and no time to work at my real work. Think of it. Employers pay salaries for time. That is the basic commodity that human beings have that is valuable. We exchange our time in life for money. Writers stay with the first step—their time—and feel it is valuable even before they get money for it. They hold on to it and aren’t so eager to sell it. It’s like inheriting land from your family. It’s always been in your family: they have always owned it. Someone comes along and wants to buy it. Writers, if they are smart, won’t sell too much of it. They know once it’s sold, they might be able to buy a second car, but there will be no place they can go to sit still, no place to dream on. So it is good to be a little dumb when you want to write. You carry that slow person inside you who needs time; it keeps you from selling it all away. That person will need a place to go and will demand to stare into rain puddles in the rain, usually with no hat on, and to feel the drops on her scalp.

Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it's to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential-as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth. You'll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you're doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I guarantee you'll hear about them. To invent your own life's meaning is not easy, but it's still allowed, and I think you'll be happier for the trouble. Reading those turgid philosophers here in these remote stone buildings may not get you a job, but if those books have forced you to ask yourself questions about what makes life truthful, purposeful, meaningful, and redeeming, you have the Swiss Army Knife of mental tools, and it's going to come in handy all the time.

Although it would be difficult to prove, the pervading view of wealth—that it should be forcibly taken from those who have it—probably has an effect on crime. If, as they are told over and over, the poor are entitled to money earned by others, why should they not simply take it themselves and cut out the middleman? Crime is, in fact, a much more efficient way to spread wealth. Of every dollar spent by Congress for welfare, only thirty cents actually reach recipients. Administration and bureaucrat salaries eat up the rest.1318 New York City spends an incredible $18,000 a year per person to accommodate drifters on cots laid out by the hundreds on the floors of armories.

This city is one place where a person who goes out for a peaceful walk is liable to come home with a shiner or bloody nose, and he’s almost as likely to get it from a cop’s nightstick as from a couple of squareheads who haven’t got the few dimes to chase pussy on the high rides in Riverview and so hang around the alley and plot to jump someone. Because you know it’s not the city salary the cops live on now, not with all the syndicate money there is to pick up. There isn’t a single bootleg alky truck that goes a mile without being convoyed by a squad car. So they don’t care what they do. I’ve heard of them almost killing guys who didn’t know enough English to answer questions.

No matter what you do for a living or who you think you work for, you only work for one person, YOURSELF!. It makes no difference if you work part time, have a salaried position, are a top executive of a corporation or run your own business. You are selling your existence at a set price. Your career goal in life should be based on doing work that you’re passionate about, while saving your time and increasing your profit. This is your life. You have the same existence in this life as any world leader, corporate executive or celebrity. You have your own free will to make decisions to get you exactly where you want to go. There are opportunities around every corner. Go find them!

The word 'inauthentic' is used by Heidegger to describe the ostrich-like attitude of the man who seeks to escape from his inescapable self-responsibility by becoming an anonymous member of a crowd. This is the normal attitude of nearly everybody. To be 'authentic' a man must be constantly and deliberately aware of his total responsibility for what he is. For example, a judge may disclaim personal responsibility for sentencing people to punishment. He will say that as a judge it is his duty to punish. In other words it is as an anonymous representative of the Judiciary that he punishes, and it is the Judiciary that must take the responsibility. This man is inauthentic. If he wishes to be authentic he must think to himself, whenever he sits on the Bench or draws his salary, 'Why do I punish? Because, as a judge, it is my duty to punish. Why am I a judge? Is it perhaps my duty to be a judge? No. I am a judge because I myself choose to be a judge. I choose to be one who punishes in the name of the Law. Can I, if I really wish, choose not to be a judge? Yes, I am absolutely free at any moment to stop being a judge, if I so choose. If this is so, when a guilty man comes up before me for sentence, do I have any alternative but to punish him? Yes, I can get up, walk out of the courtroom, and resign my job. Then if, instead, I punish him, am I responsible? I am totally responsible.

Following someone covertly, either on foot or by car, costs around $175,000 per month—primarily for the salary of the agents doing the following. But if the police can place a tracker in the suspect’s car, or use a fake cell tower device to fool the suspect’s cell phone into giving up its location information, the cost drops to about $70,000 per month, because it only requires one agent. And if the police can hide a GPS receiver in the suspect’s car, suddenly the price drops to about $150 per month—mostly for the surreptitious installation of the device. Getting location information from the suspect’s cell provider is even cheaper: Sprint charges law enforcement only $30 per month. The difference is between fixed and marginal costs. If a police department performs surveillance on foot, following two people costs twice as much as following one person. But with GPS or cell phone surveillance, the cost is primarily for setting up the system. Once it is in place, the additional marginal cost of following one, ten, or a thousand more people is minimal. Or, once someone spends the money designing and building a telephone eavesdropping system that collects and analyzes all the voice calls in Afghanistan, as the NSA did to help defend US soldiers from improvised explosive devices, it’s cheap and easy to deploy that same technology against the telephone networks of other countries.

