money by mistake

line of shame

2010-01-20T23:49:00.000-08:00

"Thousands upon thousands are yearly brought into a state of real poverty by their great anxiety not to be thought poor." --William Cobbett (1763 – 1835)

Lost causes are my secret love. Erasing the dividing line between the rich and the poor is my favorite. But, what am I talking about?

Hardly anything is as difficult to define as the line that separates the poor and the rich. Tell me what it is exactly, where you think this ominous line is located, and I am confident we won't find a second human being who agrees with you.

That is one third of the problem.

The second problematic part is that some individuals insist on the existence of a poverty-wealth chasm, and they are determined to alter its position toward equality. Something we cannot define is supposed to be moved from one mythical location to another.

The possible consequences of such endeavor make me shudder. Nothing useful can come from it. On the contrary, well-intentioned help often helps the helper more than anybody else, and it fosters "the very culture of dependence [it] so desperately needs to break." (Bret Stephens, Wall Street Journal, in a recent article "To Help Haiti, End Foreign Aid")

Oh, you mean equality can be defined and it is not a vague concept at all? True, but that's not the kind of equality the noble equalizers have in mind. Remember Orwell's Animal Farm: "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." People love to share other people's money but, when that is gone, they loathe sharing everybody's lack. Taking money from "the rich" and giving it to "the poor" never includes the money of those who ask for such preposterous transactions.

At any rate, here is the worst portion of the tricky rich-poor dilemma: talking about both the rich and the poor is a form of discrimination! All notorious consequences of prejudice are included. "The poor are..." Go ahead and fill in the blanks. "They should..." "The rich are..." "They really ought to..." Whatever you say, it'll be a generalizing label and as false as the numbers on your last lottery ticket.

Seasoning one's speech with rich-poor remarks--to support the poor by taxing the rich, for instance, or to elevate poverty to a status of moral superiority--means one of three things:

a) For the purpose of the greater good, naturally, you expect to gain political mileage from evoking cheap emotions in your audience. You don't hesitate to shamelessly exploit those you claim to defend and, since you recklessly accuse random bystanders of being culprits, you have no real interest to improve the status quo of those in need.

b) You are a faithful of the zero-sum religion and secretly you believe the earth is flat.

c) You are channeling your mom.

Incredibly arrogant accusations? Yes. But accusing people of being poor or rich, the notion that governments should decide how poor or rich a person is permitted to be, and the demand that the law must intrude and change those individuals' lives--now THAT is true arrogance!

Hey, I am not interested in becoming a language Nazi. What do I care about your use of four-letter words. Be my guest and keep 'poor' and 'rich' in your preferred vocabulary. The problem I see is the underlying meaning, its inflation, or the utter lack of meaning.

How can the lack of meaning be dangerous? Think of mantras: repeat them a couple of hundred times and their original meaning disappears, giving way to the perfect trance. It's the same with 'rich' and 'poor'. Drop those words and anyone who is listening snaps into a trance and heads begin to nod. It hardly matters what you say after inducing the trance. Nobody will question your motives or the content of your utterances.

It is impossible to use the word 'rich' without triggering a bunch of connotations: awe, jealousy, guilt, disgust, respect, anger,... The list is as endless as it is individual: everything you say about the so-called rich or the so-called poor is your personal projection. Conversations about the poor and the rich are disconnected from facts and reality. They solely revolve around the beliefs of the participants, and the purpose of such discussions is self-righteous masturbation.

Talk about someone's living condition, her illnesses, a person's level of education, achievements, or about an individual's bank balance. It can be done and facts support broad agreement. Is there Malaria? Yep, it's a sad fact. Malaria can be objectively diagnosed. HIV infections and starvation? Unfortunately, yes.

Is there poverty? That is more or less subject to personal judgment, uniquely manufactured in one's mind.

Are there people who generate an annual income in excess of $10 million? Sure there are. Are they rich? If you think so. Do you believe a guy who makes a million bucks a year thinks of himself as rich when he compares himself to an individual who makes $80 million per annum? Doubtful.

From the perspective of 95% of the world's population, the poorest mountain hick in America, driving a 30-year old pickup truck, is a rich guy. A 30-year old Chevy truck is a fact and so is a $30 million dollar mansion. Both can be discussed. Poverty and wealth are elusive: before you can make your point, the fact-supported parts of your subject will have slipped through your fingers.

The infinite power of the invisible:

Homo Sapiens is in awe of everything that can neither be empirically demonstrated nor disproved. God(s), Satan, angels, demons, the soul, love, peace, the hereafter, etc. Wealth and poverty are members of this exalted group of invisible yet infinitely powerful forces, realms, and entities. It's not real power that I am talking about, but imaginary power within a person's mind. Too many brains turn into mush when confronted with that sort of stuff.

Over the millennia we have given power to the meaning of 'poverty'. We even believe we can "see" poor and rich people. I am sorry, but fighting poverty cannot eradicate poverty. It is more like tilting at windmills: "Do you see over yonder, friend Sancho, thirty or forty hulking giants? I intend to do battle with them and slay them. ... For this is a righteous war and the removal of so foul a brood from off the face of the earth is a service God will bless." Don Quixote fought windmills that he imagined to be giants and we fight poverty and against the evil rich simultaneously.

Starvation and Malaria can be successfully fought, and I am ashamed that we haven't made much progress yet, while poverty cannot be overcome. One thing that invites us to hold on to poverty and to our imaginary solutions for the poor is our--equally misguided--idea of the rich: the rich are the reason for and the antidote to poverty, in our mind. The poor don't have money because the rich have it in their pockets. Simplistic zero-sum thinking, or nincompoop economics.

As generous as we are with the invisible and the vast powers we ascribe to the rich, as stingy are we with visible matter. If it is--"it" being money, goods, food--over there, it can't be here. Easily we dismiss the fact that we can indeed produce food for 12 billion people, for twice the current population of planet Earth. Distribution of food or money, etc. is not the solution but rather the reason for disastrous circumstances in developing regions.

It is unintelligent to say that the rich have money because the poor do not. Individuals and corporations who enjoy making money can only make more money off of people who have money themselves. Wal-Mart would love to open a thousand stores in Africa. Bill Gates would be delighted to sell a copy of Windows 7 to every child in North Korea. BMW has planned to set up a dozen dealerships in India by the end of 2010 and have them sell 10,000 cars per year. Don't you think they seek to increase those numbers?

Only complete dorks believe that individuals with money have an interest in others being penniless. Blaming the rich for the poor being poor is no more intelligent than blaming the healthy for the sick being sick.

Here is the problem:

You can't become an activist and expect to eliminate poverty during your lifetime. You could try, but you won't be the first or the last who will fail.

Here is my proposition:

End poverty today! Don't label any human being as poor. Stop referring to any individual as being rich. Make the disgusting line between the poor and the rich disappear. Nothing is easier than that because this shameful line was never existent and only imaginary.

That would be convenient for the rich to get off the hook that easily? No: if you drop your mental and emotional investment in the existence of poverty and in the idea that people can be thought of as poor, you are making room for the freedom of practical creativity and for a rational approach of actual problems.

What do you have to gain from "healing" the world from the poor and from the rich at once? It will purge an unproductive heap of clutter from your mind. The deliberate termination of an outdated idea of wealth and poverty, of poor and rich people, gives way to fresh experimentation. The fear of dying poor ends as well as the fearful hope of striking it rich (and ending up as one of "them").

Discrimination of any kind stifles social and economic development. When people stop being obsessed with each other's differences, they are free to do more of what they want, allowing others to enjoy increased freedom as well.

It takes guts to declare poverty as non-existent, and I don't blame you if you hesitate to do so. But if you don't end poverty today, it will never happen. The rich and the poor may have played important roles in tales of Robin Hood, in Charles Dickens' novels, and in Karl Marx's 'Capital' (Das Kapital), but the whole idea is ripe to be mothballed.

There is nothing to be lost and a world of freedom to be gained: nobody is poor, nobody is rich, and the fateful line between us is gone.

Egbert Sukop

"When I was growing up, our town was so poor our rainbows came in black and white." --Robert D. Cowan

capitalist fool

2010-01-01T17:32:00.000-08:00

capitalism:
"an economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods, by investments that are determined by private decision, and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market"

socialism:
"any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods"

(according to Merriam-Webster)

I am a pig!

A capitalist pig, to be exact. Do you care for freedom? Freedom of speech is one thing but the freedom to conceive, to concoct, to market, and to trade goods and services is as important for adults as a sandlot for children. And yet, a free market will remain a grand illusion. The control freaks of the world won't permit free markets. Too many folks are channeling their mom's forbidding tone of voice: "What if everybody did that?!"

The main reason we don't have free markets is that people don't trust themselves.

Freedom is too frightening for most, and we rather manage our own and other people's small-mindedness than deal with a growing wealth of options. As thrilled as we are watching football and hockey, the average specimen of homo sapiens prefers to be a secondhand adventurer. Safety and stability seem to have a greater value for most than the opportunity to make mistakes and the subsequent discovery of new horizons. Winning looks enticing only when the possibility of losing has been minimized or eliminated in advance. That's as common as it is dangerous: you can't truly win until you have made peace with the painful reality of losing. A poor wretch who can only be happy when he happens to be successful.

Neglecting ourselves, we demand security before we pursue freedom. From the government, as the largest employer in the country, to the dry cleaner at the corner: we expect parental rules, a full fridge, and the mind numbing boredom of a reasonably dysfunctional family life. We surrender freedom and individuality in exchange for nearly guaranteed mortgage payments and food on the table.

Teenagers can afford to be obnoxious and omniscient as long as they enjoy the safety of their parents' house and care. Translate that into the adult world and you realize that hating your job is a luxury, made possible and financed by those who provide you with a job and pay your rent.

Every one of us was born into a socialist environment.

Literally, and it doesn't matter whether you were born in America or in the late Soviet Union. Economically, you were raised in an environment of "collective or governmental (parental) ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods." The school system continued your socialist upbringing with a collectively controlled distribution of information. Free speech? You must be kidding!

Sure, there was some rebellion when we were kids, but after each futile episode we realized with a growl how the benefits of "the system" outweighed its oppressive factors. From day one, we learned that socialism keeps us fed, clothed, and relatively safe.

The parental-socialist environment is conservative in its nature (Websters, "conservative:" tending or disposed to maintain existing views, conditions; marked by moderation or caution; marked by or relating to traditional norms of taste or manners). It is meant to keep the kids out of too much trouble and to guarantee the survival of the family as a unit.

An ideal child-rearing home may have socialist foundations and be conservative at the same time. Yet conservatism describes the opposite end of the spectrum. A paradox? How come? I am afraid I will upset a lot of people within the next minute, but hell, it's not the first time and it won't be the last. Here goes:

Socialism "feels" right, it describes the perfect children's world, and I wish everybody could grow up in such a sheltered paradise. But once a person matures, conscious thinking and the ability to employ reason must increasingly substitute decision making that's based on 'feelings'. The history from socialism to capitalism--personally and collectively--is roughly the evolution from childhood to adulthood.

Have you had a chance to visit a socialist country, Eastern Germany perhaps, before the wall was torn down in 1989? Run by people who enjoy plucking the wings off of butterflies, real-world socialism is a pubertal environment that prevents individuals from development and maturity. Practically it's synonymous with the condemnation to eternal preadolescence.

Often I have heard that not everybody is cut out to become an entrepreneur. True. By their very nature, some individuals must live and work freely. They can't handle the existence of a superior and they despise being part of a corporate structure. Most of our fellow citizens may hate corporations, but they will never question their status quo as employees. They are happier as employees, and it doesn't matter whether they love, merely endure, or outright hate their jobs.

Do what you want to do. I don't judge your life choices. I am writing this for those who are on the fence between employment and the option of self-employment. Perhaps you have done both in succession or one after the other. If you have a job and you will never let it go, why not build a business on the side for fun and profit: have you considered the double-life of a parallel entrepreneur?

Whether you see yourself as a capitalist or as a socialist is not a matter of opinion. Neither is your preferred economical system a reflection of your income. The question is where you intend to go in the future.

That means, if you choose employment--a sort of voluntary enslavement--you may not want to call yourself a capitalist in public. Even if you don't like your work, you are still in support of a governmental or corporate system that buffers you from the cold harsh reality of selling gizmos for food. And, almost by definition, if you are an employee you hate your job and you bite the evil capitalist's hand that feeds you.

If you choose self-employment or entrepreneurship, instead of or parallel to your existing job, you can't afford to be a socialist. It can't be in your interest to denounce capitalism. Well, except when your name is Michael Moore and denouncing capitalism is your business.

Capitalism is hated for the same reasons jobs are being hated: people love to hate the essentials of life, and biting the hands that feed us is a favorite resource of emotional sustenance. Productive employment and its perks depend on capitalists. Therefore we must despise them. It is the fault of evil employers that I have to do this dirty slave work. Right?

We don't even think about the benefits of capitalism without feeling guilty. Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and George Soros are the strongest supporters of the Democratic party, the party of the covertly wealthy. No surprise at all: hardly any capitalist feels free to openly call herself a capitalist, for the same reason you don't take your mink to a PETA convention. It's like proudly announcing that you are the black sheep in the family.

Socialist - capitalist: I couldn't care less what you want to call yourself or how you choose to live your life. But you may give capitalism a second thought. I really don't give a hoot about political and economical theories, right now, or whether you consider yourself rich or poor. That stuff is of secondary importance. What does matter--to you--is this:

Do you care about the freedom of speech? If you do, why would you care less about your freedom to act, produce, and trade? And if you want to live as you choose, what would hold you back to say so?

Capitalism is the material equivalent of the freedom of speech. Hatred of capitalism is similar to being suspicious of life itself. If we can't trust capitalism as an evolutionary frame for the development of our economical affairs, we cannot trust evolution.

And we better ask mom and dad for guidance.

Egbert Sukop

ecstasy in hell

2009-11-04T12:11:00.000-08:00

"Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch'entrate!" (Abandon all hope, you who enter!) --Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy "Inferno" - Inscription at the entrance to Hell.

"There is only the dance. These things you treasure are shells." --William Gibson, Count Zero

The Job Dilemma:

I want to do what I want. But first I need to do what I don't want and make enough money, so that I can do what I want eventually. That frustrating game may keep me on my toes until I retire ... well, unless I can't retire because I may still have to do what I don't want to do when I am seventy.

Can't I just do what I love to do and make money while I'm having fun?

No, you can't!

Oh, you mean you love fishing? You turn your passion for dead stinking fish into a business. Then you'll find yourself behind the counter from 9 to 8, selling worms. On the weekends you will be busy catching up with the paper work.

You are an expert on your tacky tackle, but you'll have no time to go fishing with your buddies! That would be paradise, I understand, but I won't let you off the hook so easily. Follow your annoying passion, turn your favorite hobby into a thriving enterprise, and do what you've always wanted. Fine.

Still, it won't be what you love. You will have to file income taxes and meet with accountants. You'll spend time at your attorney's office, and you will be sued. A tiny percentage of your clientele will be so obnoxious and radically insane that it will rob you of your sleep at night and make your beloved business taste like bitterness, at times.

And that's only if you happen to be successful with your kinky entrepreneurial love affair. Should your romance with your vocation turn sour--your trusted business partner disappears in the night with the payroll that you owe your employees tomorrow; or your enterprise never gets off the ground to begin with--it'll be worse, much worse.

I mean it: you cannot do what you love. Neither can I. It doesn't exist. If you think you love something, it'll divorce you eventually in 50% of all cases. And divorce is known to be the opposite of a win-win situation ... well, except in that rare case when a clever girl plays it just right.

You don't want to engage in a lovely business venture that morphs into a clever girl. You don't want a company that is all over you like your most loyal stalker. And if the term 'reason' means anything to you, love and the rest of your emotional baggage must not have a say in your operation.

The stuff you "love" has you by the throat. You don't control love--by its very definition!

Of course you cannot control the market and how well your goods or services will perform financially. But if you lack basic powers to determine strategy and tactics of your venture, you may think you are in business but you aren't.

What about those who love what they do? They lie! For the sake of their children AND for the sake of their businesses, I hope there is a difference between the way they love their brats or their pathetic jobs.

Whether you are employed or self-employed, you are dealing with elements that aren't typically considered resources of pleasure. Take taxes, for instance. Even if you are sick enough and you love paying them, and even if the preparation of your income tax return is more exciting for you than sex, calculating that stuff gobbles up man power. If you have (wo)man hours to spare, good for you but not so good for your business.

In other words, if you "love" to waste your own or your employees' time with activities as unproductive as filing taxes, something must be wired strangely in your noodle. Taxes are just an example. You and I, we could walk through almost any office or manufacturing plant and within twenty minutes, we both could point out a dozen time or efficiency "leaks." Guaranteed.

Whoever runs such incorporated waste basket, she doesn't "love" it. Trust me. Oh, they may very well protect their habitual inconsistencies and flaws, but they don't love monetary leaks. It's easy not to love awful things. Yet the negative is only a minor reason why people don't fare well loving what they do.

Beware of the parts you do love! That is the tricky portion, able to blind you and deceive you. Love is temporary--you fall in love and you fall out of it. Bad enough for a business you happen to love currently, but worse is the fact that love has a similar potential to deprave us as truth does.

Truth and love deprive us of freedom. They shrink our options of choice. If you personally enjoy being a victim of love and of its cruel crimes: fine. But your business and your livelihood must never be at the mercy of this fickle phenomenon 'love!' It's for suckers.

The alternative:

Do what you want to do. Job or your own business, whatever. Most likely, you are already doing what you want to do, because why else are you at it?! Who cares whether you love or hate your job. It's meaningless. What does matter is that you choose what you do.

It does not matter how much you hate part X or how much you love part Y of your daily work. Both love and hatred are just emotional distractions. They are in your way, hindering you to see and decide clearly.

Extract any and every emotional charge or tension from your business. Withdraw your dumb love, cool your anger, deflate anxiety, and muster the discipline to stop worry as well as hope in their counter-productive tracks.

You don't exchange flaming and emotional correspondence with business partners or government agencies. It would be unprofessional and dangerous. Same applies internally. Your job hates to be loved. Your employees--or your superiors and your colleagues--would find it rather creepy if you passionately expressed your undying love for them all day, non?

Boredom and indifference are perfect portals for ecstasy.

Who?

Once the residue of emotional attachment to your work has been ground down to zero and you are perfectly numb--emotionally, not mentally!--you are ready for Step No. 2:

Inject ECSTASY into every minute of your (work) day!

The drug? Holy Pigflew, NO! Besides obvious legal issues and a bunch of other possible side effects, consumption of Ecstasy would be too temporary, too unpredictable, too expensive, and it would make you once more dependent. Why did you have to bring that up?!

There is no thing that has excited you in your past. No toy, no activity, no guy/girl you were into, and no sum of dough has "made you" jittery and sped up your pulse. If they did, why did that not continue indefinitely? You started it and you cut it off when you had enough. You are the master of your ecstasy.

Except, you are so damn stingy.

Here you may be as generous as you want and it won't cost you a dime. Whatever happens, whatever you do, whatever people say, whether you are fond of your status quo or not: it doesn't matter. You are ecstatic. Fun-adverse environments won't be frustrating and depressing. Hell no: that's where the joy begins. Negative surroundings are a welcome challenge and the icing on top of this adventure.

Well, if that's what you want, naturally. It may not be prudent to let others see your glossy-eyed ecstasy, especially not at work where the Zombies roam through job hell. But if ecstasy--or any stage leading up to it--is your chosen state of mind, be my guest.

That's crazy? So what. You brought up this stupid love thingy, fraught with passion for work and other cutesy road blocks. This substance, your very own ecstasy applied with a precisely measured dosage, beats your silly puppy love any day.

I love you too,

Egbert Sukop

P.S.: Ordered my damn book yet? Now is the perfect time to do it. Why? Because I said so: 'How to Better Hate Your Job' It'll kick you off your rocking chair!

hysterical history

2009-10-15T02:08:00.000-07:00

"History never embraces more than a small part of reality." --François Duc de La Rochefoucauld

Hey kiddo, this post is long! You better brew yourself a pot of coffee and retrieve a bag of M&Ms to have a chance of survival. Still, it is only a rough draft. I am scratching the surface of a few issues, ripping open a couple of old wounds perhaps, yet this is not the location nor the time for in depth elaborations.

People will be upset with me, and some peace-loving folks are likely to have violent thoughts. If that happens to be you--live with it, baby: it's a healthy response. I don't have answers and I'm not peddling solutions. I am about to drag questions into the open that stink like a dead roof rat.

If you don't have proper answers, relax, and don't blame me for bringing it up. Dense as I am, I didn't invent this stuff. It's history, unfortunately. For years I've been brooding over these questions. You'll have the privilege to see them first. Here goes:

Lox and cream cheese was on the bagel that I purchased this morning. The store manager asked me about my t-shirt: Fetchez la vache!

It's out of Spamalot, by Eric Idle, a "musical lovingly ripped off from the motion picture Monty Python and the Holy Grail." Paul, Einstein's manager, had never heard of Monty Python who, on October 5th, 2009, celebrated the 40th anniversary of their debut on TV when the first episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus was aired on the BBC. The Gods of comedy conquered the world but Paul hadn't noticed.

It is a heinous crime that gently pampered Gen Y persons grew up oblivious to the existence of Monty Python, but on the grand scale of things it matters not. What does matter is our distorted perspective of history. We have mastered the art of making things invisible and that, unfortunately, is not limited to Monty Python.

Indigestible chunks of history have been repackaged with palatable labels. Why should we let bloody facts get in our way? History is being used like a condom: everybody can stretch it as one sees fit. Well, so can I. Besides, we prefer not to get in touch with the grimy parts history screwed us with. As dirty as history will always be, at least our role during the time in question appears to be impeccable. And that's what counts most.

An example, you ask? Let us choose an easy subject: the damn Holocaust. Who did it?

Hitler.

Single-handedly?