Our plan? We put into practice that noble historical precept: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. Everybody in the factory, from charwomen to president, received the same salary—the barest minimum necessary. Twice a year, we all gathered in a mass meeting, where every person presented his claim for what he believed to be his needs. We voted on every claim, and the will of the majority established every person’s need and every person’s ability. The income of the factory was distributed accordingly. Rewards were based on need, and the penalties on ability. Those whose needs were voted to be the greatest, received the most. Those who had not produced as much as the vote said they could, were fined and had to pay the fines by working overtime without pay. That was our plan. It was based on the principle of selflessness. It required men to be motivated, not by personal gain, but by love for their brothers.” Dagny heard a cold, implacable voice saying somewhere within her: Remember it—remember it well—it is not often that one can see pure evil—look at it—remember—and some day you’ll find the words to name its essence. . . . She heard it through the screaming of other voices that cried in helpless violence: It’s nothing—I’ve heard it before—I’m hearing it everywhere—it’s nothing but the same old tripe—why can’t I stand it?—I can’t stand it—I can’t stand it! “What’s

If you are a member of Congress, (no offence,) and one of your constituents who doesn’t know anything, and does not want to go into the bother of learning something, and has no money, and no employment, and can’t earn a living, comes besieging you for help, do you say, “Come, my friend, if your services were valuable you could get employment elsewhere — don’t want you here?” Oh, no: You take him to a Department and say, “Here, give this person something to pass away the time at — and a salary” — and the thing is done. You throw him on his country. He is his country’s child, let his country support him. There is something good and motherly about Washington, the grand old benevolent National Asylum for the Helpless.

unemotional as possible when you’re asking for a raise. First, be really honest with yourself and make sure that you deserve the raise that you’re asking for. You do not automatically deserve a raise just because you’ve been somewhere for a certain amount of time. But if you can articulate the reasons why you deserve a pay increase, then schedule time to meet with your boss and let her know in advance what you want to talk about. This can be as simple as “I’d like to schedule some time with you to talk about my salary. Is it okay if we put something on the calendar?” Talk to your boss about this in person. Hitting him up on Gchat is not appropriate. If your company does regular yearly reviews, that can also be your chance to talk about money.

As Dr. Gunnar Biörck, an eminent Swedish professor of medicine and head of the department Of medicine at a major Swedish hospital, has written:   The setting in which medicine has been practiced during thousands of years has been one in which the patient has been the client and employer of the physician. Today the State, in one manifestation or the other, claims to be the employer and, thus, the one to prescribe the conditions under which the physician has to carry out his work. These conditions may not—and will eventually not—be restricted to working hours, salaries and certified drugs; they may invade the whole territory of the patient-physician relationship.... If the battle of today is not fought and not won, there will be no battle to fight tomorrow.20

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.

Tom Demarco, a principal of the Atlantic Systems Guild team of consultants ... and his colleague Timothy Lister devised a study called the Coding War Games. The purpose of the games was to identify the characteristics of the best and worst computer programmers; more than six hundred developers from ninety-two different companies participated. Each designed, coded, and tested a program, working in his normal office space during business hours. Each participant was also assigned a partner from the same company. The partners worked separately, however, without any communication, a feature of the games that turned out to be critical. When the results came in, they revealed an enormous performance gap. The best outperformed the worst by a 10:1 ratio. The top programmers were also about 2.5 times better than the median. When DeMarco and Lister tried to figure out what accounted for this astonishing range, the factors that you'd think would matter — such as years of experience, salary, even the time spent completing the work — had little correlation to outcome. Programmers with 10 years' experience did no better than those with two years. The half who performed above the median earned less than 10 percent more than the half below — even though they were almost twice as good. The programmers who turned in "zero-defect" work took slightly less, not more, time to complete the exercise than those who made mistakes. It was a mystery with one intriguing clue: programmers from the same companies performed at more or less the same level, even though they hadn't worked together. That's because top performers overwhelmingly worked for companies that gave their workers the most privacy, personal space, control over their physical environments, and freedom from interruption. Sixty-two percent of the best performers said that their workspace was acceptably private, compared to only 19 percent of the worst performers; 76 percent of the worst performers but only 38 percent of the top performers said that people often interrupted them needlessly.

Aboard the crowded ships, the men grew restless, and some began asking why their promised semiannual salary payment had not yet been made. They sent a petition to Sir James Houblon, asking that salaries be paid out to the sailors or their wives, as previously agreed. In response, Houblon told his agent to put several petitioners in irons and lock them in the ships’ dank brigs. Such reaction did not put the sailors’ minds at rest. While visiting other vessels in La Coruna’s sleepy harbor, some of the married sailors were able to send word back to their wives in England. A letter informed the women of their husbands’ plight and urged them to meet Houblon in person to demand the wages they no doubt needed to survive. The women then confronted Houblon, a wealthy merchant and founding deputy governor of the Bank of England, whose brother was chief governor of the Bank and would soon become Lord Mayor of London. His response chilled them to the bone. The ships and their men were now under the king of Spain’s control and as far as he was concerned the king could “pay them or hang them if he pleased.

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.

unfairness can take many forms. It can take the form of the inheritance of property—bonds and stocks, houses, factories; it can also take the form of the inheritance of talent—musical ability, strength, mathematical genius. The inheritance of property can be interfered with more readily than the inheritance of talent. But from an ethical point of view, is there any difference between the two? Yet many people resent the inheritance of property but not the inheritance of talent. Look at the same issue from the point of view of the parent. If you want to assure your child a higher income in life, you can do so in various ways. You can buy him (or her) an education that will equip him to pursue an occupation yielding a high income; or you can set him up in a business that will yield a higher income than he could earn as a salaried employee; or you can leave him property, the income from which will enable him to live better. Is there any ethical difference among these three ways of using your property? Or again, if the state leaves you any money to spend over and above taxes, should the state permit you to spend it on riotous living but not to leave it to your children?