I have problems believing that. It is likely that Adolf Hitler never killed anybody besides his wife and his dog. Not counting the things that the Gefreite aus Böhmen may have done in the trenches as a soldier during World War I, naturally.

The Nazis did it!

You mean my dad?

He joined the Nazi party to save his scrawny ass and the 800-year-old family farm. Since he was short of workers--they had been recruited to do what Hitler didn't do himself--my father also gained cheap Polish slave laborers with his brilliant decision to become a Nazi. Oh, that makes me realize that my dad was the only slave owner I have known personally. And I knew my father as a man who couldn't hurt a fly. I admit: I loved a slave driver and a Nazi.

Did my dad murder six million Jews?

I don't know.

I used to be afraid that some day I may come across a picture in a random book--of uniformed German creatures executing Jewish families right next to an open mass grave--and recognizing my dad as the one pulling the trigger.

Fortunately I never saw him in such a picture, but that doesn't prove his innocence. Most likely he didn't lie and he was never near such places and activities of horror. But I don't know. I never will.

Our parents and grandparents didn't talk much. The little they did say may not have been true. Hell--I can't blame them, really--what we say about recent history isn't blessed with too many truisms either. We can't even agree on the who-did-what during the last 12 months. Few Germans know what precisely their fathers and mothers were busy with in the 1930s and '40s. What do you know about your parents' time before you were born? Not much? So, there.

Perhaps my father slaughtered 6,000,000 Jews, personally. Or none, and I have felt guilty throughout my entire life for nothing. What if guilt needs no reason to exist? What if the Jews were killed for no reason? What if people, who had no reason to kill the Jews and didn't mean to harm anyone, in fact killed six million Jewish individuals?

The meek did it.

That's insane?

I will tell you what is insane: the NAAF Holocaust Project (slogan: "Never Again, Always and Forever") begins their Time Line in the year 1933: "The seeds of the Holocaust began with the evolution of Adolf Hitler's maniacal dreams based on his interpretation of Germanic history, the quest for the 'Aryan ideal', and a lust for power."

Right. That's how it all went down.

Or did it? See, Jewish folks are just as capable of bullshitting people about history as anybody else.

Am I denying the Shoah (השואה)? Of course not. But heaps of garbage have been written about the Holocaust and what ought to be done to prevent it from reoccurring. I am just adding to the pile. I vehemently deny that "the seeds of the Holocaust began with the evolution of Adolf Hitler's maniacal dreams" in 1933. That is not a historical fact: it's wishful thinking. Countless groups and people benefit from such nonsense, I understand, but a lie it is nevertheless.

"The Jews are a nervous people. Nineteen centuries of Christian love have taken a toll," was Benjamin Disraeli's opinion.

Uh, so the fatal love of Jews did not begin 1933?

"Nazi anti-Judaism was the work of godless, anti-Christian criminals. But it would not have been possible without the almost two thousand years' pre-history of Christian anti-Judaism..." said the German Catholic Theologian Hans Küng.

Sigh. I am happy that I am not the only crazy guy in the room!

I beg to differ with Mr. Küng, as far as the "godless, anti-Christian criminals" are concerned, but I let that slide. A man who was stabbed in the back by his former friend Joseph Ratzinger, currently Pope Benedict XVI, needs a little extra love.

Hitler was a Catholic until his belated death. He didn't leave the church. To my--admittedly limited--knowledge, the Catholic church never excommunicated him and they didn't feel to ban Adolf's book 'Mein Kampf.' The Talmud, however, has been banned (and burned) multiple times, starting in 1190. Anyway, Nazi anti-Judaism was the work of--more or less--Christian criminals.

Also Christians went to concentration camps for their faith and died--individuals like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, for instance--yet Christian churches did nothing to protect their flock. They were too busy building alliances with the powers in charge. The Protestant and the Catholic churches did what they have always done: maintain and gain power, in that order.

The fate of an individual--or of a few million individuals here and there--was of little concern. After signing the Reichskonkordat--a treaty between the Pope and Nazi Germany--on July 20th, 1933, Cardinal Pacelli told an English representative that the Holy See had only entered the agreement to preserve the Catholic Church in Germany. As I said, maintaining power was objective Numero Uno.

Yeah, but at that time the church couldn't know what Hitler was up to?

Cute.

On April 10th, 1933, less than three weeks after Hitler assumed power, Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber wrote to Cardinal Pacelli--who would later become Pope Pius XII--advising that defending the Jews would be wrong “because that would transform the attack on the Jews into an attack on the Church; and because the Jews are able to look after themselves.”

Hitler met the representative of the German Bishops’ Conference, Bishop Wilhelm Berning of Osnabrück, on April 26, about three months before the Vatican jumped into bed with Adolf H. At that meeting, Hitler declared:

“I have been attacked because of my handling of the Jewish question. The Catholic Church considered the Jews pestilent for fifteen hundred years, put them in ghettos, etc., because it recognized the Jews for what they were. In the epoch of liberalism the danger was no longer recognized. I am moving back toward the time in which a fifteen-hundred-year-long tradition was implemented. I do not set race over religion, but I recognize the representatives of this race as pestilent for the state and for the Church, and perhaps I am thereby doing Christianity a great service by pushing them out of schools and public functions.”

How did Bishop Berning respond, you ask? Not at all, according to the notes.

That kinda shows that the 'NAAF Holocaust Project' is a bit off by inventing that Hitler's maniacal dreams started anything, eh? Hitler, the maniac, picked up maniacal Catholic ideas and the Catholic church didn't object. Much worse, the concordat gave Hitler and his crew power and confidence he didn't have before. Cardinal Weasel Faulhaber again, in a sermon delivered in 1937:

"At a time when the heads of the major nations in the world faced the new Germany with cool reserve and considerable suspicion, the Catholic Church, the greatest moral power on earth, through the Concordat expressed its confidence in the new German government. This was a deed of immeasurable significance for the reputation of the new government abroad."

Hans Küng is correct, criminals committed the actual murder of Jews, Gypsies, gays (the NAAF doesn't bother to mention gay people), the handicapped, and others. But "anti-Christian criminals?" Not so much. Christianity was a material witness to each and every single crime Nazi Germany committed against human beings since Hitler piped up in 1933.

Imagine the Pope had threatened every Catholic member of the NSDAP (Nazi party) with instant excommunication. Could that have altered the course of history? Alas, it is a futile idea.

I am not defending Hitler. On the contrary, he was 100% responsible but that does not relieve anybody else of their responsibility. Whoever names Hitler as the main perpetrator of the Holocaust has one purpose only: to get their own arses out of this mess while looking sufficiently innocent.

Take the German government, for example. They won't permit 'Mein Kampf' to be read by Germans. They believe their subjects are weak and easily corruptible. That book is so evil that it will magically overpower the fragile little minds of German citizens and make them do more things they will regret. You can't legally display a swastika in Germany. If you do, the dumb and intrinsically genocidal Germans will erect gas chambers, start killing innocent people, and eat babies immediately.

Emotional development at Kindergarten level, incapable to evolve. That's what Germans think and expect of each other. At least, the pitiful behavior of their government suggests that. Their degenerate idea of 'freedom of speech'--the step from 'Entarteter Kunst' ('Degenerate Art') to 'Degenerate Freedom' is a small one--reflects this self-imposed damnation to eternal adolescence. I have never been proud to be a German and sadly, today it is as difficult as ever.

If you have ever cracked open a copy of Adolf's hideous double-tome, you know that it is not humanly possible to read it. It's unbelievably poorly written (even worse than this blog). Yet, it is worthy of jail time. In a country that practically legalized murder, temporarily, it is now a crime to sell the worst conceivable text document.

As I said, free speech was not invented in Germany. No trace of the "master race" here: Germans are reckless and cowardly, simultaneously. Reckless, because they appear to have little qualms about limiting freedom. Cowardly, as they are scared of a single book.

These people are superstitious and paranoid, you say? Haunted by a book and a symbol? Not at all. They accuse scribbled ink, a horrendous book, and a dead guy as a maneuver to distract you from history and reality. We can't let history get in the way of saying what we want you to believe.

Not unlike the Jewish organization NAAF, Germans believe that the Holocaust came and went within a dozen years. Keeps the rest of history unsoiled and somewhat shiny.

See, I was born in 1953 after the war ended. Not guilty. Same is true for the Catholic and the Lutheran Protestant churches: the damn Germans did it but not the Christians. Not guilty! Cardinal Pacelli alias Pope Pius XII? Not guilty. France, Austria, and Switzerland (the neutered one)? Not guilty. Everybody loves the 'Holocaust Lite' cliche: from 1933 - 1945, the Nazis did bad things in Germany. Let's shrink the truth a bit and exercise damage control.

Indeed, the Nazis committed unspeakable crimes. That verbiage includes my dad, doesn't it? True or not, storing history as a thumbnail image in our memory won't improve our past or our future.

So far, so good. Let's throw some decent 'hatred' into the borshtsh, and intolerance. Shall we? Antisemitism, intolerance, and hatred are the crappiest myths blamed for igniting the Holocaust.

What a harebrained idea! We just have to teach tolerance, love, and forbid our kids to hate. Bingo! No holocaust will ever happen again. Life will be beautiful and peaceful ever after. Utter idiocy, reckless and ruthless rubbish.

C'mon, are we that ignorant?! I know, I am not making many friends here. Martin Luther, Voltaire, the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Richard Wagner, Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh--all of these guys were guilty of antisemitism but as far as I know they didn't kill or maim people.

Admittedly, I can't stand antisemitic talk. When I hear it, I usually ridicule that human spittoon of a speaker before I withdraw my attention and walk away. Antisemitism is rather boring than dangerous, and often it sounds like Richard Dawkins waxing sentimental over atheism and frothing about religion. Hoo, how scary!

Especially because I grew up in an environment recovering from controlled thought and speech, I gladly fight for an individual's freedom to make an ass of herself. Others' rights to say what they want match my right to see and hear clearly who they are. I have an interest in people feeling free to appear as nutty as they are. The freedom to express antisemitism has the power to save lives.

Say wha...? Honestly, aren't you grateful that Mahmud Ahmadineshad, the little piss-twerp, can say what he wants, enabling Israel and the rest of us to contemplate countermeasures?

Antisemites have murdered Jews, sure, and antisemitic individuals in general are as guilty of the Holocaust as I am, but antisemitism per se has never killed anybody. It's a word, a concept, and as such antisemitism is as innocent as the swastika, a dozen Mohammad cartoons, or Salman Rushdie's 'Satanic Verses.'

Wanna hate me? Go ahead, hate me!

Apropos 'hatred:' some people have hated me my entire life. So? Supports my vanity. I hate stuff as well. I hate the frowning nannies of the world who eagerly suffocate individualism and free markets. I hate dorks who lack the slightest sense of humor. And I hate celery sticks.

Does it matter that and what I hate? Of course not. Hatred is an integral part of our emotional spectrum, and it is childish to believe that you could teach people to unlearn it. Good luck training your brats to never be sad.

Teaching others that hatred killed the Jews is risky business, and potentially deadly: it implies that those who didn't hate the Jews were innocent, and that those who don't hate today will look forward to an innocent future. There is depravity in hating hatred. Obvious, isn't it?

You mean we just love everybody, evoke peace, and nobody gets hurt? Few things are as reprehensible as the self-righteousness of love and peace loving saints. What arrogance to assume that voyeurs of mass murder are innocent!

"I don't hate anybody. So I couldn't have done it." Sounds like the kid with the soccer ball under his arm, standing next to the shattered window, proclaiming, "I didn't do it!"

"All honest men killed Ceasar ... some lacked the design, some courage, some opportunity: none lacked the will," said Mr. Cicero. Even the Germans who "lacked the will," even those who desired for all Jews to live, flourish, and prosper, and even people who died before 1933 or were born after 1945--how innocent are we? Very? A little? Not at all?

I would be surprised if the average school teacher who shows his pupils grisly Holocaust pictures and drills them, "Thou shalt not hate," had the spine to defend the same kids with his life from the threats of SS men. He would have to hate, and he'd have to be willing to kill and die to save lives. Choosing to stay innocent can kill the innocent.

More innocent Germans than guilty ones murdered the Jews.

What about 'tolerance?' Moses Mendelssohn wrote: "Such a tolerance ... is even more dangerous play in tolerance than open persecution."

Don't tolerate me! Tolerance is a well-measured slap in the face of those we neither love nor respect. Tolerance insults the human being who endures it! Hate me if you can't love me, but don't you dare to insult me with your stinking tolerance. We tolerate a horse fly on the wall until we have nothing better to do than to finally get the fly swatter. I tolerate nobody and trust me, it's better for you.

Goodness, the pious impertinence hidden in the term 'tolerance' is intolerable. In case you are looking for evil words you can readily indict as murderous, try 'indifference' and 'tolerance.' Your and my tolerance kills people every damn day in North Korea. Sanctimonious preachers and teachers of tolerance are wolves in sheep's clothing. They don't promote peace. They only peddle THEIR peace--brutally and selfishly--and they don't care how many people's lives that costs.

Tolerant, peaceful Germans committed the Holocaust.

You mean, like my dad?

We're getting ahead of ourselves. Back to the reasons for the 'Holocaust Lite' cliche. Why do we favor historically distorted thumbnail pictures over a broader image that comes closer to the truth? We mentioned that Germans like to keep their dirt limited to the years 1933 - 45. The French liked to see it all as a German issue. For 40 years, they were only "victims too."

Until 1995, when Jacques Chirac "was able to admit that the state bore a heavy share of responsibility in the mass round-ups and deportations of Jews, as well as in the property and asset seizures that were carried out with the active help of the Vichy regime."

Oops, the French are capable and guilty of mass murder? No really? Who would have thought?! For the past 60 years the French pussies should have looked almost as ugly as my father, and they should have been treated with similar suspicion. Non?

"The state," dear Mr. Chirac, the "Vichy regime?" True, but wouldn't you surmise that people, flesh-and-blood individuals, were a bit involved as well? I am afraid 'responsibility' will remain the most slippery word in any language, used as sloppily as we can get away with. We just can't handle responsibility, neither individually nor collectively.

What if only those were "innocent" who haven't been accused and who haven't admitted their active or passive participation yet? How about the Jewish people? What's their interest in the hit-me-over-the-head-with-a-2x4 school teacher's version? Simple. They don't want to look like the French.

Pardon!

No seriously, if we didn't define the Holocaust as a temporary German problem, the Jewish people were forced to accuse everybody. Yep, pretty much everybody! Check out the time line at the end of my sermon and you'll get the picture.

And going after every antisemitic evidence that has reared its ugly head during the past 1,000 years plus is not as efficient as the sharp focus on 1,000 evil Germans ... well, and those who offered a helping hand:

"Historians estimate the number of non-German "killing workers" (a term coined by German writer Ralph Giordano) at about 200,000. There is probably no other group of criminals that has proven more difficult to prosecute than the Nazis' non-German helpers and accomplices." --ABC News

An Israeli friend of mine--she escaped Germany in the 1930s--told me how stunned she has been throughout her life about the fact that a handful of German SS peeps (imagine Motor Vehicle Division employees with rifles) were able to control a transport of over a thousand Jews. Every single time!

Why?

Because German Jewish victims were made of the same stock as their executioners: they were first and foremost like German Shepherds, born and raised to swallow orders for breakfast, used to bark or be barked at, to patiently stand in line until they reached either the cash register or the gas chamber.

Damn me, but six million Jews let it happen as tens of millions of passive, spineless and peaceful German citizens allowed it to happen. People died because of their worthless hope. Jews hoped to save their lives by cooperating with their butchers. Germans hoped to save their worthless hides by shutting up. In the name of peace. "Let's not rock the boat, Hans-Ludwig, and think of the children!"

The 'Holocaust Lite' versions of history have made millions of people in Europe feel good about themselves, and not just the French. Survivors and the children of the victims have found an agreement with the ex-perps (my dad) and their brood (me). Let's clip the story down to 12 handy German years. Done. Never again ...

Result: in the U.S. I can hardly find a person who doesn't believe that the eerie horror of the Third Reich was synonymous with the Holocaust. Hitler = Holocaust. There it is. Artificially and officially, the Holocaust has become the most important event of the 20th century.

That is just too silly. The millennium-old German and European sentiment against the Jewish people was a welcome vehicle to unify dull masses, a driving force to get the train out of the station toward world dominance. But the Holocaust was only a milestone for these clowns, and certainly not the destination.

Oh dear, I do not intend to discount the suffering or make light of the death of millions of Jewish people. Not at all. But the Holocaust is simply not the only reason why the Third Reich was a time of horror. The Holocaust was a sideshow. Neither were Hitler and his creeps the only ones spilling blood by the barrel. Stalin murdered nearly 30 million of his own people, and chairman Mao? 'The Australian' prints:

"For if the Chinese Communist Party deserved only a single entry in the testimony of history, it would be this: starting in the northern spring of 1959, China's leadership willfully enabled the deaths of about 36 million of its citizens, and then watched as they suffered, expired and even consumed each other's flesh. Neither Stalin nor Hitler, nor any of the other protagonists in either of the 20th century's world wars, could match this scale of political and humanitarian nihilism."

Yeah, but that's only 36 million people and not 6,000,000 and besides, the 36 million were Mao's own people. The question arises whether 6 dead Chinese persons can measure up to one dea... good God! We shall not go there! Anyway, I believe the number that's mentioned in this article by 'The Australian' is quite conservative and the victims of the Chinese Communist Party amounts to approximately 60 million individuals who perished thanks to their own fine government.

Please help me here:

We are desperately trying to prevent future slaughter of people, but we don't really care when governments torture and execute their own subjects? Women get stoned to death in Afghanistan, limbs get cut off in Saudi Arabia, gays are being hung in Iran, the Tutsi kill 100,000 Hutu (1972 in Burundi), or the Hutu chop up 800,000 to 1,000,000 Tutsi (Rwanda, 1994)? Does that matter? Sad and it shouldn't happen, but that stuff takes place in sovereign countries and as long as those countries don't threaten America, all we can do is shrug and order another Coors Lite?

Uh, except when a Canadian or U.S. citizen gets herself into trouble in Iran. Then the media smell a window of opportunity to sell some copy with a sentimental crap piece. But we don't care what governments do with their subjects. That's Amnesty International's turf.

Germans, citizens of the former 'Union of Soviet Socialist Republics' (USSR), and Chinese folks combined murdered approximately 100 million individuals within their own countries. I am not even counting fallen soldiers. When school teachers prattle on about Holocaust prevention, do they also make suggestions how to stop the Che Guevaras, Castros, Ahmadineshads, Kim Jong-Ils, and Pol Pots (responsible for killing 25% of Cambodia's population; "What is rotten must be removed," a Khmer Rouge slogan proclaimed.)?

By teaching love instead of hatred, and tolerance, I presume? Yeah, Hitler was an evil murderer while Che was a good murderer, and school kids proudly wear his picture on their t-shirts once again. A Mao shirt is cool, a Hitler shirt is not. Please tell me, why?

Uh, the Jews were not killed by their own government! They were killed by ze bloodsirsty Chermans? That's the only difference between murdered Jews and dead Chinese, Russians, Poles, Greeks, etc. and ... yes, Germans?

Not!

Jewish people were German citizens as well, and therefore exterminated by their own government, like everybody else. Don't start splitting hairs, and tell me that the Polish Jews and the French Jews weren't German. Even I know that. Still, they were delivered to their death by their own governmental authorities.

It was a race thing? One race eliminated another? Good Lord, talking about race differences is definitely musty fascist Nazi nonsense: there happens to be one human race, only. One. The German Jews were killed by their own, by Germans. By folks like my dad ... except, that he didn't do it. But that's what they all said.

Listen up!

You can't poke fun at the Holocaust. I understand. That's highly inappropriate! No other matter in the history of humankind was that serious. It's like an ongoing funeral: the responses that are permitted are practically ritualized and pre-labeled by authorities. German and Austrian governments have laws about what can or cannot be said.

A demon we aren't allowed to laugh at: during Nazi times, Germans were not permitted to say the wrong thing. Today, nobody has the permission to say the wrong thing. My parents didn't talk about the Holocaust. Children of Holocaust survivors have told me that their parents never talked about the Holocaust either. And you and I are not authorized to have a unique opinion today.

Taboo.

If you want to know what you can say, you must ask the Simon Wiesenthal Center. And then they'll tell you how to prevent the deaths of the next 6 million Jews, but not the tragic demise of the next 94 million human beings? Bumbling idiots!

If we can't talk freely, we are doomed to bury the truth with the dead. We need to be able to talk. People must have the freedom to say the wrong things about the Holocaust and about everything else!

Suffocating the "wrong words" today is equally dangerous as it was to lock dissenters into concentration camps. Several European governments are preparing laws to criminalize the insult of another person's religion. Hitler would jump up and down with delight and offer his blessings.

As far as freedom and individualism are concerned, we are still savages. And no, tattooing Chinese characters on your arse or wearing your baseball cap backward does not prove that you are an individual. Polite and politically correct, the "peaceful" avoidance of trouble and tension confirms the status quo of lurking danger.

Instead of speaking out in favor of our individual choices, we turn into eunuchs. We do everything necessary to keep things the way they are. We abstain from rocking the boat. Freedom of speech is wasted on us. For safety's sake we hold down jobs that dictate what we can't say or do. Set free, we immediately seek the shelter of slavery.

Kids in the sandlot should learn that antisemitism is a bad thing. Fine. They should learn to differentiate between the emotion of hatred and the consequences of acting on their hatred. But for you and me, there is something else to be considered:

We must think, speak, act, and laugh freely. As long as it doesn't hurt another person, we must take our freedom that nobody can give us, and expand it daily. There is no freedom unless we give ourselves permission to say and do thousands of wrong things before we'll find what's right and what works.

If we are not free we don't care about other people's freedom, as the employed don't care about the problems of employers. To my ears, the sound of a union member shouting: "Tax the rich!" is painfully similar to a Nazi screaming: "Kill the Jews!" The outcome may be different but the emotion behind both is the same.