On April 30, 1921, President Warren G. Harding appointed Reily, a former assistant postmaster in Kansas City, governor of Puerto Rico as a political payoff. Reily took his oath of office in Kansas City, then attended to “personal business” for another two and a half months before finally showing up for work on July 30.24 By that time, he had already announced to the island press that (1) he was “the boss now,” (2) the island must become a US state, (3) any Puerto Rican who opposed statehood was a professional agitator, (4) there were thousands of abandoned children in Puerto Rico, and (5) the governorship of Puerto Rico was “the best appointment that President Harding could award” because its salary and “perquisites” would total $54,000 a year.25 Just a few hours after disembarking, the assistant postmaster marched into San Juan’s Municipal Theater and uncorked one of the most reviled inaugural speeches in Puerto Rican history. He announced that there was “no room on this island for any flag other than the Stars and Stripes. So long as Old Glory waves over the United States, it will continue to wave over Puerto Rico.” He then pledged to fire anyone who lacked “Americanism.” He promised to make “English, the language of Washington, Lincoln and Harding, the primary one in Puerto Rican schools

Avoiding School or Dropping Out Unfortunately, school sometimes becomes so difficult for people with social anxiety that they start avoiding it as much as they can. This has a serious effect on a person’s future. It is difficult to get a good job with a decent salary if you do not have a high school diploma. If you drop out, you are setting yourself up for a difficult time. Cedric has always had a hard time in school because of his extreme social anxiety. He feels uncomfortable with his classmates and avoids speaking with them. During classes, he always sits in the back and never participates. When teachers call on him, he usually mumbles “I don’t know.” As a result of his social anxiety, he has low self-esteem and suffers from depression. One day, he decided that it didn’t matter if he went to school or not. Some mornings, he hides in the yard until his mother leaves for work, and then he stays in his room all day. Other times, he wanders around the woods. Cedric has no idea what he wants to do with his life. He knows it is only a matter of time before his mother finds out he has been missing school. He wishes he could just hide and hibernate. Deep down, he knows he has a problem, but he doesn’t know what to do about it. Secretly, he hopes his mother forces him to see a therapist because he is afraid of what the rest of his life is going to be like.

Article V For the most convenient management of the general interests of the United States, delegates shall be annually appointed in such manner as the legislatures of each State shall direct, to meet in Congress on the first Monday in November, in every year, with a powerreserved to each State to recall its delegates, or any of them, at any time within the year, and to send others in their stead for the remainder of the year. No State shall be represented in Congress by less than two, nor more than seven members; and no person shall be capable of being a delegate for more than three years in any term of six years; nor shall any person, being a delegate, be capable of holding any office under the United States, for which he, or another for his benefit, receives any salary, fees or emolument of any kind. Each State shall maintain its own delegates in a meeting of the States, and while they act as members of the committee of the States. In determining questions in the United States in Congress assembled, each State shall have one vote. Freedom of speech and debate in Congress shall not be impeached or questioned in any court or place out of Congress, and the members of Congress shall be protected in their persons from arrests or imprisonments, during the time of their going to and from, and attendence on Congress, except for treason, felony, or breach of the peace.

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.

In a sense the rise of Anabaptism was no surprise. Most revolutionary movements produce a wing of radicals who feel called of God to reform the reformation. And that is what Anabaptism was, a voice calling the moderate reformers to strike even more deeply at the foundations of the old order. Like most counterculture movements, the Anabaptists lacked cohesiveness. No single body of doctrine and no unifying organization prevailed among them. Even the name Anabaptist was pinned on them by their enemies. It meant rebaptizer and was intended to associate the radicals with heretics in the early church and subject them to severe persecution. The move succeeded famously. Actually, the Anabaptists rejected all thoughts of rebaptism because they never considered the ceremonial sprinkling they received in infancy as valid baptism. They much preferred Baptists as a designation. To most of them, however, the fundamental issue was not baptism. It was the nature of the church and its relation to civil governments. They had come to their convictions like most other Protestants: through Scripture. Luther had taught that common people have a right to search the Bible for themselves. It had been his guide to salvation; why not theirs? As a result, little groups of Anabaptist believers gathered about their Bibles. They discovered a different world in the pages of the New Testament. They found no state-church alliance, no Christendom. Instead they discovered that the apostolic churches were companies of committed believers, communities of men and women who had freely and personally chosen to follow Jesus. And for the sixteenth century, that was a revolutionary idea. In spite of Luther’s stress on personal religion, Lutheran churches were established churches. They retained an ordained clergy who considered the whole population of a given territory members of their church. The churches looked to the state for salary and support. Official Protestantism seemed to differ little from official Catholicism. Anabaptists wanted to change all that. Their goal was the “restitution” of apostolic Christianity, a return to churches of true believers. In the early church, they said, men and women who had experienced personal spiritual regeneration were the only fit subjects for baptism. The apostolic churches knew nothing of the practice of baptizing infants. That tradition was simply a convenient device for perpetuating Christendom: nominal but spiritually impotent Christian society. The true church, the radicals insisted, is always a community of saints, dedicated disciples in a wicked world. Like the missionary monks of the Middle Ages, the Anabaptists wanted to shape society by their example of radical discipleship—if necessary, even by death. They steadfastly refused to be a part of worldly power including bearing arms, holding political office, and taking oaths. In the sixteenth century this independence from social and civic society was seen as inflammatory, revolutionary, or even treasonous.

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’.

For millennia, sages have proclaimed how outer beauty reflects inner goodness. While we may no longer openly claim that, beauty-is-good still holds sway unconsciously; attractive people are judged to be more honest, intelligent, and competent; are more likely to be elected or hired, and with higher salaries; are less likely to be convicted of crimes, then getting shorter sentences. Jeez, can’t the brain distinguish beauty from goodness? Not especially. In three different studies, subjects in brain scanners alternated between rating the beauty of something (e.g., faces) or the goodness of some behavior. Both types of assessments activated the same region (the orbitofrontal cortex, or OFC); the more beautiful or good, the more OFC activation (and the less insula activation). It’s as if irrelevant emotions about beauty gum up cerebral contemplation of the scales of justice. Which was shown in another study—moral judgments were no longer colored by aesthetics after temporary inhibition of a part of the PFC that funnels information about emotions into the frontal cortex.[*] “Interesting,” the subject is told. “Last week, you sent that other person to prison for life. But just now, when looking at this other person who had done the same thing, you voted for them for Congress—how come?” And the answer isn’t “Murder is definitely bad, but OMG, those eyes are like deep, limpid pools.” Where did the intent behind the decision come from? The fact that the brain hasn’t had enough time yet to evolve separate circuits for evaluating morality and aesthetics.[6] Next, want to make someone more likely to choose to clean their hands? Have them describe something crummy and unethical they’ve done. Afterward, they’re more likely to wash their hands or reach for hand sanitizer than if they’d been recounting something ethically neutral they’d done. Subjects instructed to lie about something rate cleansing (but not noncleansing) products as more desirable than do those instructed to be honest. Another study showed remarkable somatic specificity, where lying orally (via voice mail) increased the desire for mouthwash, while lying by hand (via email) made hand sanitizers more desirable. One neuroimaging study showed that when lying by voice mail boosts preference for mouthwash, a different part of the sensory cortex activates than when lying by email boosts the appeal of hand sanitizers. Neurons believing, literally, that your mouth or hand, respectively, is dirty.

Liberty is poorly served by men whose good intent is quelled from one failure or two failures or any number of failures, or from the casual indifference or ingratitude of the people, or from the sharp show of the tushes of power, or the bringing to bear soldiers and cannon or any penal statutes. Liberty relies upon itself, invites no one, promises nothing, sits in calmness and light, is positive and composed, and knows no discouragement. The battle rages with many a loud alarm and frequent advance and retreat…the enemy triumphs…the prison, the handcuffs, the iron necklace and anklet, the scaffold, garrote and leadballs do their work…the cause is asleep…the strong throats are choked with their own blood…the young men drop their eyelashes toward the ground when they pass each other…and is liberty gone out of that place? No never. When liberty goes it is not the first to go nor the second or third to go…it waits for all the rest to go…it is the last…When the memories of the old martyrs are faded utterly away…when the large names of patriots are laughed at in the public halls from the lips of the orators…when the boys are no more christened after the same but christened after tyrants and traitors instead…when the laws of the free are grudgingly permitted and laws for informers and bloodmoney are sweet to the taste of the people…when I and you walk abroad upon the earth stung with compassion at the sight of numberless brothers answering our equal friendship and calling no man master—and when we are elated with noble joy at the sight of slaves…when the soul retires in the cool communion of the night and surveys its experience and has much extasy over the word and deed that put back a helpless innocent person into the gripe of the gripers or into any cruel inferiority…when those in all parts of these states who could easier realize the true American character but do not yet—when the swarms of cringers, suckers, dough-faces, lice of politics, planners of sly involutions for their own preferment to city offices or state legislatures or the judiciary or congress or the presidency, obtain a response of love and natural deference from the people whether they get the offices or no…when it is better to be a bound booby and rogue in office at a high salary than the poorest free mechanic or farmer with his hat unmoved from his head and firm eyes and a candid and generous heart…and when servility by town or state or the federal government or any oppression on a large scale or small scale can be tried on without its own punishment following duly after in exact proportion against the smallest chance of escape…or rather when all life and all the souls of men and women are discharged from any part of the earth—then only shall the instinct of liberty be discharged from that part of the earth.