Your daring entrepreneurial endeavors inspire and support other entrepreneurs. Your courage to stand up for capitalism provides an environment for others who enjoy making money also. Your freedom to say what you want to say--especially controversial and provocative things--is the best protection for other individuals who differ in their opinion.

The utter lack of Chutzpah caused the Holocaust. Wanna prevent the next one? Forget tolerance.

Proliferate Chutzpah.

Shalom,

Egbert Sukop

P.S: I still love my dad!

P.P.S.: Here's how the Holocaust began. Once upon a time, more than a thousand years ago ... (Source: http://www.religioustolerance.org/ )

70: The Roman Army destroyed Jerusalem, killed over 1 million Jews, took about 100,000 into slavery and captivity, and scattered many from Palestine to other locations in the Roman Empire.

135: Serious Roman persecution of the Jews began. They were forbidden, upon pain of death, from practicing circumcision, reading the Torah, eating unleavened bread at Passover, etc.

306: The church Synod of Elvira banned marriages, sexual intercourse and community contacts between Christians and Jews.

325: The Council of Nicea decided to separate the celebration of Easter from the Jewish Passover. They stated: "For it is unbecoming beyond measure that on this holiest of festivals we should follow the customs of the Jews. Henceforth let us have nothing in common with this odious people...We ought not, therefore, to have anything in common with the Jews...our worship follows a...more convenient course...we desire dearest brethren, to separate ourselves from the detestable company of the Jews.

337: Christian Emperor Constantius created a law which made the marriage of a Jewish man to a Christian punishable by death.

339: Converting to Judaism became a criminal offense.

367 - 376: St. Hilary of Poitiers referred to Jews as a perverse people who God has cursed forever. St. Ephroem refers to synagogues as brothels.

379-395: Emperor Theodosius the Great permitted the destruction of synagogues if it served a religious purpose. Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire at this time.

380: The bishop of Milan was responsible for the burning of a synagogue; he referred to it as "an act pleasing to God."

415: St. Augustine wrote "The true image of the Hebrew is Judas Iscariot, who sells the Lord for silver. The Jew can never understand the Scriptures and forever will bear the guilt for the death of Jesus."

418: St. Jerome, who created the Vulgate translation of the Bible wrote of a synagogue: "If you call it a brothel, a den of vice, the Devil's refuge, Satan's fortress, a place to deprave the soul, an abyss of every conceivable disaster or whatever you will, you are still saying less than it deserves."

489 - 519: Christian mobs destroyed the synagogues in Antioch, Daphne (near Antioch) and Ravenna.

612: Jews were not allowed to own land, to be farmers or enter certain trades.

613: Very serious persecution began in Spain. Jews were given the options of either leaving Spain or converting to Christianity. Jewish children over 6 years of age were taken from their parents and given a Christian education.

722: Leo III outlawed Judaism. Jews were baptized against their will.

855: Jews were exiled from Italy.

1078: "Pope Gregory VII decreed that Jews could not hold office or be superiors to Christians."

1096: The First Crusade was launched in this year. Although the prime goal of the crusades was to liberate Jerusalem from the Muslims, Jews were a second target. As the soldiers passed through Europe on the way to the Holy Land, large numbers of Jews were challenged: "Christ-killers, embrace the Cross or die!" 12,000 Jews in the Rhine Valley alone were killed in the first Crusade. This behavior continued for 8 additional crusades until the 9th in 1272.

1099: The Crusaders forced all of the Jews of Jerusalem into a central synagogue and set it on fire. Those who tried to escape were forced back into the burning building.

1121: Jews were exiled from Flanders (now part of present-day Belgium).

1146: The Second Crusade began. A French Monk, Rudolf, called for the destruction of the Jews.

1180: The French King of France, Philip Augustus, arbitrarily seized all Jewish property and expelled the Jews from the country. There was no legal justification for this action. They were allowed to sell all movable possessions, but their land and houses were stolen by the king.

1189: Jews were persecuted in England. The Crown claimed all Jewish possessions. Most of their houses were burned.

1227: The Synod of Narbonne required Jews to wear an oval badge. This requirement was reinstalled during the 1930's by Hitler, who changed the oval badge to a Star of David.

1236: Pope Gregory ordered that church leaders in England, France, Portugal and Spain confiscate Jewish books on the first Saturday of Lent.

1259: A "synod of the archdiocese in Mainz ordered Jews to wear yellow badges."

1261: Duke Henry III of Brabant, Belgium, stated in his will that "Jews...must be expelled from Brabant and totally annihilated so that not a single one remains, except those who are willing to trade, like all other tradesmen, without money-lending and usury."

1267: The Synod of Vienna ordered Jews to wear horned hats. Thomas Aquinas said that Jews should live in perpetual servitude.

1290: Jews are exiled from England. About 16,000 left the country.

1298: Jews were persecuted in Austria, Bavaria and Franconia. 140 Jewish communities were destroyed; more than 100,000 Jews were killed over a 6 month period.

1306: 100,000 Jews are exiled from France. They left with only the clothes on their backs, and food for only one day.

1320: 40,000 French shepherds went to Palestine on the Shepherd Crusade. On the way, 140 Jewish communities were destroyed.

1321: In Guienne, France, Jews were accused of having incited criminals to poison wells. 5,000 Jews were burned alive, at the stake.

1347 +: The Black Death: Rats initially carried the Black Death; their fleas spread the disease from the rats to humans. As the plague worsened, the germs spread from human to human. In five years, the death toll had reached 25 million. In England, two centuries passed before its population levels recovered from the plague. People searched for someone to blame. They noted that a smaller percentage of Jews than Christians caught the disease. This was undoubtedly due to the Jewish sanitary and dietary laws. Rumors circulated that Satan was protecting the Jews and that they were paying back the Devil by poisoning wells used by Christians. The solution was to torture, murder and burn the Jews. "In Bavaria...12,000 Jews...perished; in the small town of Erfurt...3,000; near Tours, an immense trench was dug, filled with blazing wood and in a single day 160 Jews were burned." In Strausberg 2,000 Jews were burned. In Maintz 6,000 were killed...; in Worms 400..."

1354: 12,000 Jews were executed in Toledo.

1374: An epidemic of possession broke out in the lower Rhine region of what is now Germany. People were seen "dancing, jumping and [engaging in] wild raving." The epidemic spread throughout the Rhine and in much of the Netherlands and Germany. Crowds of 500 or more dancers would be overcome together. Finally, the rumor spread that God was angry because Christians had been excessively tolerant towards the Jews. Jews "were plundered, tortured and murdered by tens of thousands."

1391: Jewish persecutions begin in Seville and in 70 other Jewish communities throughout Spain.

1394 : Jews were exiled, for the second time, from France.

1431 +: The Council of Basel "forbade Jews to go to universities, prohibited them from acting as agents in the conclusion of contracts between Christians, and required that they attend church sermons."

1434: "Jewish men in Augsburg had to sew yellow buttons to their clothes. Across Europe, Jews were forced to wear a long undergarment, an overcoat with a yellow patch, bells and tall pointed yellow hats with a large button on them.

1453 : The Franciscan monk, Capistrano, persuaded the King of Poland to terminate all Jewish civil rights.

1492 : Jews were given the choice of being baptized as Christians or be banished from Spain. 300,000 left Spain penniless. Many migrated to Turkey, where they found tolerance among the Muslims. Others converted to Christianity but often continued to practice Judaism in secret.

1497: Jews were banished from Portugal. 20 thousand left the country rather than be baptized as Christians.

1516: The Governor of the Republic of Venice decided that Jews would be permitted to live only in one area of the city. It was located in the South Girolamo parish and was called the "Ghetto Novo." This was the first ghetto in Europe. Hitler made use of the concept in the 1930's.

1523: Martin Luther distributed his essay "That Jesus Was Born a Jew. " He hoped that large numbers of Jews would convert to Christianity. They didn't, and he began to write and preach hatred against them. Luther has been condemned in recent years for being extremely antisemitic. The charge has some merit; however he was probably typical of most Christians during his era.

1540: Jews were exiled from Naples.

1543: Martin Luther wrote "On the Jews and their lies, On Shem Hamphoras" : "...eject them forever from this country. For, as we have heard, God's anger with them is so intense that gentle mercy will only tend to make them worse and worse, while sharp mercy will reform them but little. Therefore, in any case, away with them!...What then shall we Christians do with this damned, rejected race of Jews? And then, after suggesting to set their their synagogues on fire, to destroy their homes, and to forbid their rabbis under the threat of death to teach, Luther continues: "To sum up, dear princes and nobles who have Jews in your domains, if this advice of mine does not suit you, then find a better one so that you and we may all be free of this insufferable devilish burden - the Jews."

1550: Jews were exiled from Genoa and Venice.

1555: A Roman Catholic Papal bull, "Cum nimis absurdum," required Jews to wear badges, and live in ghettos. They were not allowed to own property outside the ghetto. Living conditions were dreadful: over 3,000 people were forced to live in about 8 acres of land. Women had to wear a yellow veil or scarf; men had to wear a piece of yellow cloth on their hat.

1582: Jews were expelled from Holland.

1648-9: Chmielnicki Bogdan led an uprising against Polish rule in the Ukraine. The secondary goal of Bogdan and his followers was to exterminate all Jews in the country. The massacre began with the slaughter of about 6,000 Jews in Nemirov. Other major mass murders occurred in Tulchin, Polonnoye, Volhynia, Bar, Lvov, etc. Jewish records estimate that a total of 100,000 Jews were murdered and 300 communities destroyed.

1806: A French Jesuit Priest, Abbe Barruel, had written a treatise blaming the Masonic Order for the French Revolution. He later issued a letter alleging that Jews, not the Masons were the guilty party. This triggered a belief in an international Jewish conspiracy in Germany, Poland and some other European countries later in the 19th century.

1819: During the late 18th and early 19th centuries, many European Jews lobbied their governments for emancipation. They sought citizenship as well as the same rights and treatment as were enjoyed by non-Jews. This appears to have provoked sporadic anti-semites to engage in anti-Jewish violence. Jews and their property were attacked first in Wuerzburg, Germany. The rioting spread across Germany and eventually reached as far as Denmark and Poland.

1846 - 1878: Pope Pius IX restored all of the previous restrictions against the Jews within the Vatican state. All Jews under Papal control were confined to Rome's ghetto - the last one in Europe until the Nazi era restored the church's practice. On September 3rd, 2000, Pope John Paul II beatified Pius IX; this is the last step before sainthood. He explained: "Beatifying a son of the church does not celebrate particular historic choices that he has made, but rather points him out for imitation and for veneration for his virtue."

1873: The term "antisemitism" is first used in a pamphlet by Wilhelm Marr called "Jewry's Victory over Teutonism."

1881: Alexander II of Russia was assassinated by radicals. The Jews were blamed. About 200 individual pogroms against the Jews followed. ("Pogrom" is a Russian word meaning "devastation" or "riot." In Russia, a pogrom was typically a mob riot against Jewish individuals, shops, homes or businesses. They were often supported and even organized by the government.) Thousands of Jews became homeless and impoverished.

1893: "...anti-Semitic parties won sixteen seats in the German Reichstag."

1894: Captain Alfred Dreyfus, an officer on the French general staff, was convicted of treason. The evidence against him consisted of a piece of paper from his wastebasket with another person's handwriting, and papers forged by antisemitic officers. He received a life sentence on Devil's Island, off the coast of South America. The French government was aware that a Major Esterhazy was actually guilty. ₃The church, government and army united to suppress the truth. Writer Emile Zola and politician Jean Jaur? fought for justice and human rights. After 10 years, the French government fell and Drefus was declared totally innocent.

1905: The Okhrana, the Russian secret police in the reign of Czar Nicholas II, converted an earlier antisemitic novel into a document called the "Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion." It was published privately in 1897. A Russian Orthodox priest, Sergius Nilus, published them publicly in 1905. It was promoted as the record of "secret rabbinical conferences whose aim was to subjugate and exterminate the Christians." The Protocols were used by the Okhrana in a propaganda campaign that was associated with massacres of the Jews. These were the Czarist Pogroms of 1905.

1915: 600,000 Jews were forcibly moved from the western borders of Russia towards the interior. About 100,000 died of exposure or starvation.

1917: "In the civil war following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the reactionary White Armies made extensive use of the Protocols to incite widespread slaughters of Jews." ₅ Two hundred thousand Jews were murdered in the Ukraine alone.

1920: The Protocols reach England and the United States. They are exposed as a forgery, but are widely circulated. Henry Ford sponsored a study of international activities of Jews. This led to a series of antisemitic articles in the Dearborn Independent, which were published in a book, "The International Jew." The Protocols were sold on Wal-Mart's online bookstore until they were removed on September 24th, 2004.

1920: The defeat of Germany in World War I and the continuing economic difficulties were blamed in that country on the "Jewish influence."

1920's, 1930's: Hitler had published in Mein Kampf in 1925, writing: "Today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord." The Protocols are used by the Nazis to whip up public hatred of the Jews in the 1930's. Widespread pogroms occur in Greece, Hungary, Mexico, Poland, Rumania, and the USSR. Radio programs by many conservative American clergy, both Roman Catholic and Protestant, frequently attacked Jews. Reverend Fr. Charles E Coughlin was one of the best known. "In the 1930's, radio audiences heard him rail against the threat of Jews to America's economy and defend Hitler's treatment of Jews as justified in the fight against communism."

1936: Cardinal Hloud of Poland urged Catholics to boycott Jewish businesses.

1940: The Vichy government of France collaborated with Nazi Germany by freezing about 80,000 Jewish bank accounts. During the next four years, they deported about 76,000 Jews to Nazi death camps; only about 2,500 survived. It was only in 1995 that a French president, Jacques Chirac, "was able to admit that the state bore a heavy share of responsibility in the mass round-ups and deportations of Jews, as well as in the property and asset seizures that were carried out with the active help of the Vichy regime."

1941: The Holocaust Museum in Washington DC estimates that 13,000 Jews died on June 19th, 1941 during a pogrom in Bucharest, Romania. It was ordered by the pro-Nazi Romanian regime of Marshal Ion Antonescu. The current government has admitted that this atrocity happened, but most Romanians continue to deny that the Jews were killed on orders from their own government.

1941: Polish citizens in Jedwabne in northeastern Poland killed hundreds of Jews, by either beating them to death or burning them alive in a barn. According to the Associated Press: "The role played by Polish citizens was suppressed for nearly six decades until publication of a book by a Polish emigre historian, Jan Tomasz Gross. After release of the book in 2000, the Polish government launched an investigation. 'The role of the Poles was decisive in conducting the criminal act,' [prosecutor Radoslaw] Ignatiew, said. The book, 'Neighbours,' sparked national soul-searching among Poles, many of whom could not believe that anybody but the Nazis would have committed the atrocity."

Source: http://www.religioustolerance.org/

peace by piece

2009-08-25T20:06:00.000-07:00

There is a fantastic way to rid yourself of superfluous Twitter followers. Here's what I did:

I posted "Like health and mental health--they cannot be defined--peace will never exist. I'll go as far as calling peace inhumane." Followed up with "Peace activists didn't end the Holocaust and other nightmares. Soldiers did. War is awful indeed. However, peace can be worse."

That helped. It doesn't matter how open-minded individuals believe they are. When you tickle a holy nipple of a holy udder of somebody's holy cow, you are dog meat! The peace peeps won't hesitate for a second: they'll kill you instantly by unfollowing.

Nobody is open-minded! Being open-minded is a myth of the smug crowd and so is the belief in peace on Earth. John Lennon, for instance, lured us into this type of self-deception: "Imagine all the people living life in peace ... I hope some day you'll join us and the world will be as one."

Right. You know what that means, don't you? Fascism. When you join us and decide to think like me, someday, there'll be peace. No kidding. Other people are the problem in the world. It's not me, and once they're all like me we'll have heaven on Earth and peace forever. We, the peace-loving hypocrites, are better than everybody else.

"Lennon's jealousy could manifest itself in violent behavior towards [Cynthia Powell, John's first wife], as when he slapped her across the face (hitting her head against the wall) the day after he saw her dancing with Stuart Sutcliffe." During their divorce, Lennon refused to give his wife any more than £75,000, telling her on the phone, "That's like winning the pools, so what are you moaning about? You're not worth any more." Also, [John] reportedly donated money to the Trotskyist Workers Revolutionary Party. For entirely peaceful purposes, I am sure.

"Shortly afterwards, at McCartney's twenty-first birthday party on 18 June 1963, Lennon physically attacked Cavern Club MC Bob Wooler for saying "How was your honeymoon, John?". To Lennon, drunk, the matter was simple: "He called me a queer so I battered his bloody ribs in"."

I wholeheartedly agree: if the world population could just be like John Lennon, there would be peace. Not the kind of peace I'd imagine, though.

Don't get me wrong. I love peace. When I was eighteen the German army, die Bundeswehr, wanted me badly and, since I had no intention to learn how to kill people, I became a conscientious objector. My family was not proud of my decision and I lost friends over it. My love for peace caused war with some of those near me.

Jump with me to Afghanistan. During last week's election, the Taliban threatened Afghan voters to cut their inked voting fingers off. That's the kind of peace you will permit--and you'll have to live and sleep with--if you are opposed to the presence of U.S. and Nato troops in Afghanistan. And we are not even talking about the "peace" that women will have to endure under Taliban terror.

Malaysia: A Malaysian Muslim woman who had been sentenced to be caned for drinking beer in a hotel has been granted a reprieve until after Ramadan, religious official have said. Kartika Sari Dewi Shukarno, 32, will be beaten publicly after Ramadan. How merciful.

A clear sign that there is peace in Malaysia. John Lennon knew that already: if you slap a woman, there will be peace. Am I so utterly wrong with my statement that peace can be inhumane?

Was it wrong for U.S. soldiers to free the damn Germans from themselves? Had the allies remained in their countries, peacefully holding their dicks instead of evil guns, would that have meant peace for Jews and Germans, Russians, Poles, Scandinavia, and the French? Of course there was peace in concentration camps. Right? And order, too.

You, today, would you leave it alone because those dorks peacefully butchering each other means no immediate threat to you?

"Oh, I love people." Do you really? How much?

Had soldiers not ended the Nazi nightmare, my parents would not have married and I would not have been born. Third Reich type peace would have prevented my existence and you'd have been spared my diatribes.

Peace can be an attempt on people's lives. Peace murders and maims people. In 1994, U.N. peace troops withdrew from Rwanda to allow the Hutus to chop up approximately 800,000 Tutsis. Our cruel idea of peace is directly responsible for the most ghastly genocide in recent history.

Peace-no-matter-what may quickly turn into unspeakable horror, disregarding human life, freedom, and dignity. Refusing to blindly believe in peace as the be all and end all has nothing to do with warmongering.

Peace can take everything away from you that you may expect to gain from it--yep, including peace.

I promote happiness, happiness of the individual. But see: life is messy and if I am not too mistaken life will always be some sort of a mess, individually and collectively. We can't wait until everything is neatly sorted out before our "real life" may begin. Life has begun and happiness can only be had today, in the middle and the muddle of the mess.

I prefer today's murky happiness over tomorrow's seemingly ideal imagination. I hate war, but I cannot trust peace. Our childish dreams yearn for ideal circumstances. Sounds almost as boring as heaven, with all your hunchbacked toothless relatives sitting on a cloud barking one 'Hallelujah' after the other.

"Why are you so negative and cynical?"

I am? Wrong! Nothing is as adventurous and fun as reality. Add lust, risk, and freedom. Authentic individuality and freedom can't afford peace. Once again: no, war is not the alternative to peace, but war can't be excluded. War is a part of the human condition.

Forget war for now. Question is how well can you handle tension? Opposition? Disagreement? Forget peace. Enjoy tension! Explore it, exploit tension, and be ecstatic about your messy life just the way it presents itself today.

Egbert Sukop

P.S.: Buy my book 'How to Better Hate Your Job.'

Darden's Dorky Dean

2009-08-20T15:30:00.000-07:00

On August 20th, the Wall Street Journal published an article about the dean of the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business, Professor Robert Bruner, and lessons he thinks students can take away from financial crisis. But does he really? Think, I mean?

Commonplace drivel is rather atypical for the WSJ, but Professor Bruner seems to be a master of trite statements.

"Ethics are always No. 1," he says. Since when? He continues, "It appears that the system rose to tolerate borderline or obviously unethical or illegal behavior." The system--of governmental oversight, I assume--did not tolerate unethical behavior: it grossly proliferated the suspension of ethics. What has Mr. Bruner been reading for the last twelve months? Certainly not the Wall Street Journal. Apparently, Professor B. does not trust the markets--you and me--to shake out the shady nor does he have much faith in our judicial system.

How do I know that?

If a certain behavior is illegal now, it can be prosecuted immediately with or without Bruner's moral lectures. Except, in the case of our recent crisis we are eager to let the true culprits go. It's too dangerous for some seemingly innocent folks to open that can of worms, and we don't want to inconvenience individuals who live in clouds above and beyond ethics classes.

Are we so retarded that we need the dean to tell us that the comprehension of his ethics can keep us from committing crimes? How naive is this gentleman? Does he believe those who violate ethics and/or laws are unaware of their behavior and its consequences?

It is silly to raise the moral index finger, as if to say that better ethical training will prevent future ethics violations. There will always be crime, dear Professor Bruner, and teaching your unbelievable drivel to "the next generation" with "more critical care and reflection" would not have prevented an army of banksters from feeling tempted by the sugar high of credit default swaps.

"The aftermath is a much larger role for government" because the benefactors of past ethics violations don't care to miss out on the fruits of unethical behavior in the future, and if they can exploit crises to increase the sum of money that goes around--they undoubtedly will. A fine reason for government to push for its own procreation. Professor Bruner knows as well as I do that (deliberate) incompetence of government oversight won't be magically eliminated by more government oversight.

If it's not working now we should do more of the same? Really? We have slept through moral theory since Socrates and Aristotle, but suddenly dean Bruner discovered the recipe to solve the remaining problems during Darden's next class? I am so impressed ... by his arrogance!

"It's always in the panic that the world settles up with unethical behavior. If you look at the discoveries of Ponzi schemes, they coincide with economic troughs," says Mr. Bruner. If a crisis is a tool to end unethical behavior we should be looking forward to the next crisis, shouldn't we? Or does he believe that Bernie Madoff would have never ponzied around had he had the pleasure of sitting through dean Bruner's ethics training?

Apropos Ponzi: We have known for a century that Ponzi schemes cannot work. Further, we are aware that Ponzi schemes are illegal. However, governments--and the individuals who do the governments' holy work--don't interrupt their donut breakfast for "more critical reflection." Charles Ponzi's dubious accomplishments have inspired our government more than Professor Bruner's ethics lecture ever will: illegal or mathematically impossible--governments don't hesitate to engage in activities that are STRENG VERBOTEN for everybody else.

Enter social security, the most grandiose Ponzi operation under the sun. How do you teach business ethics without cynicism or a heaping portion of intellectual dishonesty?

Dean Bruner goes on to embarrass himself by sharing platitudes "Good leaders are present and engaged and alert," or "The best leaders do the opposite [of playing Bridge]." How do you do THAT?

But Darden's dorky dean's $64,000 lie rolls off his tongue thusly: "I believe in pay for performance ..." Damn. I wasn't sure if business schools (B.S.) are still deceiving their students with such reprehensible nonsense. Now I know: they do and shamelessly so.

Do you believe in performance related pay? I won't laugh if you do because it's just as sad as it is funny, but I suggest the following:

Make a list of everybody you know, from your hunchbacked relatives and friends to your dry cleaner at the corner. Don't forget to add the famous (Simon Cowell), the droll (Paris Hilton), and the infamous (Michael Vick).

Then write down how hard and how many hours they work. Put numbers next to their names--each person's annual salary or wage--before you ask yourself whether the belief in "pay for performance" continues to make any logical sense. Does Beyoncé Knowles work 2,200 times harder than your car mechanic?

Too much underpaid work to figure it out?

I thought so. As an alternative, you may purchase a copy of my book 'How to Better Hate Your Job.' It will thoroughly answer this question for you. Not enough: my book rudely rips into numerous uncomfortable issues and I solemnly promise it would make Professor Bruner's head spin.

Egbert Sukop

P.S.: Uh, before I forget: have you bought my book yet?

circulus vitiosus

2009-08-09T15:47:00.000-07:00

"The only happy people I know are people I don't know well." --Helen Telushkin (via Dennis Prager)

The more details we discover about another person's life, the clearer it becomes that other people have at least as much adversity to deal with as we do. Some individuals appear exceptionally lucky on first sight, before we learn about the heavy burdens they are carrying. Nobody's life is free of challenges and pain. Every single human being has plenty of reasons not to be happy.

There it is: if you are not as happy as you wish to be, it is because feeling awful makes more sense. Is being miserable logical? Is the absence of happiness a natural function of nasty, happiness-smothering circumstances?

A vicious circle of desire keeps us from enjoying life as intensely as we could. For instance, we wish to be happy and we want to make money, but instead we develop weird habits of exclusive thinking:

Large percentages of the population think that they cannot be happy while being at work. Hence making money excludes happiness, and being happy excludes making money. We want both, but we're making damn sure that it won't occur. We can't handle both simultaneously. Our ability to multi-task is rather limited.

Combining the two appears nearly impossible. Work is not supposed to be fun. If it's too enjoyable it can't be that hard and if our work lacks hardship, its perceived monetary value drops to levels of insignificance.

People are afraid of having too much fun at work. When that happens--and we're happy on the job despite our intentions to suffer for money--feelings of guilt can kick in swiftly.

Our belief in sweat equity is similar to blood sacrifices of ancient cultures. Of course we don't kill the annual virgin to persuade our gods that we deserve a decent crop. Nevertheless, we are a superstitious bunch. How else do you explain the unwillingness to abandon human sacrifices?

People trade their lives for a house. Individuality is easily surrendered in exchange for our brats' education and for comfort. Right, we pay for comfort with emotional and physical discomfort. Pain is a common currency for the purchase of luxury and highly questionable symbols. Cars are often seen as symbols of freedom and mobility, and we're willing to relinquish true freedom to do what we want in exchange for $1,000 rims and an iPhone.

Symbols of freedom and happiness can be more important than raw freedom and happiness. After all, we are sophisticated people and we prefer freedom secondhand.

The idea that fun and enjoyment may be valuable commodities or even capable of producing money seems absurd. Can't we work our behinds off WHILE we are happy? Can you?

Imaginary lists lurk around our heads, lists of potential happy makers, 'Happy Lists,' and lists of events with supposedly depressing character, 'Unhappy Lists.'

Money--preferably lots of it--appears in prominent positions on people's list of happiness causing events. Restored health, grandchildren, vacations, completion of education and other projects, world peace, a lower tax burden, raises, marriage, divorce, a day of sunshine, or a good deal--almost anything can serve at one time or another to sucker us into the belief that we'll be happier once X has happened.

The majority of lottery winners eventually experiences the undoing of their pre-jackpot lives, yet the unlikely occasion of winning the lottery remains on many people's Happy Lists.

Children are on plenty of Happy Lists, but will children “make" you happy by definition? Unloading responsibility for your happiness onto the small shoulders of your kids—born or unborn—would be an unspeakable cruelty. We may experience an abundance of happy times with children, but the inhumane expectation that your offspring owes you an increase of your personal happiness will be punished by the universe. Trust me.

Childless individuals often believe with children they would be happier. I know of parents who think without children they could have been happier. We are nuts.

Divorce is on the average Unhappy List. Wish lists and LOA treasure maps don't usually include divorces. “Oh, I want to meet a nice man and share a devastating and humiliating divorce with him.” Bizarre? Surprisingly, approximately half of those who get married will look forward to their divorce sooner or later. Indeed, divorces can make us happy or at least they may lead us back to the road toward happiness.

Birthdays appear on Happy Lists, cancer commonly on Unhappy Lists. Gout, death, repair bills, or a cleft lip: Unhappy List. Beer, tax hikes, celibacy? Depends on you.

"Those who seek happiness in pleasure, wealth, glory, power, and heroics are as naive as the child who tries to catch a rainbow and wear it as a coat." --Dilgo Khentse Rinpoche

No, that does not mean you should make do without pleasure, wealth, or power! Mr. Rinpoche doesn't say anything against having fun or the acquisition of cash per se. But he is correct: to seek ecstasy in the warm and fuzzy, in the cracks of the notoriously positive, is as limited as it is hopelessly immature. If the good is "making" you happy and the bad is "causing" unhappy feelings, negative experiences will cancel out happiness and on average your life will trickle away at an emotional level of plus/minus zero.

Being happy when life goes well and complaining when the going gets tough is not that creative, or is it? Happiness cannot expand without venturing out into hostile territory, the dark and the negative. Every 4-year old knows that fun is fun. Duh. The real challenge is to connect the dots between happiness and the common cold, between cancer and ecstasy, or to respond to an impertinent boss with boundless lust for work!

Forget the new age rubbish, the brain-phlegm coughed up by recycled dork religions: "there is a positive side to everything," or that smug "what is this pain teaching you?" No, no, no--that is not happiness. It's a miserable wretch grasping for that last straw of meaning to hold on to, a nanosecond before filing for intellectual bankruptcy.

I am not asking you to prospect for kernels of wisdom in negative experiences. The negative, the reprehensible, or the outright painful is indeed ugly and I don't suggest you cover it up with a mountain of fudge. The last thing on my mind is peddling positive thinking.

But: Even ugly experiences can be lived with style, excitement, and passion!

If you need help entering your form of ecstasy when you are facing one of life's less than desirable surprises, I am happy to teach you for a hefty fee. Yet I don't believe that's necessary. Why?

We are naturally born happy entities!

You don't need to teach 2-year olds how to be happy. They know how it works. From then on people learn how to not be happy. We have learned what we can gain with misery and what we forgo by being happy too often. And ecstasy is an absolut no-no. Makes you look crazy.

What am I talking about? When you are unhappy, you get attention. We knew how to milk that before we could speak. Being unhappy increases a person's perceived importance. Others latch on with there own problems or they are compelled to help. At the very least, individuals feel compassion with the unhappy. Unhappy fellows are considered deeper, more sophisticated, and thoughtful.

Being unhappy puts you in a control position! A superior angrily barking at his subjects gets immediate respect and more so than a boss who invites you to be merry and to join his ecstatic dance around his desk.

Happiness is suspect! We hate pain and misery, but we're not as scared of it as we are opposed to ecstasy. True happiness is associated with loss of control and must be avoided at all times. People don't even laugh uncontrollably because they are afraid how others may judge them.

Overtly happy people are an embarrassing sight. They are shallow freaks. They cause jealousy and resentment quickly. The happy person obviously doesn't control himself and neither do we expect that he can control others if necessary. You cannot trust a happy man. You want power? Forget being happy!

Everybody knows how to be happy at all times. If and when we aren't, we are scheming. Misery is artificial and those feigning it have ulterior motives. The unhappy person takes the feelings of the few happy freaks hostage. Unhappiness works by way of extortion.

When you are unhappy, you are intent to control your human environment by intimidation. And damned, it often works and we permit misery to bully our happiness into a tiny corner. Twice a month--maybe--at night, in bed, in the dark, when hardly anyone notices we are willing to be happy for 10 seconds.

Pathetic.

Never again trust unhappy people! And that includes an unhappy moody you.

Egbert Sukop

P.S.: That should not stop you from buying my damn book. So? What are you waiting for?!

poor people suck

2009-06-14T17:16:00.000-07:00

Poor people suck. We know that. With their very existence they destroy everybody's happiness, and it's probably a good idea to get rid of them. Robin Hood was not the first to fight the poor by giving them money he had stolen from the rich, and President Obama won't be the last. Such attempts are heartwarming but doomed to fail eventually.

Oh, I don't mean that taking money from the rich is impossible. It works every time but it won't help. Trying to eliminate the poor is such a challenge. Apparently, these guys are a resilient pest and most likely matters are trickier than you may expect:

The poor are an evasive species. Kind of like Sasquatch. Try to find Sasquatch. Then give him money and he will disappear? He won't but that's what we hope the poor will do, don't we?

We want the poor to disappear, and we sheepishly believe that bribing them will support their vanishing act. If we don't try to manipulate the poor into going away there is something wrong with us, we think, and we feel mightily guilty.

My Sasquatch allegory is stupid and inappropriate? About six billion people on earth are poor and you don't need to 'find' them? Of course I am pretty dense but consider this: just as you can't put a finger on Big Foot's big toe, you cannot pick out one single poor person and transport her to life's greener pastures at will.

Looking for a poor individual you could depoorify may not be as easy as finding a needle in a haystack. Besides, there are a bunch of fun things to do in a haystack once you'll tire of the needle business. For centuries we have been eager to whack the poor out of their embarrassing existence, with the result that there are a few billion more of them today than at any time in the past.

We try to get rid of something unwanted, and the inevitable result will be its proliferation.

When I was a little girl, my mom told me I could catch rabbits by dropping salt on their bushy tails. I believed her, loaded up on salt, and went into the field to hunt rabbits. Alas, my dad took the salt away from me, believing it was a potentially dangerous substance (which it was, but only for rabbits). Hence I never caught a rabbit and they have been hastily procreating ever since.

For similar reasons we may never catch a hairy specimen of Big Foot. Does that mean he will never disappear? If we can't find poor people, will they go away? I know you are questioning my sanity, but who are 'the poor?' The homeless guy with a Facebook page, powering up his Dell laptop with a generator (Wall Street Journal, June 4th 2009)? More than a billion people who live on less than a dollar a day? That is some form of financial stability at least, isn't it?

I can hear the howling of the do-gooders from here. I am cruel, you say? Hey, you want to eliminate the poor, not I. Admittedly, from the perspective of the religion of poverty I am committing heresy. I deny the existence of the poor. True. But the nanny activists are denying the poor their existence. What is worse: denying God or making an attempt on his life?

What makes the poor poor? There are plenty of people with little money who refuse to be called 'poor.' Similarly, there are folks with enormous assets but they would rather bite off a chunk of their tongue before they'd admit to being 'rich.' Money doesn't make people rich, as lack of money can't make anybody poor.

Judgment creates both groups, the so-called rich and the allegedly poor. To be precise, it's commonly the judgment of other people. The existence of the poor and the rich is caused by discrimination.

Not even those we think must be poor are likely to call themselves poor. The rich and the poor live in our heads only. Not two individuals will agree on the dividing line between poor and rich. When does one cross that line? What will it take, exactly? If you knew that, it could be done perhaps. Alas, nobody seems to know.

The line between the rich and the poor is individual and imaginary. So is Sasquatch.

The poor are serving a public purpose. We don't talk about poverty out of compassion, we do it because political mileage is to be gained from being seen as helping the poor. Recently I did an unlikely thing--unlikely for me, that is: I volunteered, distributing food and household staples to families in dire need. The organizers were incredibly concerned about properly sucking up to the media. The compassionate journalists were fed with fine foods that could not be wasted on a poor person. The organizers wanted to be photographed with the unfortunate, but they were hardly willing to have any direct business with that unwashed unkempt crowd of trash.

We love this mythological creature: the poverty stricken peasant. We have a romance with our helper's syndrome and the more poor losers we can identify, the more heroic we will look eliminating them. Poor people are as much of a godsend to those fighting poverty as blind children in India were for Mother Teresa. Mother Teresa needed the poor at least as much as the poor needed her. She died with coffers full of charity millions. Collecting the money was important for her. Making it available to those in need who provided the purpose for its accumulation was apparently not that pressing an issue.

We love problems and we nourish them. Problems that we cannot solve give meaning to our otherwise empty lives. And we are suckers for meaning, aren't we? Obviously we need the poor and--thank God--there is a simple solution. Not easy, but simple enough to be executed. We simply invent more of them than we can handle!

Apropos 'execution.' The Nazis knew how handy the Jews could be and sure enough, they loved them to death. Of course the Germans didn't invent the Jews per se. But the Nazis painstakingly invented how the Jews were perceived by a population that quietly permitted--and actively participated in--the bizarre joys of government issued murder.

Artificially altered public perception was powerful enough to turn the population of several countries into willing exterminators. And sleight of hand is what makes people appear as poor as needed. It's not about the lack of money. The sentimental value of emotions you can trigger is what counts. The sap quotient is key. No money is just no money and that experience is not exclusively owned by 'the poor.'

Naturally, nobody wants to kill the poor. We just want to get rid of them, for their own sake and for the common good. It'll be good for them to be gone. Not even the poor need the poor. To be exact, we don't really want to get rid of the poor. We just want to be seen as the ones working on such a sacred task.

Nobody gains brownie points from the absence of poverty and the poor. May they never go away completely. See, that's were the parallel between Sasquatch and the poor is undeniable. We are eager to curb their existence but we cannot afford to kill them off.

Now, are there any real poor people or not? I am not so sure. Agreed, there are several billion people with very little or no money as well as you can find folks who have plenty of assets and decent piles of cash.

I won't deny the existence of people with empty bank accounts and pockets, but the imaginary line we evoke to separate the so-called poor from the so-called rich is nonsense. Politicians gain from that mind game, the so-called poor sure won't.

I will go an inch further: the poor don't exist! The poor are a myth, and so are the rich. You can't get rid of either mythical group, for the same reasons you won't purge the world of Big Foot. Give up the fight, and drop the sick idea that the world would be better off without the poor. Contrary to popular opinion, the world is a great place and Sasquatch doesn't have to become extinct.

A play of perceptions. We have learned nothing about the poor besides myriads of colorful perceptions packaged in sappy stories. The idea of poverty helps journalists sell copy. New age geezers drove their human environment up the walls with poverty thinking and prosperity thinking. Poverty has been used to instigate revolution, to murder Czars, and to control societies. In other words, hardly anything is as valuable as poverty. It offers a wealth of opportunities. What would we do without the poor?

We can't afford to lose the poor and therefore we shall never eliminate poverty. Too many of us want the poor out of our sight AND to stay right where they are, simultaneously. The Jews were a temporary asset for the short sighted Nazis. For our society, the poor are a gift that keeps on giving--a cash cow to be exact.

Talking about racism: conversations about the rich and the poor are as ignorant and derogatory as disparaging talk about different "races." Meanwhile, we have figured out there is only one human race. Duh. But the fascist in us craves the fun of judging. Hence both the poor and the rich have become immortalized, as projections of the unwanted.

'The poor' are not other people. The poor are us. Our ideas of despair have been formed along the lines of nonsense that comes to our mushy mind when we think about poverty with a Hollywood perspective. We are utterly selfish when we evoke the image of poverty. We love thinking about the poor poor as an exercise in secondhand self-pity. The poor have done more for you than you will ever do for them. They give you reason to whine between beers.

It is not intelligent to parrot vague terms ad nauseam. Dividing the population into poor and rich people is separatism. We may choose to continue at our peril. If you really don't enjoy looking at someone's dire circumstances, write her a $500 check. But we'll do more for a vibrant economy when we stop milking each other's moral code under the pretense of doing good. As a species we are too creepy to ever do the right thing. Let's not even try.

If we truly cared about the poor we would have eliminated Malaria by now. We know we can, simply because we have done it in other regions. But we don't give a rat's ass. And that is o.k. as long as we don't pretend otherwise.

Arrogance permits us to address other people's poverty. In our hubris we think we have something to offer. Do we, really? We have adjusted the term 'Third World Country' to the politically more correct 'Developing World,' while we have advanced to becoming the 'Developed World.'

You mean it's a sign of development that more than 90% of our society works in lifelong dependency and despises every day of work? We should export our brilliant accomplishments? We would feel so much better about ourselves if we butchered the individuals and their potential also in the developing world on a grand scale, so they may live in voluntary slavery like we do?

If I were poor I would hide from the nannies who want to save me. But fortunately there are no poor people. Only individuals with differing amounts of cash in their pockets. And then, there are some things that mysteriously unite us all: the right and the freedom to have as much as we have.

Last but not least, we share a great equalizer: the fun of trying to make another buck.

Egbert Sukop

P.S.: Buy my book! And good grief, do it now: http://to.ly/7cx

crappiness of happiness

2009-05-28T17:43:00.000-07:00

A friend asked me how I would sum up the content of my new book in one sentence. The short answer: "Ecstasy in Hell!"

Yeah, but how ... yeah, butt what?

The pursuit of happiness is overrated. Happiness is not. See, as long as you pursue happiness you can't have it. So, why would you want to pursue happiness instead of enjoying it? You are happy or you aren't--there is no middle ground. Nobody is almost happy or half depressed.

The experience of happiness is rather sparse. We have developed myths about the proper pursuit of happiness, and our belief in happy-making myths is more important to us than actually being happy. Let's bludgeon three of these myths out of existence.

Life is messy, and it will stay that way. If we must fix the world before we can relax and enjoy a moment of happiness, we are doomed. Miserable people, on a mission to make the world a better place, will make the world more miserable. I don't trust unhappy do-gooders.

The supposedly meaningful maxim: "Leave the world a better place!" is frighteningly meaningless and in the incompetent hands of the unhappy, anything that seems better to them is guaranteed to take a turn for the worse. If you are unhappy with the universe, take a nap. But please don't do anything to make it better.

Do you know why you don't like your bloody world? Because every dork has tried to improve it. That includes--but is not limited to--Mao, Hitler, and Stalin. They wanted a better world as well. By all means put horse manure under your rose bushes if you so desire, but don't screw with my world. I don't need more of other people's harebrained ideas to improve the law "for my safety." What am I talking about? Health Nazis, like NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg, want to outlaw salt. Salt? Yes, salt! I am confident it'll be illegal for me to pick my own nose, soon.

If you are unhappy with your reality, the world is not the cause of your misery. You are. And don't even consider improving yourself to take care of that problem: you are beyond help. The situation is hopeless and nothing better could happen to you.

Hopelessness is the portal to expanded happiness!

Dopey Hope No. 1: "One day I shall be sane and because of my healthy noodle, my world will be more enjoyable."

You will never be sane.

The DSM-IV (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) lacks a definition of sanity, but it describes you and me in excruciating detail. We are nuts, all of us, in different departments and on a variety of intensity levels.

We are a bit cuckoo, and some of us a little more than others. So what? Call it eccentric if you prefer but quit tinkering with your noggin'. You are doing fine. Few things are as liberating as the realization that you will never be normal or like other people. Other people will always be nuttier than you can imagine. Trust me, you don't want to be like them.

Putting an end to your quest for sanity translates to instant relaxation and provides a crucial foundation for happiness. Go for it. You can be there before noon tomorrow.

Dopey Hope No. 2: "One day I shall be surrounded by individuals who truly understand and respect me. Feeling understood will make me think better of myself."

You will never find a person who understands you!

I don't know how to break it to you, but you will die alone. Nobody cares to croak with you. A couple of teary-eyed folks may hang around, but the performance of the day will be yours.

We were alone when we were born. No matter how creepily "loving" and feng shui the atmosphere during your water birth was, the crappy pain you had to experience while transitioning from mom's pot belly to a rather cold environment akin to Siberia was exclusively yours. Since then, you have been on death row and it won't be commuted. Sorry!

Apropos, if waterboarding is torture, so is child birth. If newborns could talk, they would scream for a lawyer and the Geneva Convention. Put an adult through the same procedure that every baby experiences during birth, and pregnancy would be outlawed as a crime against humanity. Under a multitude of risks to life and limb, each one of us was cruelly tortured into this life. To add insult to injury, the entire blasted family was looking forward to our most painful experience of a lifetime.

I acknowledge that our mothers had their heaping share of pain to deal with, but they volunteered to participate. We did not. However, individuals live through this mandatory event in gruesome loneliness. It's great to have company, but pharmaceuticals are better suited to move this chapter quickly into the past.