Late in the nineteenth century came the first signs of a “Politics in a New Key”: the creation of the first popular movements dedicated to reasserting the priority of the nation against all forms of internationalism or cosmopolitanism. The decade of the 1880s—with its simultaneous economic depression and broadened democratic practice—was a crucial threshold. That decade confronted Europe and the world with nothing less than the first globalization crisis. In the 1880s new steamships made it possible to bring cheap wheat and meat to Europe, bankrupting family farms and aristocratic estates and sending a flood of rural refugees into the cities. At the same time, railroads knocked the bottom out of what was left of skilled artisanal labor by delivering cheap manufactured goods to every city. At the same ill-chosen moment, unprecedented numbers of immigrants arrived in western Europe—not only the familiar workers from Spain and Italy, but also culturally exotic Jews fleeing oppression in eastern Europe. These shocks form the backdrop to some developments in the 1880s that we can now perceive as the first gropings toward fascism. The conservative French and German experiments with a manipulated manhood suffrage that I alluded to earlier were extended in the 1880s. The third British Reform Bill of 1884 nearly doubled the electorate to include almost all adult males. In all these countries, political elites found themselves in the 1880s forced to adapt to a shift in political culture that weakened the social deference that had long produced the almost automatic election of upper-class representatives to parliament, thereby opening the way to the entry of more modest social strata into politics: shopkeepers, country doctors and pharmacists, small-town lawyers—the “new layers” (nouvelles couches) famously summoned forth in 1874 by Léon Gambetta, soon to be himself, the son of an immigrant Italian grocer, the first French prime minister of modest origins. Lacking personal fortunes, this new type of elected representative lived on their parliamentarians’ salary and became the first professional politicians. Lacking the hereditary name recognition of the “notables” who had dominated European parliaments up to then, the new politicians had to invent new kinds of support networks and new kinds of appeal. Some of them built political machines based upon middle-class social clubs, such as Freemasonry (as Gambetta’s Radical Party did in France); others, in both Germany and France, discovered the drawing power of anti-Semitism and nationalism. Rising nationalism penetrated at the end of the nineteenth century even into the ranks of organized labor. I referred earlier in this chapter to the hostility between German-speaking and Czech-speaking wage earners in Bohemia, in what was then the Habsburg empire. By 1914 it was going to be possible to use nationalist sentiment to mobilize parts of the working class against other parts of it, and even more so after World War I. For all these reasons, the economic crisis of the 1880s, as the first major depression to occur in the era of mass politics, rewarded demagoguery. Henceforth a decline in the standard of living would translate quickly into electoral defeats for incumbents and victories for political outsiders ready to appeal with summary slogans to angry voters.

The spotlight wears people out, puts them in a slump. Those who sped up too much from the beginning, without a gradual process of growth and change, become unhappy in the end, and at times, collapse to the point where they can't make a comeback. They may just use up their happiness in advance, like an advanced salary. If there's a fixed amount of happiness allotted each person, and the happiness could be allocated according to one's will, would it be better to place it early on in life, or later?

this will come with the expectation that you might ask about work hours or salary. This is the perfect time to make the shift and ask them more about themselves, check around for personal things in their office that might need to be asked about; maybe a diploma that reflects their alma mater. Just think of any conversation that you can engage it and will break the ‘mold’ to set you apart from a forest of identical resumes.

When evaluating a new client for degree of independence, I consider four factors: 1. Emotional issues: Does the person have good resources within himself or herself for coping independently with emotional issues that come up, or does he or she turn to parents not only for advice, but for cues as to how to react to the event in question? 2. Financial issues: Does the adult child earn an adequate living on his or her own, or does he or she rely heavily on parental input for things such as job contacts, supplemental funds, or housing? 3. Practical issues/interactive situations: Can the person manage day-to-day living, finances, nutrition, exercise, and housekeeping? 4. Career/Education issues: Does the person have a rewarding job or career that is commensurate with his or her abilities and offers the potential for further success? Is the person willing to learn new things to increase his or her productivity or compensation? These are the basic skills of living, many of which are addressed in the social ability questionnaire. Just as there are levels of social functioning, so too there are levels of independent functioning. All three of the following levels describe an adult with some degree of dependency problems. A healthy adult is someone who is independent financially, is able to manage practical and interactive issues, and who stays in touch with family but does not rely almost solely on family for emotional support. Level 1—Low Functioning Emotional issues: Lives at home with parent(s) or away from home in a fully structured or supervised environment. Financial issues: Contributes virtually nothing financially to the running of the household. Practical issues: Chooses clothes to wear that day, but does not manage own wardrobe (i.e., laundry, shopping, etc.). Relies on family members to buy food and prepare meals. Does few household chores, if any. May try a few tasks when asked, but seldom follows through until the job is finished. Career/education issues: Is not table to keep a job, and therefore does not earn an independent living. Extremely resistant to learning new skills or changing responsibilities. Level 2: Moderately functioning Emotional issues: Lives either at home or nearby and calls home every day. Relies on parents to discuss all details of daily life, from what happened at work or school that day to what to wear the next day. Will call home for advice rather than trying to figure something out for him- or herself. Financial issues: May rely on parents for supplemental income—parents may supply car, apartment, etc. May be employed by parents at an inflated salary for a job with very few responsibilities. May be irresponsible about paying bills. Practical issues: Is able to make daily decisions about clothing, but may rely on parents when shopping for clothing and other items. Neglects household responsibilities such as laundry, cleaning and meal planning. Career/education issues: Has a job, but is unable to cope with much on-the-job stress; job is therefore only minimally challenging, or a major source of anxiety—discussed in detail with Mom and Dad. Level 3: Functioning Emotional issues: Lives away from home. Calls home a few times a week, relies on family for emotional support and most socializing. Few friends. Practical issues: Handles all aspects of daily household management independently. Financial issues: Is financially independent, pays bills on time. Career/education issues: Has achieved some moderate success at work. Is willing to seek new information, even to take an occasional class to improve skills.