Some of us develop the idea that life becomes more bearable in a group. 'Bearable' doesn't equal happiness for me, but who am I to judge the lemmings? You mean dying will be more fun when we "belong?" The only thing that improves in a group is the stupidity of each individual member. It can jump up exponentially in fact. Think committee decisions.

The first tree you ever saw in your life differed from my first tree. Somebody innocently mentions the word 'tree,' and you and I believe we have an idea of what she meant. Each of us imagines a different tree, and we could bombard each other with descriptions for days without success: we shall never get a congruent image of the other person's tree into our head.

Trees or chairs are relatively easy to communicate about. Tangibles are child's play compared with more complex subjects such as peace, love, freedom, or the existence and consistency of a soul. Good thing that I don't bother maintaining one. A soul that is. I don't even care for peace or love, but that is a separate story.

It is practically impossible for two people to agree on a precise definition of 'love' or 'God.' What is torture, for instance, and what is not? After half a decade of heated debates we aren't closer to agreement, are we?

Giving up the idea of finding your damn soul mate or someone who truly understands you can relieve you of the tension you were trying to eliminate by trying hard to meet understanding friends. I have felt most lonely while I was surrounded by dear friends, and I have felt outright deserted in the midst of family.

You can only discover, express, and enjoy your kind of freedom alone. Don't be so dense: of course you can be close to great individuals, but you'll never cross the chasm of individuality. Between individuals there can't be understanding. I shall never know you.

Dopey Hope No. 3: "One beautiful day the world will be as desired and all my insipid wishes will come true."

Not!

By the way, do you know what people hate most about the markets? The fact that markets behave as unpredictably as the world does. The notion that free markets don't work is as absurd and feeble minded as the idea that reality must be wrong.

"The world"--our collective experience of planet earth and your personal reality--will never be as neatly organized and pleasant as we wish for it to turn out. It matters not how many cutesy treasure maps the faithful Claw-of-Attraction dorks will nail to their bedroom walls. Even Hitler tried that and failed miserably.

You will never like your present day in its entirety, your future, or your past. And if you can be happy with the rosy parts of reality only, you are doomed to a dull existence, baby. Happiness about everything going according to your plan is for greenhorns. Gathering positive events in your life and trying to eliminate more of the negative stuff is a zero sum game.

Positive thinkering is maxed out. You won't prevent a quarter of a billion annual Malaria infections by thinking "good" thoughts and Malaria won't become more palatable by "seeing the glass half full." If your teenage son happens to impregnate your neighbor's 16-year old daughter--The Secret this or The Secret that--you won't like it one bit.

Conditional happiness is a setup for depression. "I am willing to be happy only if and when X occurs." Well, good luck with that! Why would you want to deprive yourself of happiness between highly improbable events? Are you so superstitious that you believe your self-chosen misery will convince the universe to have mercy with your rotten soul? You think sacrificing your happiness will guarantee better circumstances for your future?

If you are not happy, you have made a childish deal with the universe: "Dear universe, if you provide me with XYZ eventually, I am willing to be miserable in exchange meanwhile." People literally choose misery now to be happy later. It's pathetic.

I know I am exaggerating. I am wrong. It's not true. I lied. Funny species that we are, we can't be that droll ... or can we?

Your life's circumstances will rarely be conducive to prolonged happiness. If you care to be happy, you must pry it out of the iron grip of daily adversity. You must shorten your bitch lag!

Say wha ...?

Bitch lag.

There it is. The happy-maker par excellence.

Bitch lag is the time it takes to regain your composure, your productivity, and your happiness--after a disruptive unpleasant event triggered you to complain about reality.

We are useless while we're bitching about our lot. We are not making money and we're not aware how much fun we are having. But we are having fun indeed while we are locked in complaining mode. In fact, bitching about the world animates us so that we could go on for hours. Honestly, you don't want to defend the position that hating event X in your life is an expression of misery, or do you?

Bitching is bitching. We love it!

When things go wrong in our lives, when we are upset, pissed off, and red-faced in glowing anger: we are in our element. That, too, is happiness. Unadulterated ecstasy. We enjoy the crap in our lives more than we do its lame positive sides. Gets the blood pressure going.

You cannot expand your happiness by by increasing the nice and pink stuff. That's ninny theory. Leave The Secret and mind numbingly boring self-improvement to the baby boomers. Hardcore happiness wants to be experienced around the clock and because they don't have access to it, the baby boomers can't be weened off their weed.

I am not interested in inhaling five minutes of happiness on weekends. I want all of it all the time, or nothing! So can you. And damned, it's free!

Zero bitch lag: you realize you're bitching about something and--Bingo!--you are there. THAT is your current expression of ecstasy.

Reality sucks once-in-a-while for everyone of us. So what? Exploit it, all of it, for fun and profit. And you'll have one hell of a grand time.

Egbert

P.S.: Have you bought my book yet? No? Geez, pick it up at http://moneybymistake.com

I love what I want

2009-04-07T11:12:00.000-07:00

My friend Tom Volkar brought up the issue of love in regards to work. Should we pursue work we love or is it better that we do what we want? To get a deeper understanding of where I am coming from, I suggest you visit Tom's fabulous essay 'Loving Your Work is Overrated.' Now.

Here's my response:

Thank you, Tom, for shamelessly plugging my book! Your kind compliments are making me blush.

Roughly 50% of our marriages end in divorce, and we are falling out of love at an even higher rate. Love has a poor track record, especially as the basis for a flourishing long term business relationship with oneself.

Granted, love doesn't always look like Tom Cruise jumping up and down on Oprah's sofa. But elements of insanity or at least manic behavior are lurking in the shadows of every romance. We love being in love to a level of addiction, and here is the opening to unavoidable pain. Our love for love usually dissolves it ... if we are lucky.

Unless we talk about love for our brats, that is--but that kind of caring is hardwired into our DNA. Any damned ostrich can do that.

Love is a terminal illness. Your love will end or it will end you. Love can literally kill people, and it is healthy to keep in mind that most homicides take place between individuals who once loved each other.

When we are tired of "loving" destruction and self-destruction, we can simply resolve the relationship entirely or we may opt for transmuting this mushy monstrum into something of durable consistency: able partners can transcend seizures of love and derive from it what they WANT!

Decades ago I loved my work. I was on a mission ("They're not gonna catch us. We're on a mission from God." --Blues Brothers), and I didn't believe that this love could end. The stuff we love is fraught with too much meaning. You mentioned 'the horns of angels:' "If the horns of angels and blinding white light don't announce their epiphanies, they often question their discoveries."

Frequent questioning of our discoveries is an integral part of a healthy mental diet. People get heart attacks over the impertinent self-importance that's covered up by their calling. Yep, God's Will can be a severe case of covert hubris. It serves us well to relax and to re-discover the playful character of old fashioned trial and error.

Beginning a new business venture can be fun. What's so wrong with lust? And if it works, why wouldn't you want to continue?

Today, I embrace the fact that I am somewhat detached from my projects. Distance makes the heart grow fonder? It does. Emotional distance supports free choice and thickens your bond with everything you really want.

The next occurrence of love is likely going to be a temporary phenomenon. Worse, our love suspends free will. Freedom of choice is impaired by love, and that can be as sickening as a commitment. Apropos, commitment to psychiatric wards is usually perpetrated by--you guessed correctly--loved ones, in the name of love. Is the sleepiest Saint out there finally snapping to attention?

'Doing what we love' is just another holy cow on the chopping block: ultimately we don't do anything we don't want. Feelings and emotions are always subject to our will. The baby boomers have used their sacred feelings as the most powerful tool to manipulate and to subjugate their environment. The infatuation of a teenager is an intense expression of what she wants.

So is our love and our hatred for our work.

Egbert Sukop

P.S.: Are you twittering yet? Follow me on twitter.com at http://twitter.com/esukop

P.P.S.: And don't forget to visit Amazon to purchase a copy of my book 'How to Better Hate Your Job' at http://tinyurl.com/dyal4y

dream life

2009-04-01T10:04:00.000-07:00

Dreaming happens whether we like it or not. We don't dream actively. We can ride a bicycle but we cannot intentionally dream. Dreaming "happens." It is an event we have no or extremely little control over.

But then we invent dreams we care about. We believe they are important. We want to turn them into reality. We are becoming attached to the outcome. Our dream--of how reality should be--morphs from innocence into a necessity, and we swear we shall never be happy again without getting what we want.

That's the moment when your finest dream has gathered sufficient power to reduce your life to a pile of rubble. The more we want something, the less freedom we have. A specific goal or a dream can kill the ecstasy you are capable of enjoying this very moment. Dreams that are meant to improve your life may become roots for its destruction.

Let's back up a notch. I am aware there are different types of dreams and goals, and I admit that I am simplifying. But what the hell, why shouldn't I?

Reduced to two kinds of goals, we can pursue one that is supposed to better our lives or a different kind that expresses our enjoyment of life. The former--"I want x, so that my life will be better, more meaningful, healthier, richer, etc."--evokes the image of a dog chasing a rabbit.

The outcome is impossible to predict. We expect to increase happiness in the future, and that imaginary level of happiness is linked to success or to the failure of our projects. We deny ourselves to be content at this moment because we are using misery as the motivator to achieve what we want in the future.

That is self-improvement at its worst. To be honest, where is the improvement in reaching such a goal? When I have to deprive myself of current joy as a psychological technique to get what I want, I am likely to repeat this effective--but nevertheless idiotic--'success' pattern in the future.

Say wha?

Once you have reached goal x, you will find ways to make yourself feel miserable again (re-charging your motivational battery) as a starting point for the pursuit of a new goal y that "will make you so incredibly happy." Pretty sick, don't you think?

Angry people crave to change the world. And when the world changes they are still angry. Anger is their childish tool. Anger is what they enjoy the most, and they will continue to be angry no matter what they'll achieve.

My happiness does not depend on luck and on the decisions other people are making. The outcome of my projects, my success rate or my bank balance, determines how much I can enjoy myself at the moment? That would be a fine reason for blowing my brains out. Sure, it's nice when things go well and when our projects are flourishing. I love when that happens, but I won't permit a fickle universe to steal my happiness.

Does goal setting work? Sure, why not. Is it advisable for the purpose of self-improvement? I am sorry, I have too much self-respect to suggest such a harebrained idea. If you love your life, beware of self-improvement. And if you don't enjoy being you, you have bigger problems to deal with than those that simplistic self-improvement can solve.

The other type of goal I mentioned is based on current contentment. It's not aimed at causing happiness. On the contrary, existing happiness is the foundation for this kind of goal. No retail therapy necessary. There is nothing you need to buy, do, or accomplish before you are willing to respect yourself by being happy and relaxed. You are exercising because you are feeling so good, instead of exercising for the purpose of reaching workout goals.

Playfulness versus dead serious cut throat behavior toward yourself. You can start the same business playfully and you can build the same house. But when contentment is the basis for setting material goals, they are easier to accomplish because it's just matter and free of emotional attachments. Making money is more fun when that money doesn't have to make you happy.

Not being happy is childish.

Children use misery and pain to get attention. When so-called adults continue that pattern, it becomes awfully pathetic. Pursuing dreams in order to be happy 'one day' is futile, and it is useless to work on goal achievement with the purpose of being free to to what you want afterward.

As far as happiness is concerned, I promote instant gratification. We can't make ourselves dream the right stuff in our sleep, and we don't control whether we'll have nightmares or pleasant dreams in pink. Neither are we capable of forcing a particular dream into existence during our waking hours.

'Follow your dream' does not mean that your will is the measure of all things and that you must subjugate reality at any cost. Forcing your will on your environment would be a fine recipe for misery, almost a guarantee that you will never be satisfied again.

In my dreams I never get to do what I want. Hence I rather wake up, be happy, and do what I want. How does that work, 'being happy first?'

Good question! I thought you'd never ask. It's easy: attend my seminar. Oops, I forgot that I don't offer seminars ... at least not now. But you can purchase a copy of my book 'How to Better Hate Your Job.' That will answer questions about instant happiness. Not exhaustively but in ways you don't expect.

A happy day to you,

Egbert Sukop

P.S.: Are you twittering yet? Follow me on twitter.com at http://twitter.com/esukop

P.P.S.: And don't forget to visit Amazon to purchase a copy of my book 'How to Better Hate Your Job' at http://tinyurl.com/dyal4y

happy people and mad dogs

2009-03-24T02:28:00.000-07:00

"Money loves happy people," said Rev. Ike a couple of decades ago and he was damn right. Happy individuals will make different financial decisions than depressed or desperate people. It's pretty obvious, isn't it?

Now, if you are one of those who believe you won't be happy until you'll get more money, you are doomed and I can promise you won't be happy with or without the additional funds you deem necessary for your emotional paradise. In that case you are equally screwed as are people who believe children are supposed to make their parents happy. Holding your kids responsible for your happiness is perhaps the worst kind of permanent child abuse.

Your children cannot and will not make you happy. You will experience delightful times with them as well as terrifying moments and sad days. But burdening your offspring with the impossibly heavy load of "owing you" happiness is cruel, and making your kids feel guilty for your emotional disposition doesn't speak for you. Fortunately you have never done that. It's your job to be happy, and as a happy person you will be better equipped to meet challenges of all sorts, including a series of awkward situations your children will present to you.

Expecting more money to provide you with a happier future is equally insane. No matter how wealthy or how poor you think you are, you will always be surprised by unforeseen situations. You will see sad days in connection with monetary events, you will be angry, frustrated, and you may live through moments of severe depression, self-doubt, and regret. Excitement, hope, elation, and even love will be part of your relationship with money also. But money is not the cause of your experiences.

Is there a parallel universe? Absolutely!

Our thoughts and feelings occur PARALLEL to everything else. Emotional up and down swings happen and they are not dependent on your current bank balance, number of children, color and make of your cars, horsepower of your damn speed boat, or boom-and-bust cycles of our economy (be they "natural" or artificially induced).

Things are great AND we are feeling fabulous. We are well off AND we can feel like crap. Times are horrendous AND we are scared of the future. Vast portions of the economy are in the crapper WHILE we are feeling upbeat, adventurous, and happy. Stuff happens WHILE we feel things, pleasant or not so pleasant. One does not happen because of the other.

The childish idea that once the flaws of our world are fixed life will be fantastic, is dangerous and worse: it deprives us of happiness for the most part of our lives because we are constantly in the waiting loop for an improved "thereafter" of some sort. As babies we learned that factual or perceived misery may be helpful to gather attention. Trust me, the same strategy looks rather silly when applied by adults. And it is insufficient. Looking pitiful serves no purpose and it is without benefit. Nothing and nobody can help us attain happiness. As with death and taxes, we are on our own.

Thoughts and feelings happen parallel to actual events. No causality here. I agree, at times that may be a tough one to swallow. But it is helpful. Here is how:

You get to choose the set of background feelings you want to make money with!

A sunny disposition is your favorite temperamental makeup? Alright then, what do you enjoy doing when you are in a great mood? Grab a piece of paper--I mean, really--and scribble down a dozen adhoc ideas how you could make money with that, in simple ways and SOON.

Our society seems to be desperate for more jobs. We are a funny species, aren't we? We hate jobs but we are crybabies, and therefore we are demanding more jobs we can bitch about. Sooner or later we may get what we hate so passionately, more jobs, but for now let's just concentrate on making an additional dollar. With or without a recession, did you know that it is easier to make some extra money than to land a job?

The amazing thing is you can make a buck with happiness as an underlying theme, but you don't have to. If you are rather angry, fearful, or mad as hell it works equally well.

You will hate me for this: issues that "make" you mad are NOT the real cause of the way you feel. It's the other way around. More or less consciously, you pick 'mad' as your entertainment of the moment and all your senses go on a witch hunt until you find a subject you can feel mad about. Bingo! Now that you have found a target, you are pulling the trigger over and over again, shooting off one salvo of nasty thoughts after the other.

It doesn't help, as we have experienced repeatedly. Projecting responsibility onto a scape goat may obscure reality for awhile but the responsibility remains ours. When I am mad it is nobody else's business. Nobody "did that to" me. And, talking of business, you can exploit being "mad as a dog" for fun and profit as easily as you can make money while being content and happy.

What drives you up the wall? What subject enrages you? What pisses you off? Huh!

Yep, none of these issues "do that to" you or cause the way you feel. Rather, your feelings accompany issues you concentrate on. They move along on parallel paths. They are not linked. I am terribly redundant, I know, but it cannot be said often enough. Why? Because disconnecting your experience of the world from the perceived cause of your experience ends your status of being a victim once and for all. Abandonment of causality in this regard functions as the ultimate empowerment.

Now you may use your being mad as a tool--or as underlying mood of your choice--to make money as well. Again, what serves you best as a trigger to being intensely upset? Jot down a dozen ways to turn it into extra cash. Impossible? C'mon, this is how trial lawyers discovered the cornucopia of class action lawsuits. Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) thrive on the fund raising power of anger. And so can you.

Under one condition: you can turn happiness, hatred, madness, or--if you must--love into a business venture and cash ONLY if you own the feeling. If the cause or the source is outside of you, forget it. When you are causing and generating the thought or the feeling at will, you are controlling the consistency of your business operation. If you don't own the feeling, you are subject to the fickleness of love, hatred, or happiness and you cannot afford that.

Further, if you are the one who chooses "being mad" as foundation for your business, you can enjoy what you are doing just as much as those who want to do what they love. When you own your hatred, you can do what you hate and you will discover quickly how much you love hating it. Love is an umbrella emotion: do what you love, do what you hate, or anything in between--you can love it all.

Takes balls, though.

Egbert Sukop

P.S.: Have you read my new book yet? No? Geez. You owe it to yourself. Employed or self-employed, we are all doing a job of some sort. Of course, you don't "hate" everything you do! You probably like your job but the circumstances or your colleagues are not as pleasant as they should be.

Positive thinking is maxed out. By now, you have noticed that you can't improve the messed up elements of your work conditions via thinking or wishing. Nothing against 'The Secret' but you have experienced the limits of happiness, or have you not?

Well, there are alternatives. Go and pick up your copy of 'How to Better Hate Your Job' today. If that link refuses to work for you, go to www.amazon.com and use ISBN 978-0-578-00314-6

Should you get lost, visit my website www.moneybymistake.com and you'll know what to do next.

trojan dinosaur

2009-02-15T10:16:00.000-08:00

The mind is its own place and in itself, can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven. --John Milton

Dinosaurs would disagree with the common perspective that evolution necessarily means progress. Natural selection, one of the major mechanisms that propels evolution, "decided" that the qualities of dinosaurs weren't the most fabulous for the purpose of indefinite reproduction. Hence nature--or whatever the hell you choose to call it--discarded the dino option.

The treehugger in us mourns extinct species but we are natural hypocrites. We are not thrilled about a pack of Canis Lupus roaming our backyards, but we consider it a cruel deed when a wolf gets shot in Alaska. Honestly, you don't want to find your Toyota under a pile of dinosaur excrement when you are about to drive home from church. And who enjoys getting stepped on by large animals? The fact that dinosaurs fell victim to extinction is reason to celebrate. What you may call progress meant death for dinosaurs.

Death of a species is not always caused by the evil human race. Tens of thousands of species had become extinct before homo sapiens popped up. And to this day, a bunch of species die PARALLEL to our existence and not because of us picking our noses the wrong way.

Hate me if you like, but I think it's a blessing that certain creatures are dead. Actually, that is true for some people also: who would want the Mao monster back? Or Hitler, Stalin, Che Guevara--I know, there are folks who are in awe of murderers like Che--and Pol Pot? Evolution kills things, and not only bad and creepy guys with body odor. Evolution couldn't care less about good or bad individual specimens of a species, and it doesn't give a rat's pink behind about a single species, either.

Evolution is a process from inferiority to superiority, from worse to better? Bollocks. Adaptation to a changing environment, spruced up by occasional random changes--genetic drift--does not imply that the environment causes a species to improve. Homo Sapiens of the 21st century may be better suited to procreate in an increasingly Orwellian world and perhaps we are fit enough to survive our own idiocy, but that does not say anything about us being a better edition than the Mesopotamian dorks of the iron age some 3,000 years ago.

Do you seriously believe the average dunce of today is advanced compared to the average contemporary of George Washington? I am confident Mr. Washington could smoke each and every politician of today's world in his pipe. Since George Washington, politicians have certainly not progressed. Or do you think they lie so much better today than they did 200 years ago? One wishes politicians would become the new dinosaurs, following the brittle crop of banksters on their heels, but unfortunately they are as resilient as a bad strain of the flu.

We are freaks, and the human race is a strange species. But, that is not what I intend to talk about: I have evolution on my mind, evolution free of progress.

Apropos '200 years' of development and progress: Matt Ridley, an Oxford-educated zoologist, said in a recent interview: "It is conceivable that some people in Africa are living at a lower standard of living than anyone was 200 years ago." (Reason magazine, February 2009). Yes, we are progressing indeed.

Evolution has no interest in pacifying an individual or a collective perspective of "better" or "more" in any department of our humanness. Sure, the tools and technologies we employ today are superior. But are people better individuals today? Are we happier? Objectively, the improvement of quantities or qualities is hardly on the menu of evolution, and it would be silly to expect that the universe increases income, health, or freedom naturally as an organic function of evolving from one Monday to the next.

Survival of the fittest? Really? My observation tells me that the fittest die as well, sooner or later. Often sooner. Athlete's heart, you know? Yeah, I am aware that my exegesis stinks and that I am bending scientific truths for my devious purposes. But some of those truths are crooked and questionable. For instance, people are peddling barrels of snake oil under the intimidating banner of "quantum physics." It's all made up out of thin air anyway, without the slightest scientific base but people are buying it with hard currency. You care for solid evolutionary truth?

It is a fact of evolution that everybody ends up dead. Nobody survives evolution. Nobody wins. If death is progress from your perspective, then yes, evolution means progress. Otherwise, I'll continue to have my doubts.