Listed below are three basic rules that will help you become a successful candidate. Remember, however, that you need not be offered a job in every case to consider yourself successful. Rather, you are successful if you keep the job search process going in a professional manner. In working with countless people in the process of looking for a job, I have concluded that, for those who are currently unemployed, the full-time job should be just that: looking for a job. For those who currently have a job, but are openly seeking a better position with new challenges or a higher salary, take comfort in knowing you are working from a position of strength; use that knowledge to add to your self-esteem. In all cases, see yourself from the employer’s point of view. In their eyes, you are a more likely candidate if you behave professionally before and after the interview (with appropriate inquiry and follow-up—more on that later) and if you interact appropriately during the interview itself. As you continue to look for a job, remember the following tips for success: 1. When you call about a job prospect, get as much information as you can about the position and the company—including the name of the person doing the interviewing. Don’t be put off by feelings of anxiety—you have a right to “interview” them too. If possible, go to the library and research the company. By the time of your interview, you will feel more confident—and less anxious—because you will have resources from which to draw during your conversation. 2. If you have time to mail your resume before your scheduled interview, do so. But be sure to include a cover letter as well. While the resume gives background information about you, the cover letter explains why you are writing and briefly describes what makes you a good candidate for the job. Don’t allow low self-esteem to make you afraid to “sell yourself!” Only you can say why you would be an asset to the company. And one more thing—write the letter to a particular person, not “To Whom It May Concern” or “Dear Sir or Madam.” Most of the time, a prospective employer’s receptionist is willing to tell you exactly whom to contact. Use courtesy titles (“Dear Mrs. Smith”), unless the person is someone you already know on a first-name basis. 3. Do follow up. An appropriate measure of assertiveness goes a long way. Most employers appreciate someone who is diligent and communicates a genuine interest in the position. But don’t be aggressive. Limit your contact to a follow-up note, a phone call two weeks later, and perhaps a third one a few weeks after that. Be sure to let them know that if another, more appropriate, position comes along, you would be interested to learn about it. Again, by communicating properly and creating your own opportunities, you can achieve some control over your own destiny.

There is a deeper satisfaction if you earn from your own work than relying on corruptible ways of amassing riches.

Know Singapore’s Credit Bureau to Get License Money Lender Approval Do you ever wonder how a licensed money lender like banks get the information they need to decide whether they will approve your loan or not? In this article, you’ll know the Credit Bureau Singapore (CBS) role on the moneylenders’ process of lending money. History of CBS Association of Banks in Singapore (ABS) and DBIC Holdings owns CBS. It was founded on November 15, 2002, and its key role is to serve as a financial risk management tool for financial institutions. Among CBS founders’ are Citibank, United Overseas Bank (UOB), Development Bank of Singapore (DBS), Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation (OCBC), American Express, ANZ, Maybank, HSBC and Standard Chartered Bank. Key Role of CBS on Licensed Money Lender Loan Approval The CBS is a private company established to help financial companies and credit card institutions to evaluate the threats and opportunities of giving credit to possible or current customers. To put simply, when you apply for a loan, the CBS gives the licensed moneylender your credit report. This credit report reflects your credit information such as credit history, repayment track, and in some cases default records, lawsuit, and bankruptcy reports. This valuable information is collected from financial institutions and other public data resources (like subpoena and data of bankruptcy) which is part of CBS. The Banking Act allows the CB to get such customer’s confidential data and produce a “complete risk profile.” CBS follows a stringent code of conduct to protect the consumer’s data privacy. Only the official members of CBS can access and use the credit information. Licensed money lender should not disclose any information about their clients’ credit background to any third party. The CB also cannot collect customer’s personal data such as contact numbers, home address, credit limit, and salary. Now that you finally know who helps licensed money lender to decide your loan’s approval, you should now know that borrowing money is not as simple as it sounds. Multiple agencies are working together to check whether you are worthy of the money.

Know Singapore’s Credit Bureau to Get License Money Lender Approval Do you ever wonder how a licensed money lender like banks get the information they need to decide whether they will approve your loan or not? In this article, you’ll know the Credit Bureau Singapore (CBS) role on the moneylenders’ process of lending money. History of CBS Association of Banks in Singapore (ABS) and DBIC Holdings owns CBS. It was founded on November 15, 2002, and its key role is to serve as a financial risk management tool for financial institutions. Among CBS founders’ are Citibank, United Overseas Bank (UOB), Development Bank of Singapore (DBS), Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation (OCBC), American Express, ANZ, Maybank, HSBC and Standard Chartered Bank. Key Role of CBS on Licensed Money Lender Loan Approval The CBS is a private company established to help financial companies and credit card institutions to evaluate the threats and opportunities of giving credit to possible or current customers. To put simply, when you apply for a loan, the CBS gives the licensed moneylender your credit report. This credit report reflects your credit information such as credit history, repayment track, and in some cases default records, lawsuit, and bankruptcy reports. This valuable information is collected from financial institutions and other public data resources (like subpoena and data of bankruptcy) which is part of CBS. The Banking Act allows the CB to get such customer’s confidential data and produce a “complete risk profile.” CBS follows a stringent code of conduct to protect the consumer’s data privacy. Only the official members of CBS can access and use the credit information. Licensed money lender should not disclose any information about their clients’ credit background to any third party. The CB also cannot collect customer’s personal data such as contact numbers, home address, credit limit, and salary. Now that you finally know who helps licensed money lender to decide your loan’s approval, you should now know that borrowing money is not as simple as it sounds. Multiple agencies are working together to check whether you are worthy of the money.