You want to believe in evolution or in creationism, 'Intelligent Design?' Have it your way, I don't care. Peculiar to me is the fact that the defenders of a creator do not trust their God, just as the church of evolution--c'mon, for Richard Dawkins evolution IS a religion--does not trust the inner workings of evolution.

Denouncing progress in the church of evolution is heresy, and I'm afraid the mind of the average intellectual has not improved since the Catholic church and the Holy Inquisition put Galileo Galilei under house arrest 500 years ago. For the Catholic church on the other hand, progress CAN be heresy if it interferes with the church's manic opportunism:

In 1990, Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI., cited some current views on the Galileo affair as forming what he called "a symptomatic case that illustrates the extent to which modernity’s doubts about itself have grown today in science and technology." As evidence he quoted philosopher Paul Feyerabend, as saying:

"The Church at the time of Galileo kept much more closely to reason than did Galileo himself, and she took into consideration the ethical and social consequences of Galileo's teaching too. Her verdict against Galileo was rational and just, and the revision of this verdict can be justified only on the grounds of what is politically opportune."

Two years later, in 1992, Pope John Paul II. vindicated Galileo. It must have been "politically opportune," as the church--according to Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI.)--obviously doesn't give a crap about what's true.

The Catholic church does not trust God's creation, and she does not feel comfortable selling creation "as is" to her flock. In this case, church executives waited half a thousand years before they felt sufficiently comfy to inform the faithful of what they had known to be true all along. When the church offers truth eventually, please be aware that it may come with a 500-year delay.

Ultimately, it doesn't matter whether you believe God created the status quo or evolution delivered us where we are today: as a society, we don't trust either of the two. What do I mean? We do not trust free markets! Truth is not opportune and we prefer to fight it with as much money as we are willing to print. Perhaps not for 500 years, because even the dullest union member can calculate that foolishness can't be financed indefinitely, but we are determined to cover up reality with mountains of money.

If you can trust the existence of progress and evolution, why can't you trust the market? Products come and go. The markets are subject to evolution also. Some inventions stay for a long time and adjust to changing requirements. The wheel, for instance, has been around for awhile. Entire professions have come and gone. Other products and services become obsolete within months of their introduction or after a few years. The elevator man, for example, is a rare phenomenon these days, and if you want an exquisite carpenter for your project, you need to go to the Amish or you are out of luck.

I suggest we continue paying all former elevator people. Let us build elevators--useful or not--so that the last remaining elevator men can drive up and down all day until their last pitiful brain cells croak. Manufacturers of typewriters should be enabled financially to employ their workforce again and until the end of time. Steam engine operators, weavers, pardoners (licensed to sell Papal indulgences), and postillions need to get back on somebody's payroll.

Insane? I don't understand! Small business owners who earn barely $25 an hour (and cannot afford health insurance) are forced to pay General Motors' workers who are making $39.68 an hour (including base pay, cost-of-living adjustments, night-shift premiums, overtime, holiday and vacation pay), plus another average $33.58 an hour (health-care, pension and other benefits). Difference between the two is that one is productive and the GM employee is not.

GM can't sell enough cars to justify their business model. For years to come, millions of factually obsolete jobs will be artificially propped up by those of us whose services and products find buyers. We may just as well pay everybody royally whose profession has become superfluous during the course of history. A trillion dollars more or less won't make a difference.

When you own a restaurant and you manage it poorly, you'll have to face reality. When arrogant dicks like John Thain run a 95-year old company like Merrill Lynch into the ground, Bank of America may pick up the pieces on paper but the productive tax payer will be forced to deal with the consequences. Mind boggling, that people have to work their asses off on productive jobs and in money-producing businesses--large AND small--to finance jobs that will disappear once it'll be "politically opportune" to describe the Emperor's Clothes as what they are.

If you believe the rich have to pay more in the future to finance the poor, you are so wrong! The productive are being punished for their productivity and forced to pay for the unproductive. Individuals who have to come up with the dough to keep useless jobs on life support, may have less money than those who benefit from this disgusting scheme.

AIG Insurance, the 18th largest company in the world, is "too large" to let it slide into bankruptcy. Your puny business and mine are apparently not too small to support giant losers like Bank of America (who has received $45 billion), AIG Inc. (who has access to $190 billion), and Shitty Group (who has received $50 billion). Goodness, AIG lost $62 billion buckaroos in the last quarter of 2008 alone! How does one do that (unless that money was never really there; unfortunately, that comes painfully close to the truth)?

Dinosaurs die. That used to be an evolutionary fact. Since governments never met a crisis they didn't like, dead dinosaurs are being mutated to Trojan dinosaurs or transformed into economically undead, if you will. The harsh reality of boom and bust cycles is "politically not opportune" anymore for the pussies--oops, please accept my sincere apology!--we have become while progressing lazily. We are crying for mom to help us, and the political nannies are thrilled to comply. With a little unforeseen twist, that is.

Am I angry? Not at all. Frustrated, demotivated, or depressed? On the contrary.

Freedom and individuality have always been fragile and precious, and this moment is as good as any to claim them for yourself. Governments come and go, and what one government can give you, the next may take away from you. Getting upset over government waste is a waste of time. Evolution has not been able to improve politicians, and neither will we perform such a miracle.

The real question is: will you allow anyone--the recession or the undead--to take away your happiness? Don't. That is the first step into freedom. Reclaim your full power over your happiness! The following steps may not be as easy, but they will be simple as well.

The fight to expand your individuality is so hard because it must be fought against and for yourself.

Egbert Sukop

P.S.: To all of you who have purchased my new book:

Thank you so much! I feel privileged that you chose to read my rebellious and provocative material. Not everybody can digest it without (growing) pain and I appreciate the daring individuals who are embracing the challenge. You are truly exceptional!

'How to Better Hate Your Job' is now available on
www.amazon.com (ISBN: 978-0-578-00314-6).

hate responsibly

2009-02-06T20:52:00.000-08:00

Things you don't like are more powerful than things you do like. Think about your job, and then agree with me: collectively--and perhaps individually--we are making more money hating what we are doing than by loving all the way to the bank.

Even if we are self-employed, if we chose our profession deliberately, and if we honestly love what we are doing with a passion: there are aspects of our work that we don't enjoy. We hate firing people, for instance. We despise pouring over our income taxes. Or, we aren't too ecstatic about a difficult customer stealing our precious time. You may be the grand master of delegating unwanted tasks but if you are telling me you love everything you do--all day, every day, and everybody you are dealing with--you are losing credibility rapidly.

It is similar with children. We love our offspring, sure, but do you truly LOVE dealing with every issue your teenage kids bring up? Rubbish! They're confronting us with ample material we can hate. Pulling a condom out of your 14-year old daughter's jeans pocket while doing the laundry or discovering your son's stash of weed in his chest of drawers calls for conversations you might file away labeled as 'tough love,' while the brats are increasingly convinced how much you must be hating them. No, we don't love everything we say we love.

Our work entails details we are not too thrilled about. There are elements we hate. And we are doing it anyway. Hatred for disliked parts of our jobs has become integrated in our overall passion for the things we do. Long ago we may have stopped dissecting the emotional layers of our work world, separating the likes from the dislikes. We are simply lacking the time for silly exercises like that and besides, it's superfluous. The work must be done anyway. The brood wants to be raised (they disagree, though). There is no reason for us to stop doing what we hate, and we won't.

On the contrary, we are making money by hating things. To a certain degree, hatred has a cash value attached to it for every one of us. Talk about peace and love as much as you want but please do tell me, what percentage of your rent or mortgage payment requires from you the discipline to do what you are hating. That works the other way around as well. We have disciplined ourselves to hate what we are doing, because we are aware of its value.

More than 87% of Americans hate their jobs. That means the overwhelming majority pays bills with the cash equivalent of hatred. Love doesn't seem to be as trustworthy or as bankable as hatred. Hey, I didn't invent this idea! Neither am I trying to convince you of anything. I am stating facts that others--Forbes magazine, for example--have gathered, and I am offering you an unusual perspective.

Did I suggest you should be hating your job instead of loving it? Nonsense! I am writing about the often painful reality of hatred for our jobs. Pointing out alternative options for the interpretation of that reality, is my aim.

Oh, I know you don't enjoy hearing this. I could sell so many more copies of my book by telling you instead what's pleasing to your ears. Sorry, I won't harass you for the umptieth time with motivational syrup how doing what you love will make you rich by Tuesday afternoon. I am confident you'll find enough of that gooey stuff elsewhere. I prefer talking about subjects that stink.

Back to hatred. Making money with hatred is one thing, but our relationship with subjects of hatred is deeper than love for money.

Power.

A common opinion states that individuals are continuously on a quest for power. Power over other people (one reason to make children, if you are allergic to cat dander). Power over money. Power over a piece of the environment.

True, we are freaks, but I disagree with the general theory that human beings are seeking power. If we did, why are so many of us settling for so little of it? No, the average person is satisfied wielding an ounce of power necessary to report her neighbor's messy front yard to the homeowners' assassination. Beyond that, we prefer secondhand power: we are in awe about OTHER people's power or with the power we believe they have.

The masses enjoy the small mindedness of admiring those in power positions, and we love to see some of those who climbed high drop out of power. The secondhand power trip permits our own behinds to stay in life's security zone. Fascination with power cannot be fully understood if we leave out the thrill the mob derives from the destruction of power.

From the blood drenched French Revolution and the murder of the Russian Czar family, to a time when every schmuck feels entitled to limiting the salaries of "greedy" executives in the ivory towers of "evil powerful" corporations--witnessing the so-called powerful fail is equally entertaining to us as it is to cheer them on while they are rising stars. No, baby, most of us do not yearn for such power. Most of us don't have the sick desire to fall victim to our neurotic ilk. And then, that describes a certain form of power we are milking out of a status that pretends to be powerless, or do we not?

But I digress.

"Things we don't like are more powerful," or so I said. Why? Because we are not actively hating anything. Hating is a passive act. Say wha ...? In our younger--and arguably dumber--years some of us were victims of love. We "fell" in love until we fell out of it, involuntarily. As if the objects of our love--girl, car, beer, boy, motorcycle, etc.--had had the slightest power over us and over the way we chose to feel. We were craving a powerful car under our scrawny arses precisely because we lacked the balls to assume power over those feelings and emotions that we believed cars and girls had over us.

We did not love. That stuff "made us" love it. Small wonder we began a frustrating and eventually unsuccessful quest of unearthing the ultimate IT (job, house, partner, religion, anything). Pretty pathetic. Meanwhile, a bunch of us have figured out that our love interests happen to be rather brief infatuations unless we inject an active element. We started to choose ("Honey, I'd love to go to Disneyland!"), and we have experienced some value in actively following through. We have discovered how to love by choice. Damn yeah, there can be freedom in it!

Things we hate are so powerful because we don't hate anything by choice: what we are hating seems to make us hate it. "Honey, let's hate the Jews." That's not how NAZI Germany's dogged family daddies succeeded murdering 6,000,000 individuals. Seriously, the good old German butchers were convinced IT happened to THEM as it did to Jews, homosexuals, Gypsies, intellectuals, artists, and countless others who were seen as responsible for their executioners' deeds.

"I hate my job," means I am not responsible for hating my job. It suggests my job is so bad that I am practically forced to hate what I do. And it means I believe in the higher power of the things I hate. What I hate determines my life. If I am holding down a job I can hate, I am relatively safe. Hatred is the provider for nations. It buys lunch.

"Dear Lord, don't ever let us run out of stuff we can hate!" It's the prayer of journalists who desire to sell copy. You, too, ought to be grateful for work you can hate passionately. The public is getting giddy about the future creation of millions of hated jobs, since we know that economies are falling apart when our collective and personal hatred drops to mediocre regions.

On a personal level, that translates to an increase of income and to improved happiness if you can manage to discover more work projects you can hate. Double that offer if you bring yourself to the realization that the power behind the scenes is yours.

Egbert Sukop

P.S.: My book 'How to Better Hate Your Job' is now available on Amazon.com. As rebellious and provocative as it is, you should not read this disturbing material. Not you!

money motion

2009-01-31T21:35:00.000-08:00

"To play at the top of your form, you cannot be emotionally involved in the results." --Arnold Snyder, Card Player magazine

Showing--your true--emotions in a game of Poker makes you predictable. An expensive idea. Somebody at your table will be taking advantage of your vulnerability. To add insult to injury, sure as hell you will be a victim of your emotionally altered state of mind, and your impaired judgment will cost you. Overt excitement is counter productive for the purpose of making money, and so it is letting other players see how angry or how depressed you are.

Permitting emotions to be important disables rational thinking and overrides adequate decision making. Duh. What a concept! You knew that, of course, and you would not make the mistake of worrying about outcomes or of getting aroused in expectation of money you may be getting in the future.

You have noticed, we are not talking about Poker anymore. The word 'money' alone is a crank you can use to drive the best of us crazy with. I don't mean crisp bank notes. No. The associations each one of us comes up with involuntarily, when the issue of money enters the thought process, are clouding our rational mind. Our fears, hopes, dreams, and traumatic experiences easily dominate the moment. Collective fears--about the recession for instance, expressed in the media or at the water cooler--may affect us more than the recession itself.

Pleasant emotions about the expectation of huge piles of future dough and uncomfortable money-related emotional states are equally distracting. To be exact, it hardly matters whether you think of money as a past experience, as your current situation, or as a future event. Further, it is of little consequence if you feel positively or in negative terms about money.

The fact THAT you are permitting yourself to react to money with ANY emotional state renders every single undertaking less productive and less profitable.

Our emotional responses to money are similar to our reaction to mom. When you are at a critical point of negotiating an important business transaction or you are being interviewed for your dream job, the last thing you desire is for your mother to pop in. Well, unless something went awry with you in the distant past.

Loving your mom or mammon has nothing to do with this phenomenon. It's not about losing interest in money or in spending time with dear old mom. On the contrary, and as you may recall it's not even about mom or money. The money--and your mom--IN YOUR HEAD must respect boundaries. Just as listening to your mother's chatter about her experience at the hair salon can't possibly improve your game at the card table, the voices in your head chattering away about money need to shut up!

While you are working on the suicide clutch of your 1948 Harley-Davidson Panhead, it is incredibly dumb to be in tatters over your financial situation. Are we finally agreeing with each other? Now, while you are working on ANYTHING, it is advisable to leave your stupid emotions aside.

You cannot make decent money while thinking about money and worse, while being bullied or lured into a corner by your money-induced emotions.

I know, I have said the same thing over and over again, but in this case redundancy was necessary. Why? Because you and I, we both have allowed the occasional meddling of money-baggage and money-hype with our work that we should have solely focused on. You haven't? Good for you. Most of us are guilty of having done so too often and for too long.

Not being "emotionally involved in the results" of your business supports the purpose of a business to produce hefty profits. What is more important to you, your silly emotions or profit? In all likelihood you can't have both. We cannot be happy if we permit emotions to run our lives, and we can't succeed financially when we give our emotions the upper hand in business decisions.

Whatever you are feeling as far as money is concerned is poisonous for the actual making of money. As paradoxical as this idea may look to you, it is simplifying life.

Just work!

No painful worries are wearing you down. No addictive hopes are lifting you up to fake highs until natural boom-and-bust cycles are tossing you back into the ditch of--equally artificial--hopelessness.

Do what you know best. You will live through times with a bunch of money. Relatively speaking, that is. And it is probable that you will be experiencing times with relatively little income. Not everybody goes from a small income to a large one over the decades and fortunately, not everyone drops from lofty monetary highs to pitiful lows. Realistically, both versions can happen to any of us. Whatever it will be for you, you'll fare better leaving your damn emotions out of the equation.

Work. And enjoy your work. Especially if and when you hate it.

Egbert Sukop

P.S.: My new book 'How to Better Hate Your Job' is rebellious in its nature. Who would have thought! A provocative perspective on employment, work, and money. Go get your copy!

niche

2009-01-13T16:15:00.000-08:00

In my new book 'How to Better Hate Your Job' I advocate the exploitation of things you hate, for fun and profit. What does that mean? Isn't it more profitable to do what I love? Shouldn't I concentrate on activities I love just because love feels better? And anyway, isn't love morally superior to hatred?

Instead of filling another useless book with the futile attempt of a dissatisfying answer, I shall give you two practical examples of individuals whose lives are clearly expressing how enjoyment and--if you so desire--monetary gain can be derived from subjects you did NOT like so much, originally.

We talk about freedom a great deal, but since freedom is not expensive--it's free, in fact, unless you live in Russia or in South Korea (South, you read that correctly, where blogging the wrong thing can get you arrested)--we don't value freedom as much as we could.

Half the nation complains that something they hated has been taken away from them?! We hate our jobs, but we demand not to be deprived of what we hate. Hey, don't give the subject of our hatred to people in developing markets. The stuff we hate is still too precious to be wasted on desperate people in China and Vietnam. They deserve worse than that. Individuals in India may love what we hate, and that is a clear sign our hated jobs are still too good for them.

Looks to me that the only thing we love about our work is the absence of individualism and freedom! At least 87% of employees hate their jobs, but the truly disturbing news is that they seem to hate their own individuality MORE. I am wrong? Of course, I am wrong: we bring the kids to soccer practice; we buy expensive rims; and we tattoo our asses to express how cool and individualistic we really are. Right, nobody else does that! You mean fashion equals individualism?

Apropos 'fashion:'

Enough ranting! Here are the examples I promised you. Nancy Judd used to work for the city of Santa Fe--the trash department, to be exact--wearing a furry blue "Carlos Coyote" costume and raising awareness for recycling in new Mexico (Wall Street Journal, Jan. 13th, 2009). She ran workshops and aired radio advertisements to get New Mexicans to recycle. And she hated that people weren't paying attention.

Today, Nancy Judd produces Dumpster Couture, "trashion." She crafts clothing from plastic bags, electrical wire, old cassette tapes, Obama campaign posters and fliers, glass shards, rusty nails, vinyl convertible tops, door hangers, etc. On Saturday, her work will be shown in Washington at the Green Inaugural Ball honoring President-elect Barack Obama.

Ms. Judd cannot sketch. She has no training in fashion. She gets her design ideas from old paper dolls. She solved the problem of making a saucy cocktail dress from a shower curtain.

Nancy refuses to make money with her work, even though she could: she markets her stuff as educational tools, illustrating problems with solid waste and raising awareness through instructive art exhibits (shown at the Pittsburgh Airport, for instance).

The creation of a single piece has taken her as long as 200 to 400 hours of work!

Now, I am asking you, can you see hatred, passion, fun, yes and even your damn love, profit potential, and above all: individuality in the mix?

Next case, Gilbert Kaplan (source: The Economist, November 2008), an economist and former publisher of a newsletter for investors, analysts, and money managers: In 1965, he heard Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 2 in c minor, the "Resurrection" for the first time, and he just found himself "sobbing, absolutely hysterical."

Mr. Kaplan, a perfectionist, wasn't pleased with the way professional conductors interpreted Mahler's work. He didn't like Leonard Bernstein out-mahlering Mahler, for example. Kaplan had no tolerance for conductors overruling or ignoring Mahler's meticulous instructions, while caring more for their own egos.

Ergo, Gilbert Kaplan began conducting Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 2 himself! I believe, he does not conduct anything else. Mr. Kaplan has dedicated the last 40 years to conducting this one symphony. A nut? Probably, in the eyes of many. But with a sober scholarly approach, this bloody amateur and unskilled dreamer is now acknowledged as the leading technical authority on Mahler's 2nd symphony.

Meanwhile, Kaplan has conducted ensembles at La Scala in Milan, Munich, Vienna, and opened the prestigious Salzburg festival. He gave Mahler's work its Chinese premiere in Beijing. His recording has outsold Bernstein, Pierre Boulez, Claudio Abbado, and everybody else's. On December 8th, 2008, Mr. Kaplan conducted the New York Philharmonic 100 years to the date after Mahler, with the same orchestra, conducted the American premiere of this piece.

Gilbert Kaplan has done something that Gustav Mahler failed to accomplish himself: he diverted public attention away from the morbidity of some of Mahler's music. Thanks largely to Kaplan, Mahler's image as a "composer of doom" has been put to rest.

We crave to be so damn creative, but we easily miss the simplicity and the genius of the "Kaplan approach." The man has not invented anything. He has doggedly studied something that exists already. Plus, he absorbed every note, letter, and detail of and about Mahler and this particular piece of music. That alone is an invention, and Gilbert Kaplan changed history.

I don't think Mr. Kaplan sat down one day, thinking what he could do or how he could make more money. He had NO CHOICE. He had to do what he has spent the last four decades on, dictated by his passion. He didn't ask his cousin whether it would be a good idea to pick up conducting Mahler. EVERY cousin and well-meaning friend would tell you "NO!" Don't do such a foolish thing!

There is NO motivation for you to be passionate and free, to do what you can't not do, and to be the individual you are. I am convinced every single human being is a damn genius in at least one particular field. And not a single one of us is too dense or too dull to figure out what the hell that individual genius department may be.

And the best of all: there is no how-to manual available or necessary for you to be the individual you are and to enjoy your freedom to the max.

Egbert Sukop

P.S.: Hey, buy my book 'How to Better Hate Your Job.' It's about time, and I'll be glad you did!

loaded and useless

2009-01-10T16:17:00.000-08:00

Who cares about becoming a millionaire?

Millionaires are too common: now, you can find self-help books promising to get you on the road toward ending up a billionaire. Oh my Gawd, how intimidating! Last title I looked into explained thoroughly how to save $1,000 when you purchase your next car. You buy a million cars and you have saved a billion bucks. Everybody can do that! What?!

Call me a sucker. For the past 35 years I have read a plethora of get-rich material, nearly a thousand books filled with money-making, success inducing snake oil. Everything I have read could be condensed to a 25 page manual if you want to waste that much paper.

You don't get rich with that type of nonsense, but it used to be somewhat entertaining. I can't help it, I am merely bored out of my skull reading such garbage today. Mostly it is recycled waste from the 1970s and '80s. What idiot does one have to be to entertain the goal 'millionaire' or 'billionaire,' anyway? As if that had a quality just by itself.