It is worth pondering how much of our struggle with avarice is linked to a tendency to value things solely in terms of their usefulness. When the older generation laments that they are only a burden to society, since they are no longer capable of useful work or productive labor, and their medical care is a constant drain on others’ resources, have they internalized a system of value that measures people’s true worth in terms of a cost–benefit analysis? Time spent with children also becomes “unprofitable” in more than one sense, for we have precious little in the way of tangible payoff to show for such investments. The very use of metaphors of financial transactions to describe personal care for other human beings points to a conceptual framework tilted toward the distortions of avarice. The salary charts for the helping professions, especially compared to the salaries of those who work in financial fields managing investments, also point not so subtly to implicit assumptions of what is truly of value and worth. We are measured by our usefulness, and our usefulness is measured by the production of things and the possession of money. Greed now invades human life and its value in this subtler way as well.

They must constantly negotiate among their own moral and spiritual instincts, the interests of their institutions, their personal concerns about their own salaries and retirement accounts, and professional and social status. In short, they must master the art of ethical compromise as a matter of vocational survival

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.

teaching was an underpaid and underappreciated profession. He’d said it drained the life out of people. He’d said the system takes advantage of teachers and sets them up to fail, so why would any intelligent, reasonable person with an aptitude for science or mathematics or engineering ever willingly accept a teacher’s salary to do a teacher’s job?

The goal of an interview session is to find the right person fit for the job, not just to fill a role. It is finding the right cord that will spark the fire that makes stuffs work in real-time, and it is a two way thing for both the interviewer and the interviewee.

In a married couple’s joint tax return, the couple must ‘stack’ their wages. The higher earner (given the gender pay gap this is usually the man) is designated the ‘primary earner’, and their income occupies the lower tax bracket. The lower earner (usually the woman) becomes the ‘secondary earner’, and their income occupies the higher tax bracket. To return to our couple earning $60,000 and $20,000, the person earning $20,000 will be taxed on that income as if it is the final $20,000 of an $80,000 salary, rather than all she earns. That is, she will pay a much higher rate of tax on that income than if she filed independently of her higher-earning husband.

I have never made much money, but this hasn't bothered me. I don't care what I'm paid. I have never had a shared bank account. I do not keep track of how much money is in my bank account. I am not stingy, I admire money well spent. I am not saving for my retirement. I have lived for several years without insurance.

Since I opened the account here,' I said, 'I've been given a NIE. It's here on my resident's permit.' I pushed it through the hatch to him. 'Ah yes,' he repeated. 'Excellent. A NIE. Yes, yes, the computer in Bilbao will like this. Turning to his screen, he tapped in my NIE. 'Yes, very good. You now exist. Excellent, excellent.' Returning my precious permit and congratulating me once again on my new-found existence, Carlos bid me good day, and soon after, three months' salary duly arrived. In the following two years, I slipped in and out of existence three times in as many minutes as an official at an office called 'El Tráfico' juggled with my NIE, my lack of NIF and yet another number – one till then unknown to me – my special personal NIT (Número de Identidad del Tráfico), which for a Spaniard is naturally the same number as their NIF, but for an alien, is a unique non-NIF, non-NIE number. CAM? (Clear as Mud?) Also, in the intervening two years the Maastricht Treaty had come into effect, making the Spaniards and me – and even, heaven forbid, the French

single persons are often excluded from discounted health benefits, greater social security options, lower tax bills, and higher salaries.

In order to fortify the talent density in your workforce, for all creative roles hire one exceptional employee instead of ten or more average ones. Hire this amazing person at the top of whatever range they are worth on the market. Adjust their salary at least annually in order to continue to offer them more than competitors would. If you can’t afford to pay your best employees top of market, then let go of some of the less fabulous people in order to do so. That way, the talent will become even denser.

We’ve been against performance reviews from the beginning. The first problem is that the feedback goes only one way—downward. The second difficulty is that with a performance review you get feedback from only one person—your boss. This is in direct opposition to our “don’t seek to please your boss” vibe. I want people to receive feedback not just from their direct managers but from anyone who has feedback to provide. The third issue is that companies usually base performance reviews on annual goals. But employees and their managers don’t set annual goals or KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) at Netflix. Likewise, many companies use performance reviews to determine pay raises, but at Netflix we base salaries on the market, not performance.

Felix has six people reporting to him. Each of them have ten people under them who, in turn, manage teams of about a dozen people who are client facing. Felix realized that while the tathastu of the company (revenue) came from the market, the tathastu of the employee (salary) came from the head office via the boss. Hence the gaze was typically upstream not downstream. People were more interested in boss management than customer management. To change this orientation, when he became head, Felix put the names of his six team members on a notice board in front of his desk. "You are the people who will help me succeed if I help you succeed," he told them in a team meeting. Next to each one's name he put down their individual short-term goals, first personal and then professional. Every week he would take time out to discuss these goals. As the months passed, he noticed each of his team members had similar sheets of papers on their notice boards, with the names of their respective team members. They were mimicking downstream what they were experiencing upstream. Were they being sincere or strategic? Felix did not know, but at least he ensured that his people focused a little more of their attention downstream than upstream.

...the dissemination of what is called 'news' is always an anti-social and disturbing act; that 'news' consists as to ninety per cent, of the records of human misfortune, unhappiness, and wrongdoing, as to nine per cent of personal advertisement, as to one per cent of instructive and improving matter; that the study of the newspapers is harmful to the citizen because (a) by the their insistence upon railway accidents, floods, divorces, murders, fires, successful robberies, the rates of taxation and other evils, and (b) by the prominence which they give to exceptionally good fortune, the winners of large sweepstakes, the salaries and faces of beautiful actresses, and the occasional success of what are known, it appears, as 'outsiders', [one] is led to the conclusion that industry, thrift and virtue are not worth pursuing in a world so much governed by incalculable chances; and, in general, that the conditions of mind most fostered by the news of the day are curiosity, cupidity, envy, indignation, horror, and fear.

MANY YEARS AGO, I had joined the local news desk of a prominent newspaper in Bengaluru, the sleepy south Indian town that became the country’s Silicon Valley. After trying my hand at crime reporting and general business journalism, I developed an interest in tracking technology. Among other things in the mid noughties, I had half a page in the paper to feature new gadgets every week. Nokia, Blackberry, Samsung and a few other companies were regulars on the page. While I was enjoying my work, my salary needed a boost. (The media industry’s decline was just about beginning, and salaries were as poor then as they are today.) Getting out of the rather difficult circumstances that I found myself in, I moved on to the Economic Times to report on technology. The business daily was India’s largest pink paper by circulation, and I worked with some of the best journalists of the time. My job was mainly to write about technology services companies. Soon I got bored with tracking quarterly results and rehearsed statements. This was around 2012, and India’s start-up ecosystem was in its infancy. I quit the paper to join a start-up blog. I didn’t ask for a raise. I was just happy to be able to write about start-ups and their founders. It was something new, and their excitement was infectious. In those days, ‘start-up’ was not a mainstream beat in India. Only niche blogs wrote about them. On the personal front, there were months when I was flat broke. One evening I sold my old Nokia 5800 for ₹300 at a second-hand electronics shop to buy a packet of biryani. That is still the best biryani I’ve ever had. The two years at the start-up blog were also my best two years ever. As start-ups became the buzzword, I went back to the pink paper to write about them. I was able to upgrade my life a little. I moved into a middle-class apartment with my family. I got some furniture and so on. After selling the Nokia phone, I used a feature phone for a few days. But now I had to upgrade my phone. After much research, I zeroed in on a Micromax handset. Micromax, a Gurgaon-based company that began making handsets in 2008, had some smartphones that were affordable on a young journalist’s salary. It was also a leading brand and had some interesting features such as dual SIM and a great touchscreen display. Going from a phone that ran on Symbian (Nokia’s proprietary operating system that failed) to an Android-based phone was like suddenly being

it’s really not much different from a personal development seminar,” Sara said. “Basically a quick, impromptu brainwashing course to educate your typical corporate warriors. They use a training manual instead of sacred scriptures, with promotion and a high salary as their equivalent of enlightenment and paradise. A new religion for a pragmatic age. No transcendent elements like in a religion, though, and everything is theorized and digitalized. Very transparent and easy to grasp. And quite a few people get positive encouragement from this. But the fact remains that it’s nothing more than an infusion of the hypnotic into a system of thought that suits their goal, a conglomeration of only those theories and statistics that line up with their ultimate objectives.

It is not tedium that one feels. It is not grief. It is the desire to go to sleep clothed in a different personality, to forget, dulled by an increase in salary.

The early Christians didn’t have megachurches where people watched a pastor with a $250,000 salary preach via a Jumbotron from a satellite campus; they didn’t “worship” beside people they’d seen several times before but never actually met, and they didn’t preach a hyper-capitalistic, American version of Christianity. The first Christians lived in the context of community and wrestled with an emerging theology among a tight-knit group of friends—friends who shared every aspect of their lives together, including their wealth. They did life together, in every respect. The undiluted version looked a lot different from American versions of Christianity. Western, individualistic culture invites us to embrace our independence and champion our ability to do this all on our own, but the life of Jesus invites us to embrace a healthy interdependency on others. The radical message of Jesus invites us to express and wrestle with our faith in a lifestyle of unbroken community with others. In Western culture however, living in community often is against the flow of how our society works. As culture has morphed deeper and deeper into a strictly individualistic-oriented culture, we now find ourselves in a world where it is not uncommon to not even know the name of our neighbors in the house next to us. What’s even scarier is that we might not even know the person sitting in the church pew next to us.

If managers looked to the inspiration for the technologies they deploy, they would find it comes from a scientific method that has no connection to the cramped, fearful ideologies of the managerial economy. The scientific method insists that researchers must go where the evidence leads, whatever the consequences. Status, salary and position should offer no protection from criticism, because no idea or person is sacred.

. . . stop being part of the social norms of writing and teaching, which then leads to the point, stop being a capitalist person, one who works for a salary to teach writing in a form that’s acceptable to capitalism, which then leads further to the point, exit social norms imposed upon you, do not have a lifestyle that requires living by capitalist rules even outside the teaching and practice of writing—which ultimately is the only way to a real literary community, which is based on real art, and you see how impossible a track I’m on?

When people gather and discuss in a group, independence of thought and expression can be lost. Maybe one person is a loudmouth who dominates the discussion, or a bully, or a superficially impressive talker, or someone with credentials that cow others into line. In so many ways, a group can get people to abandon independent judgment and buy into errors. When that happens, the mistakes will pile up, not cancel out. This is the root of collective folly, whether it’s Dutch investors in the seventeenth century, who became collectively convinced that a tulip bulb was worth more than a laborer’s annual salary, or American home buyers in 2005, talking themselves into believing that real estate prices could only go up. But loss of independence isn’t inevitable in a group, as JFK’s team showed during the Cuban missile crisis. If forecasters can keep questioning themselves and their teammates, and welcome vigorous debate, the group can become more than the sum of its parts.