Please do understand me: I have nothing against billionaires! People do what they want to do and they end up in the money, preferably lots of it. Fine! Absolutely fantastic and I have respect for a bunch of them. Please understand me again correctly: I do not respect individuals for the heaps of money they have accumulated. I respect them--if I do--for the character they have and for certain things they have done. Their money is almost meaningless. I am glad it's there but that is that.

On the other hand, desperately trying to make money no matter what, in order to call yourself millionaire or billionaire is as empty as anything can be. Such folks are living--do they, really?--breathing pathetic jokes.

The question is not 'what to do to become a millionaire,' but why?

To be better off? To buy yourself out of the trouble you are in now? To gain freedom you don't experience today? To feel more relaxed? To be less depressed and more happy? To end discomfort and tension?

On January 5th, a German billionaire, Adolf Merckle, threw himself under a train and successfully committed suicide. "I am sorry," said the note he left behind for his wife. In 2007, Mr. Merckle was No. 44 on the Forbes list of the world's wealthiest people.

On sunny days he rode his ancient bicycle to work, and when it rained he drove his VW Rabbit. He employed about 100,000 people, supported a Leukemia charity, he collected supermarket stamps, and returned empty bottles for the deposit.

I am sure a lot of billionaire wannabes dream of returning their empty water bottles to the grocery store for a nickel each, once they get rich. Get-rich-quick aspirants can't wait to enjoy their daily commute to work on their rusty bicycles. And when they get home after a 16-hour work day, they are checking their local rag for coupons.

Hey, I am not making this up! This was the REALITY of a 74 year old billionaire until last week. It differs a bit from what those who haven't made it yet expect from the typical billionaire life style, doesn't it? And then, there is something else that separates insipid money dreams from the facts:

There is no sum of money large enough to protect you from yourself!

One dead billionaire should be sufficient proof for you that money will never buy you out of feeling sorry for yourself. Tension, problems, the emotional roller-coaster we all know too well--all these experiences and challenges may very well be related to monetary issues, but we cannot solve them by throwing enough dollars at our problems. We can't.

Financial salvation is a childish dream. The sooner we realize that, the easier it is to make money and to enjoy it for what it is. Currency is useful to purchase goods and services with. That's it. It cannot fulfill dreams. Cash is a bad pacifier and money is certainly a cruel people-pleaser.

Adolf Merckle was a wussy. He was not a billionaire I have respect for. Adolf M. was the same type of shit weasel like those who wait for more money to end their "unbearable" situation, so that they can enter "financial independence.". Five bucks an hour or $40 billion dollars of annual revenue. What's the damn difference if you can't stomach the tension that comes with life, naturally?

You know, there are billionaire dorks. And for each dorky billionaire, there are millions of dorks eager to get there as well. That's great and I am thrilled you are not one of those people! It is helpful and clarifying, though, to see it from time to time.

Once more: I am not making fun of or writing against having oodles of money. On the contrary, money is fine ... as long as you don't lose yourself in it or die for its cause.

Do what you want, baby, even if you hate it!

Egbert Sukop

P.S.: Oh, and buy my damn book 'How to Better Hate Your Job.' I promise, I'll be glad you did!

question and answer: 'slaves'

2009-01-06T19:24:00.000-08:00

A reader asked me, "So, Mr. Sukop, you say that people hate their jobs and are slaves to the system, what exactly do you suggest they do in this down-turned economy?"

Firstly, I did NOT say that employees 'are slaves to the system.' Modern wage slavery is voluntary, and those who spend good portions of their lives with activities they despise are slaves to their own perceived lack of options. There is no 'system,' no conspiracy, that deviously demands submission from those who want to make a living.

Employees, unhappy with their status quo, settled for long term misery before our current economical challenges became obvious, and they will do the same during and after. I don't have the right answers for my own life, and I certainly cannot tell anybody else what they should or should not do.

With one exception: if you choose employment, you better make damn sure you are happy with your choice. You owe it to yourself to enjoy what you do, the parts you like AND the annoying details.

If you happen to be employed and employment is not your first choice, then establish a business parallel to your hopefully temporary employment. Enjoy the freedom of trial and error under the umbrella of relative job safety and its benefits.

It doesn't matter whether you start trading goods, manufacturing gizmos, or if you offer a service: when you ask 'what exactly do you suggest they do,' I have one definite answer. You must get used to the idea of SELLING the goods or services you choose to deal with, FOR MONEY. If you don't want to do that, it doesn't matter what you do. If you are indeed willing to do that, it also hardly matters what exactly you choose to do.

Unless you are motivated by immense pressure, don't quit your hated job until you know what alternative HAS PROVEN to work for you financially.

Egbert Sukop

P.S.: Have you bought my book yet? It's about time you do: 'How to Better Hate Your Job.'

parrot job

2009-01-04T11:46:00.000-08:00

Questions for you:

Do you wish to get yelled at? Are you eager to work for a crooked employer whose standards of integrity are a couple of notches below yours? Is it fun for you to defend flawed products? Will it be entertaining for you to upset people all day, every day? Do you enjoy feeling sorry, for yourself and for those who yell at you? Can boredom provide you with a better sense of fulfillment and meaning than happiness?

If you answered one or more questions with 'Yes,' you should demand from your favored politicians to bring all outsourced slave jobs back into the U.S.. You don't deserve better than to get what you ask for. Perhaps I should explain myself ...

Yesterday I talked to a few extremely friendly Kodak employees who are populating a yell center in India, about a brand new camera that never worked. Koduck's consumer friendly customer policy states that they will try to repair the garbage we buy from them. If their bungleware can't be repaired, they will generously send us a refurbished model, out of the goodness of their hearts. In other words, they never really owe their customers a new camera. With the help of an army of nice and underpaid folks in India, Koduck gets away with giving us crap for scrap, while charging the full retail price.

Everyone I talked to--and their supervisors--appeared to understand my perspective. They would be pissed off as well if they had to accept a used, refurbished item after paying for a new one. All of them expressed how sorry they were and apologized profusely for the messed up company they work for.

As resource for their answers, they seemed to access approximately a hundred vaguely related phrases. The same phrases were randomly repeated in an endless loop. I could still be talking to them and hear the same things, and they would continue to be friendly. Marvelous! One day, all those outsourced jobs will be re-outsourced (outside our species) from India to a special breed of parrots.

I said all this to say: for all of you who still believe in Tom Peters' long debunked excellence myth, some companies outsource their dirtiest jobs because not enough Americans care to guard corporate garbage heaps anymore. Especially not when you get compensated only with an excellent kick in the pants.

Neither do U.S. citizens stand in line to work on gorgeous 140 degree Fahrenheit summer days in Arizona to trim palm trees while breathing dust and cutting up their hands. More or less legal Mexicans are sort of reverse outsourcerers, and they are not here because they are criminals but because there is an economic vacuum they are willing to fill.

The question is not 'How can your job be protected from unChristian Indians or illegal Mexicans?' The real questions: why are you such a masochist that you are willing to mobilize the world to continue your own misery? Why are you too lazy to find something that does not insult your intelligence? You make sure your husband goes to jail if he beats you, but you demand to be abused and exploited on a sorry job for life?

If you feel your job is somehow threatened by your employer who ogles the outsourcing option or who might replace you with a damn immigrant, your job is not obsolete:

You are.

You sure you are taking the proper medication?

It's not about outsourcing or the threat of illegal immigration, and those who fear it or fight it have something wrong with their heads. Are we all going bananas? Mindless journalists pretend to bemoan the loss of jobs. Mindless politicians proudly brag about the creation of jobs. Mindless readers and voters worry about or hope for jobs.

The thought that creeps through my warped mind is that NOT one of the people who decry outsourced jobs would actually want to have one if they were immediately returned and delivered to their doorstep. NOT one of those dillweeds who'd love to call the governmental pest control on all Mexicans would be eager to take over an immigrant's crappy job. The cry for jobs sounds to me like a hypocrite's last yelp.

Jobs.

Media, politicians, and unions freely use the term as if it had a value per se. More is good and less is naturally bad. We want more jobs! Why? Not all jobs are created equal. Government jobs, for example, are not productive. I guess that's why the government is the largest employer in the country. People feel good about not being productive. Making money is evil, while taking money from those who make it is morally superior. Come again?

Anyway, non-governmental jobs are not all productive, but outside the government you can find employees who do create value with their work. You can also find jobs that destroy more value than the most productive job can generate. Ask your banker, how. It's rather idiotic to assume that an unspecified glob of jobs is homogeneous and worth being prayed to and for.

Interesting that job security exists in reverse proportion of a job's productivity. The more profitable you are for your boss, the easier you may find yourself sacked. Um, let's not even go into the corporate fairytale of performance and its deeper lack of meaning.

If 'a job' stands for one and the same thing by definition, what might that be? I have thought long and hard about that issue for the last three minutes, and the common denominators I came up with are mainly two:

Jobs suck and secondly, those who occupy a job feel underpaid.

Jobs suck: 87% of Americans openly admit hating their jobs. Consider the number of weasels who won't tell and you get dangerously close to 99%. Now, most jobs may not be awful as such. The reprehensible elements are added by a loud, gray, or otherwise unpleasant environment, back stabbing colleagues, mind numbing policies, head banging decisions, commuting, unreasonable customers and yes, blood boiling boredom. And, let's not forget daily stress over seeing one's life slip away. Precious minutes we could use for fun and profit ... even for meaningful things.

Low pay: How many people do you personally know who have complained to you about excessive compensation?

Jobs are voluntarily pursued by people who don't see another option. Similarly, senate majority leader Harry Reid believes America has a voluntary tax system, but I must warn you before you try out Option B. In general, jobs are chosen by those who aren't aware of a different choice, and the dividing line between employment and slavery is damn thin.

Sure, employees may choose where they want to live--unless their company suggests they move--they don't get raped (at least not sexually) or flagellated, and a bunch of human rights apply—including the Right to Work. But, plenty of employees are being told EXACTLY what to say and what not to utter, what to do and what not to do under any circumstances. The major difference between slavery and the world of jobs is (insufficient) monetary compensation.

Today, individuals voluntarily sell themselves into partial and temporary slavery for a wage or a salary. Jobs are the contemporary equivalent of slavery.

And I am having a hell of a difficult time comprehending why more slaves than "owners" move mountains to protect current forms of slavery, and calls for the abolishment of employment would be considered the devil's work.

I am afraid, freedom, individuality, and creativity aren't valued highly by us and by the school teachers' union, as long as we can have a job.

Historically, everything that works has been built on a flawed past, on trial and error. Evolution happens to operate that way. America is a nation of bunglers, of people who are willing to try and fail repeatedly. The alternative to covet a secure job is not to be scared of making mistakes and of making mistakes frequently. Hardly anything is as productive as the willingness to make mistakes and yes, the freedom to even repeat the same mistakes until we get it right.

Scary? Of course it is. But your mistakes can never be as scary and disastrous as mistakes your governments and your employers are making for you and with you.

Egbert Sukop

P.S.: Go in peace and buy my damn book 'How to Better Hate Your Job.'

P.P.S.: Now!

life after success

2008-12-15T22:05:00.000-08:00

The Wall Street Journal started a new series of articles, "The Fallen: The declining fortunes of leading business figures." William H. Miller is one of the featured characters. Mr. Miller spent almost twenty years building a reputation as the era's greatest mutual-fund manager. During the last year he destroyed it.

Bill Miller is not a swindler, like Bernie Madoff, just a business man who made lucky decisions for nearly two decades. We love to call that 'success.' A succession of bad moves during the recent twelve months brought his business to its knees. Bad luck.

We are tempted to ascribe a series of consecutive decisions to business acumen when they turn out to be profitable. Luck would be too insulting a label for such a person's skill and foresight, wouldn't it?

And yet, the same man's inability to keep his success on a steady level or to increase it indefinitely shows that he has never been in control of his destiny. It just looked like that for a relatively long time. Bad luck during the past year proves that his twenty years of profit were to a certain degree subject to luck as well.

Now, I am not a friend of the term luck. People's successes are random, and so are their failures. Our endeavors are subject to probability, and it is incredibly dumb to believe that one of us can master it and find a system to succeed all the time and forever.

It's not in the cards, baby! You cannot control the markets, or why do you think a 160-year-old company like Siemens paid bribes of $1.4 billion between 2001 and 2007 (according to the SEC) to round up clients, or General Motors and Ford combined make less money than you do?

Not even banks can handle the markets and manage money: banksters have destroyed tens of trillions of dollars within the past nine years before they begged you and me--the tax payers--to save their worthless asses from the abyss.

The same reprehensible leeches who expect your children's children to assume financial responsibility for the grandest fraud and recklessness economic history has seen, will doubtlessly call the police when a beggar asks for a nickel at their doorstep. I have a thousand times more respect for the dirtiest beggar than for the bank and investment scumbags who called their old buddy Henry Paulson to keep them afloat.

Yeah, I know. I will stop ranting, but you better realize how utterly SCARED our society--liberals and conservatives alike--truly is of a free market. Economic freedom? God forbid! Capitalism, my arse. The last couple of months have shown that hardly anyone wants a free market or capitalism. People want to be saved, powdered, and pampered. We talk a great deal of freedom. Do YOU want it? Are you sure? That would make you a rather exotic animal nowadays.

I am serious: belief in perpetual control of anything is utter nonsense. Success is temporary, and so is failure. One of the most difficult lesson to understand for someone who has never been wildly successful--or lucky--is the fact that there is life after success. Failure can follow success just as easily as a new success may occur after previous success. Freedom has no guarantees, no safety net, and it will never be reliable.

Success is not the end. It is not likely to last. Success will not end your worries. Success makes for an exciting moment, a great day perhaps, and a fun celebration. But success is not a permanent form of life. "Oh, I will get rich one day and then I'll let my money make more money." Too often I have heard that sentence, and I usually assume some kind of brain damage is its cause. Reality works differently.

Even a so-called breakthrough is an isolated event. There is no "other side." Breakthroughs must be repeated if you want them to "last." Your first breakthrough will be one of many to follow, or it was something else. Roll a die, and the probability to get a six will remain identical with each new attempt. Same with success: after each success, you will start over almost at square one.

Here is the crazy part. Someone who has never tasted success is in a similar position as the person who experienced incredible success yesterday!

We have heard it all: 'Nothing breeds success like success,' for instance. And throughout past decades we have endured hoards of seminar quacks selling us that fire walking, bungee jumping, and other exotic nonsense helps to prepare us for business related fear and risk factors. Because "everything is connected with everything else," supposedly.

And if you walk over glowing coals, you will be able to go through tricky business transactions as well. Rubbish! Good grief, every dork can walk through fire without getting burned: just take your stinky socks off and don't hesitate until you are on the other side. Mental preparation? That's only a sales argument to lure you into the seminar. Not more, not less.

Shock of shocks: not even success prepares you for the next success. You need to bring your keister in the right position for upcoming events, similar to a goalie who needs to get back in position after each catch. Getting in position can increase the probability of success, but it won't be any easier the next time. The success after success demands all of you, and possibly MORE of you than the previous winning experience.

But, what about the techniques we have learned? Writing down goals, time management, or new age inspired pseudo-therapy in the name of corporate productivity? Motivational mood elevators, The Secret, communication training, strategic games, or sales boot camps?

PLACEBO effect, baby!

All theories and techniques that you and I have invested too much time and money into, don't have the slightest influence over your next success. Like a placebo, details of your education may "work" in your favor in spite of their existence. Our minds like to identify reasons for successes as well as for our failures. We deny the fact that life is not as linear as we would like for it to be.

What if success is not a succession of events that you can mentally line up in a row, like ducks? We are indeed free to fail after each success. We may be dead five minutes from now.

Depressing ideas? On the contrary: a person who believes to be the greatest failure the world has ever seen is not further away from future success than someone who believes to be on top of the world this minute!

Both got work to do. They are free to go in the direction of their choice. Neither of the two controls the outcome. Everybody else is in charge and equally free to vote with their pocket books.

And believe me, they will!

Egbert Sukop

P.S.: Have you bought a copy of my book yet? 'How to Better Hate Your Job' is likely to turn your stomach inside out, and maybe it has some positive effects on your future endeavors as well. Who knows?

hope and love

2008-12-07T15:28:00.000-08:00

Holy cows!

That's what hope and love are, holy cows begging to meet a cruel butcher. A German friend of mine recently subjected me to a lengthy lecture to show me his utter contempt for my crude opinion that hope and love are not only useless in many instances, but outright dangerous. My friend is a sweetheart of a man, but I still refuse to trust love and hope blindly. It is more relaxing to trust the intentions of someone who hates me.

No, I am not talking about your messed up love life: you will have to sort that one out all by yourself, if you can. But even there, love may be in the way of excessive enjoyment. You can tell, moderation is a four-letter-word in my vocabulary.

Think stocks. You own shares of a particular company, and your love for that company overrides your exit strategy. You are holding on to those shares all the thorny way down, instead of pushing the 'Eject' button with a cool head. Emotional attachment is a hindrance to making--or keeping--money when the market signals you to hit 'Sell.'

Remember the fatal relationship Enron employees had with their Enron shares? The financial mob blamed Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling--and rightfully so--but that did not repay the devastating losses suffered by employees and investors. We don't learn anything by blaming people. Usually we don't recover our monetary losses by taking responsibility either, but realizing our responsibility permits us to actively rejoin the game and the markets. Assuming responsibility provides us with the only chance to participate in the future.

Do you know the most painful forms of responsibility? Being responsible for screwing up is easy. Making a dumb mistake may not be our favorite thing to admit, but we have learned to manage it. The mistake of trusting too much, however, of dogged loyalty, or the realization how 'the power of love' in our peaceful hands can lead to (self)-annihilation is of a different quality. Taking responsibility for doing the right thing at the wrong time can easily shatter our belief in ourselves for a couple of years or decades.

We prefer to swallow some strong substances before we are willing to face the sobering fact that everything we collectively consider as good, may turn into an evil force the next time we touch it. Good natured German folks had to learn that devoted love for their country included the modus operandi for killing tens of millions of individuals and to burn extended parts of the world to the ground.

Good God, how could I get so distracted?!

Anyway, I am confident you understand the idea that your undying love for the shares of a publicly traded company can prove to be a bitter pill that your wallet refuses to swallow joyfully. U.S. Steel used to be synonymous with corporate success, but their steel production today is hardly above their output from 1902. I doubt U.S. Steel executives, their board of directors, and their investors expected a century of stagnation 100 years ago. They expected aggressive growth. But blue chip stocks don't come with the guarantee to remain blue chips.

"If you play enough, accept that from time to time you are going to go bust, because from time to time, everyone, even the best of the best, does. Every professional eventually is faced with having to hardnose the highway." --Doc Holliday, as quoted in Bruce Old's 'Bucking the Tiger'

The professional investor knows that love for a company is costly, sooner or later, and the dumbest thing you can do. And when the love for a stock turns into loss? Yeah, what happens? Right: dear old hope kicks in. Hope, that the market will turn around and your losses will be recovered. Need I mention tulip mania in the 17th century? The tech bubble of the nineties, or the unbelievable banking fraud--fraud is the true name for it, is it not?--that is currently destroying literally trillions of investors' and tax payers' dollars? Yes, hope and pray, and it will all be good really soon.

Now, if it can be a bad move to love a company whose shares you happen to own temporarily, can it not be equally dangerous to love a company you have founded and built yourself?

That depends.

We desire "to do what we love to do." That's awfully sweet! But I am afraid, love for the stuff you do will cut into your profits as well as into your happiness. I am just playing advocatus diaboli once again, and I don't really mean what I say? Wrong! I am serious.

As an example, assume a person who is establishing a business based on one particular product idea she has fallen in love with. It will fail on the marketplace entirely, it will lead to mediocre sales, or it will turn into a roaring success. You tell me, what is the probability for either of these three simplified options?

Exactly. And in the probable case of her beloved product ailing or failing, she will throw good money after bad in the "hope" that it will get better eventually. God, that is so painful to watch! The theory that you should do what you love is the most crappy leftover of the disgustingly pitiful baby boomer generation. It's like Deepak Chopra and Janis Joplin having a baby, or Oprah Winfrey and John Lennon, the most loved fascist of the flower power movement (when everybody agrees with me, there will be peace; brilliant!). Same thing.

Apropos, one thing the poverty versus prosperity thinkers of the 1970s and 80s promoted was abundance. Remember? That is not completely useless if you apply abundance to your ideas and activities. One idea or pet project is likely to fail. A bunch of practically realized ideas are more likely to include a winner. Introduce new products or services to the markets continually, and probability is on your side: at some point it is likely to work for you financially, if you live long enough or cough up new stuff quickly and frequently enough.

You cannot control which one of your products will make money or lose. Falling in love with one of your brain children is threatening your well-being and the likelihood to discover what works for you. Your emotional attachment to that one bloody sacred thing you want to do means almost certain financial doom, followed by hope that will cause you to survive until you are destroyed for good.

Doing what we love or not is not the issue. It's ultimately meaningless. Do whatever you do--no matter whether you love or hate the activity, the project, the product--with excessive attention, the utmost skill you can muster and hell, with your damn love if you must.

That will lead to a steady level of satisfaction you will never reach with addictive dependency on doing only what you love to do. Hope and love work against the ecstasy you expect to gain from them. Screw your imbecilic idea of doing what you love.

Instead, love what you hate to do.

Egbert Sukop

P.S.: Have you purchased my book yet? 'How to Better Hate Your Job.' Grrr ... what are you hoping for? Better times, perhaps?

bank blank

2008-11-30T12:22:00.000-08:00

You are an excellent performer? A perfectionist, perhaps?

That's what is wrong with you! If you care to shovel real dough into your coffers, you might do well if you are dumb enough and an enormous loser.

Robert Rubin, former Treasury secretary and former Goldman-Sachs co-chairman, makes a living as a senior counselor and director at Citigroup Inc. these days. While Citigroup's stock has lost 70% in value, good ol' uncle Bob cashed in measly $115 million in pay--excluding stock options--since 1999. Over the past 12 months you, the tax payer, stuffed more than $45 billion dollars up his hapless employer's bottom, and I think that's awfully nice of you.

According to The Wall Street Journal (Nov. 29th, 2008), Rubin claims his role was "peripheral to the bank's main operations." Peripheral to the bank's main operations means he is kinda like selling cigars in the men's room and that's why he is one of the highest paid officials on the street. Rubin didn't want to run any of Citigroup's businesses, and he told colleagues he wanted "more time for activities such as fly fishing." What has he accomplished in his opinion? "It's a funny way to think about it. I think I've been a very constructive part of the Citigroup environment. I have been very involved."

How about you?

Are you involved and a constructive part of your company's environment? Are you blind, deaf, and mute enough to not know what's going on around you? Do you need more time for fly fishing? Can you lie sufficiently to deny responsibility for decisions you have made? Have you actively helped destroy 70% of your employer's assets? Grandpa Robert, for example, was indeed involved in a decision in late 2004 and early 2005 to grow Citigroup's CDO holdings (Collateral Debt Obligations), while the mortgage market was clearly heading South.

See, unlike most of my fellow citizens, I love people like Robert Rubin! I do not begrudge him the $245,000 he made per week for 9 years straight while pissing away his shareholder's savings as sufficiently as he could. And you ought to celebrate this man, as well.

Why?

Because he is living proof that life is unfair. And how is that a good thing? Freedom, Baby, freedom. Freedom EXCLUDES fairness. You can have one or the other, but you cannot have both simultaneously.

The miserable existence of a professional bungler and dumbass like Bob Rubin is an expression of YOUR freedom: the freedom from being equal and from having to share your candy bar with everybody else. Your freedom to earn more money than your neighbor and by Zeus, you do not need to feel guilty about it.

Putz Rubin shows you dollar for dollar that nobody gets paid according to his performance. At least real money has absolutely zero correlation with the quantity or the quality of your output. In other words, you are not only free TO succeed, you are also free FROM succeeding. You may mess up things royally and you still have a chance to end up in the money. Plenty of it, as in Bobby's case.

I don't suggest for you to become an old snake and a quack like Citi-Bob. Maybe you don't find it appealing to lie a lot and to dumb yourself down to shitty Bob's gutter standards. But before you are getting worked up over the Robert Rubins in the world and the sizable chunks of money that is foisted upon these poor guys apparently undeservedly, think again: we don't get in life what we deserve.

You do have options. You may be angry at some people over their salaries or ball your eyes out in mommy's lap and wallow in sadness that you don't have that many chips to play with. Or, you understand Robert Rubin as an inspiration and learn from him that the verb 'to deserve' deserves to be scratched out of your dillweed new age vocabulary. There are individuals who deserve to get knighted by the Queen, but they get gout instead. Huh, well.

I won't have people like Robert Rubin as my friends, and he would never choose to be near me. But his salary and the pathetic ways he "earned" it cannot enrage me. Not at all!

On the contrary, I am ecstatic that money works sort of like God--in mysterious ways--and defies all logic, rational thought, and meticulous calculation. We are addicted to discover the rules and laws our monetary affairs may be based upon, and then Robert-I-screw-you-and-Rub-it-in grins at us from the front page of our favorite rag. Jerks like Rubin are not role models your brats should adore as heroes and yet, they point into the right direction.

If money followed reliable patterns or universal laws, your freedom to make it would be limited. As scary as it doubtlessly is for you and me: we are free to try new things, and the new things are free to develop both ways.

Where there is no guarantee, there is freedom. A whole shitload of it!

Egbert Sukop

P.S.: Now go in peace and buy my damn book already: 'How to Better Hate Your Job.' What the hell are you waiting for?

do be do be do

2008-11-16T16:25:00.000-08:00

"Diego [Rivera] provided the money; Frida [Kahlo] managed it. Rivera took no interest in finances, leaving large checks in payment to him in unopened letters for years. When reprimanded, he would counter, 'Demasiado molestia' (too much to bother)." --Hayden Herrera, 'Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo'

Do you need to have financial goals in order to earn decent money? Of course not. Dame Anita Roddick did not write down her goals first before founding the Body Shop. Neither did Diego Rivera imagine how much money he intended to make before painting another mural. I don't believe he had any frame of reference to store such a nutty idea in his brain. To Señor Rivera, sex and communism were more important issues to ponder, besides painting, than what he could buy with the fruits of his labor.

Professional pimps and whores should write down their goals but miraculously, even their business ventures have functioned nicely throughout the millennia without insipid new age advice. Infallible baby boomers, sort of eternal teenagers, raised modern generations of bungling prostitutes. And I am afraid that might include you and me. Here goes the theory: 'This is where I want to end up.' 'What do I need to do to get there?'

Doing X in order to acquire Y equals a certain form of prostitution. No?

I admit, I am wrong. I'm exaggerating shamelessly, and I have rudely offended you. I am sorry, so sorry. I'm trying to make obvious that it is not only possible to achieve success without previous goal setting, but it may be easier to make money when you are not chasing the poor buck as if you were hunting down a sick, exhausted rabbit. We don't literally think "I hope money gives up and croaks before I do," but often we live our lives steered by a similar philosophy. Not a promising guarantee for contentment or happiness.

Does that imply we don't need to work to get what we want? Yes and no. Yes, because you really don't NEED to work. And No, it's not work I am ranting against. Phenomenal psychic that I am, I do see work in your future and lots of it.

You are permitted to work as much as you want! To my limited knowledge, there is no law that forces you to work: you have the RIGHT to work. You don't have to. You don't need to. You may and you can work.

The ongoing compromise makes us hate work. It's not work itself. Jobs are not the problem. Between you and your miserable job, you are what's miserable. The job is fine, just like any other job. The mindset 'I NEED to work' is counter productive to achieving anything you want, because whatever you do to get there is not what you really want. The NEED to work, the idea that turns your job or your business into an involuntary activity, royally screws up your life.

Yeah, but I must work to pay bills and to buy groceries for my damn family! How can I make money if I don't work? There we go again, I did not say you should NOT work. Did I suggest you sit on the sofa, watch The Simpsons, and rent or mortgage payments accumulate in your bank account automatically? Not that I recall!

Let us take a step back. To make one crucial thing crystal clear: I love Homer Simpson and I will not badmouth my heroes. Having said that, I know individuals--some of them loaded with dough, others poorer than Diogenes--who sit and wait. And they wait. Neither I nor they know what they are waiting for. They wait staring at their TV set. They wait while polluting perfectly fine beaches with their useless arses. And they wait ON THEIR JOBS for better times and for better jobs.

Holding down (sic!) a job does not mean one works productively. Just describes a hog occupying the space of another. Unions have made a sweet living out of nudging workers to lofty levels of insufficiency. Work does not mean something useful or marketable will come out the other end.

Bunches of people successfully hide their lazy buttocks behind work. Looking busy doesn't substitute sufficiency, and going to work every day is no proof that work will be done once you get there. Jobs are perfect to spend decades of your life in a waiting pattern. Cubicles were practically invented to keep couch potatoes out of each other's sight. WORK is one of the most misunderstood terms in our times. As a four-letter-word it is considered intrinsically dirty, but is it?

On Monday, November 10th, 2008, USA TODAY printed an article about a Philip Morris owned turkey-processing plant in California that laid of 1,450 workers in 1992. USA TODAY has been tracking 15 former plant managers throughout the past 16 years. As common as it is to despise what we do, it was natural for those fired workers to hate being deprived of their jobs. We hate jobs AND we hate losing them!

"While devastating at the time, the turkey plant closing 'was a good thing that happened,' says Pablo Martinez, 55, and now the owner of two busy Mexican restaurants that employ 24." Two of the 15 guys died meanwhile (and not of joblessness). Thirteen of the 15 former employees "indicate, anecdotally, that those who lose jobs in recessions can land on their feet, and even thrive. They say being jobless can steel and motivate people to work long and hard hours, teach them to be self-reliant and to distrust safety nets, and spur them into fields they are passionate about."

One gentleman went on to restore collectible cars, employing 10 people today. Another became a lawyer specializing in creditor's rights. All 13 agree overall, that "losing their jobs was gut wrenching but a BLESSING."

Do they work less? I don't think so. Most of these guys had to work MORE during the past 16 years than ever before during their lives as employees. It is not the actual work people hate: it is the element of prostitution and slavery we abhor. I have to do what I don't want to do in order to get what I want. Gruesome!

Goal setting can lead to doing more of the things you hate to do. I know individuals who are paid so well for jobs they despise that they don't dare to quit, because wife and brood would be quite upset if they had to cut down on their spending standards. It is utter nonsense to believe that better pay will turn a nasty job into something you can enjoy in the future. You got to be an empty dumbass to fall for a mind trick like that, but let's not talk about multi-level marketing here.

The more emotionally attached we become to achieving a particular goal, the more we may hate our work. The more we want something, the more we hate what we do to get there--potentially.

A paradox? Absolutely, but you have experienced it, haven't you? The more you want something, the higher the price. The higher the price, the more desirable a certain target becomes. Eagerly trying to get it--or him, or her--INCREASES the difficulty to succeed. The grittier the challenge, the more worthwhile appears the pursuit. We are suckers for pain. The highest value we project into things we shall never call our own. The lowest value is represented by the stuff that clutters our home.

It doesn't have to be that difficult. What does it cost you to abandon what everybody else wants, that stuff with a price tag so high that it is improbable for you to ever possess it? Exactly: nothing. You could access a tremendous amount of additional energy by withdrawing it from exorbitant goals.

Why don't you want what nobody else wants?

Goals need to be written down for acquisitions so expensive, that whatever you'll have to do to reach your goals is likely to be work you will hate. It is not a law, but it is "likely," I said. Do we hate our jobs to create a balance between things we want and those we do not? Doomed logic! A form of slavery where slave and slave driver are the same person. There is no significant difference between employees and the self-employed, other than that the self-employed are somewhat more aware of their active role in this dilemma. The self-employed CHOOSE their status quo while the typical employee resorts to pointing fingers.

Within less than one minute, every employee could CHOOSE to do what she believes she is forced to do by circumstance. As addicted to pain as most of us are, it is unlikely that employees will flip the switch soon between misery and fun. The freedom to do so, however, is available without changing one damn thing in our lives. Perhaps self-torture is too cool to give up.

We hate to do what we do in order to have what we crave to have. NOT because we hate doing what we do: rather, we hate THAT we have to what we do. I have bad news for you. This irritating fact is not going to change when you hop jobs a thousand times.

Oh, I just want to do what I love to do!

Yeah right, how could I forget. May I ask you seriously: how many individuals do you know personally who do what they love to do, and I mean ALL DAY? And I am certain they all thrive financially, don't they? Now? I am waiting ..... how many?

I don't know ANY.

What does that mean? Just as it is pure idiocy to expect that children will guarantee your happiness--and what an impertinent, reckless idea to unload that responsibility on the small shoulders of your kids--work WILL NEVER MAKE YOU HAPPY. The job you currently hate won't make you happy and, write this down instead of your stupid goals, work you think you might love will never make you happy, either!

You have the grand freedom to EXPRESS YOUR HAPPINESS on your job, while playing with your brats, or when you are founding and building your own business. Doing 'what you love' as a recipe for happiness must disappoint you eventually, as it will drown you in depression if you try to gain happiness from finding and being with a person you love. Love is so incredibly overrated, it's not even funny anymore. You long to establish a business by doing what you love? Good God, I feel for you!

You hate your job or you love your work: what's the difference? Is that so important to you how you 'feel?' One dude hates to repair cars for a living and the other can't wait to get home from work, so that he can repair his vintage Jaguar all night long. Duh!

If you are still sorting out what you like and what you dislike in life, I recommend you grow up. I may sound like a condescending ass once again--and you are correct, that is me--but please quit wasting your time on things that are of secondary importance. When you watch a newborn baby, you will realize that the emotions this little bundle goes through change every couple of seconds WITHOUT any change in the environment.

Human beings feel stuff. All kinds of stuff. Sadness, thrill, lust, angst, joy, worry, love, stress, happiness, comfort, boredom, compassion, or an itch. If you think there must be a reason for all this, you are doomed. A vast variety of feelings makes you originally you, in connection with thoughts you have parallel to the adventure to feel. Picking one single experience, 'love' in this case or the love for what you do, is equally blockheaded as it is to choose 'being bored' forever. It won't work because it can't work, and your own life is proof that you are incapable of holding one preferred feeling for years to come.

You can't even maintain one feeling--like worry--for an entire day. Try it. You'll crack up laughing about this silly idea pretty soon. No, you cannot do what you love for a living. It's nonsense and it can't be done. WHAT you do and how you feel about it is unimportant. What you are willing to put into it is what truly counts. That turns you from being a consumer into a producer.

Happiness can't be bought or worked for. Or love, for that matter. Any attempt in that direction will be frustrated, leaving you devastated and floored. You can't do what you hate and hope to be happy once your stupid ship will come in. Neither can you do what you love and expect happiness any time soon. Both ideas are futile.

It only works the other way around. You can be happy first. When? That's up to you to decide. Then do whatever the hell it is you choose to do, things you enjoy and activities you can't stand. Hey, feel free to do what you hate and still: nothing you do can take away your happiness! Not even your blasted job.

Your choices: reaching your goals no matter what, or being happy no matter what.

What is more appealing to you? I am in no position to give you advice. But if you asked me what I choose, I'd tell you it is the latter. Being happy through sadness, worry, love, hate, joy, and--God forbid, lust--gently breaks through limitations that alternatives fail to challenge.

Good luck to you,

Egbert Sukop

P.S.: Hey, even if you feel a slight temptation: DO NOT buy my book 'How to Better Hate Your Job.' I'll cost you!

pleasure of pain

2008-10-05T17:01:00.000-07:00

"People love to suffer fear and pain--think of all the recreational activities based on experiencing these things--from horror movies to roller coaster rides, and from aerobics classes to dieting. People will even pay good money to suffer fear and pain. They need it, they have to have it, they won't be happy without it." --Crystal Dawn and Stephen Flowers, Carnal Alchemy

Pain is the new pleasure. Well, it's not really new. The motto "No pain, no gain!" has been gathering friends and believers for centuries. Flagellating monks in the dark ages knew how to beat the exciting side of physical, emotional, and spiritual pain into the open. Hardworking men and women of the 21st millennium are facing fresh new sets of painful challenges. Yet they adapt quickly to exploit even gloomy areas of their reality for the purpose of extracting pure fun.

The fact that 87% of employees hate what they do can mean two different things: they are either too stupid to do what they love to do, or hating what they do IS EXACTLY what they love to be doing. Yes Ma'am, hating what they do is BETTER than doing what they love, because what they love to do is depising a lousy job. Isn't that obvious?

People aren't dumb! Give individuals some credit and yep, that includes yourself. We are making mistakes and we run into dead ends, once in awhile--that's how evolution works--but we do know what we want to do and where we'd like to go. We don't need ninny nannies and safety Nazis who are eager to protect us from ourselves, but who see us capable of paying for their exorbitant bills.

You want equality or freedom? You can't have both. They are mutually exclusive. If you value equality over freedom, you see your fellow human beings as weak or certifiably irresponsible idiots, incompetent to do what it takes to live their lives. It doesn't matter whether you want to destroy or protect people who appear to be somewhat subhuman from your perspective. I am sorry, but identifying a "lesser" class of people who desperately needs your patronizing help differs not from stigmatizing a defined group you plan to harass and hate.

You will hate me for saying this: movements for equality have fascist roots, one group trying to dominate the other. What's so bad about freedom, other than the fact that it scares the bejeezus out of us? Freedom respects your choices as an individual, assumes your capability, and expresses trust that you know better what's good for you than anybody else does. Cries for equality murder individuality in its slumber. Yours!

Hating a job means dealing with controllable portions of pain. Both, unemployment and self-employment, come with a high probability of going beyond the threshold into spheres of unpredictable and unbearable pain levels. Doing what you love and turning it into a business has the potential of lifelong torture and total self-destruction built in to it. Am I joking? I wish! No, risks and possibilities of self-employment and entrepreneurship are not limited to financial ups and downs. The chance that you will always love what you say you love is slim. You won't. It is more realistic to expect that you will hit moments when you hate the day you were born, during your career as a self-employed business person.

Thus is the price of freedom and I am willing to pay it. You don't have to be self-employed, and you continue to have my undivided respect if you don't. Being employed is still an expression of that same freedom and hating what one does is the price the majority of employees pays. There is no right or wrong here. But don't let the surface fool you:

Those who hate what they are doing, are doing what they love!

Egbert Sukop

advocatus diaboli

2008-09-21T13:52:00.000-07:00

I upset people. That's what I do. Some of my best friends think of me as an irritating bastard and still, that won't keep them from inviting me to the next Thanksgiving dinner. Sweet people, but how much worse must be your perception of me? You, who don't know me personally, don't have many options between hating my guts and loving me "anyway." But wait, perhaps there is something else to be considered:

My evil ways are the fault of my rotten star sign, of course. Hence it's useless for me to issue a public apology.

People crave advice. How do I know that? The revenue of the how-to industry, self-help books, and the self-improvement movement are proof how much we desire for others to tell us what to do. First we need to know how valuable a person's opinion might be: we are obsessed with credentials.

Once you can prove to me you're good, I'm willing to believe your opinion is worth listening to. Recently, I read a guy's book who spend some 55 pages--and I kid you not--on building up his readers' belief in his, this authors, abilities. Incredible! Of course, "past performance is no guarantee for future results," but apparently those using their credentials as bait have unshakable faith in the stupidity of their audience.

We believe someone's credentials, we trust her advice ... but we still WON'T do what she suggests. All of us have had brilliant advice throughout our entire lives. Our parents and grandparents have told us for decades not to spend more money than what we are making. It doesn't get simpler than that. And, did you listen?

Some of us, if not most of us, had to painfully learn it again while paying exorbitant prices for this simple lesson that a first grader can understand intellectually. We don't care about advice, no matter how true and down-to-earth it may me. Honestly, we don't give a rat's pink behind about anybody's credentials. We want to do what we want ... but that can be the most difficult thing to figure out.

I have said it before and I shall do so again: I will never tell you what to do. Neither will I bore you with advice about things you "should not" do. I am giving you EXTREME ideas to ponder. I don't care whether you "like" what I say or not. You happen to agree? So what? You disagree and you feel offended? So?

This is not about an argument one of us can win. It's a waste of time to find common ground by working towards a congruent opinion. I don't care what you think, and I hardly care about my own thoughts. The devil's advocate was invented by the Catholic Church--by Pope Sixtus V., to be exact--in anno domini 1587 to deal with cases of beatification and canonization. The Promotor of the Faith or Promotor Fidei, as his title was called officially, had the purpose to get to the bottom of each case, to find the truth (Saint or no Saint).

Often I playfully take the position of the devil's advocate not to unveil an absolute or "objective" truth, but to enable YOU to discover simply what you want to think and what you really want to do. I don't know what you should think, and I don't have the slightest idea what you should do. The devil's advocate may believe what she claims or she may not believe it herself. That is immaterial. What YOU believe is important, or at least I hope it is of importance to you.

When I see individuals being pissed off about me assuming the role of the devil's advocate, I know I hit the bull's eye: they are completely lost! They are also upset with me because I don't give them the advice they would then REJECT. As upset as they are, I know for a fact that they would indeed reject ANY advice I could give them ("I don't feel so good, but at least I am better than you are.").

Devils' advocates remind us of our own painful moments of confusion. We don't like to be confused. We don't like to be seen by others as indecisive, hesitant, and insecure. Confusion equals weakness for many. I don't believe it used to be easy to land a job at Lehman Brothers, high up the food chain, for indecisive and insecure applicants. That must have really helped the company.

Confusion is good!

When you are at a crossroads and you literally do not know: THEN you get a taste of freedom. I won't deny that the experience of raw freedom is often painful, but it will be your very own truth that sets you free. It's not someone's truth somewhere that you need to hunt down.

I may tell you once-in-awhile that I argue the perspective of "advocatus diaboli." I am sorry if you don't enjoy that! Seriously, I am. I feel sorry for you because it might be in your best interest to treat any type of advice as if it was given by a fraud and a quack like me. The next street bum you see may have wisdom that's potentially more valuable to you than the combined knowledge of a hundred assorted lawyers from Merrill Lynch, AIG, and Lehman. Credentials are cheap these days. No, scratch that: credentials have always been worthless.

Confusion is good for ya, emotional upheaval included. Confusion means instant freedom.

Egbert Sukop

loving idiocy

2008-09-14T11:42:00.000-07:00

"Triple your income and enjoy life!" promised the business card I discovered on top of a urinal in a restaurant. Network sharketing at its best. I did not touch that card. Hell no! Somehow I had a problem computing my idea of enjoyment as a direct function of literally inviting others to piss on my name. Besides, it's kinda sexist and discriminating to exclude women as potential business associates even if your business is of such crappy nature.

Understandably, armies of job-hating employees prefer to suffer through the decades until retirement puts them out of misery. Or a heart attack. Or a quasi retirement, diversified by having fun as a friendly greeter at Walmart, part time.

Employees are bright people in general! Choosing despicable jobs for a lifetime does not mean an individual is too blockheaded to leave appalling work situations behind in exchange for freedom, riches, and the joy of doing what she loves to do. Not necessarily. At least subconsciously, most employees are aware that hating a job may not be the worst of all available alternatives.

We aren't fighting anymore for survival in an environment of sabertoothed tigers, poisonous snakes, and war parties of belligerent tribes. Well, in a transferred sense we are, and it continues to be a desperate act of survival for many of us. You don't need to be an anthropologist to recognize dynamics that were typical for stone age societies beautifully preserved in any bureaucracy. Groups of people, for that matter, tend to re-enact reprehensible forms of "togetherness" we thought we had overcome by now.

We haven't. Laziness is not as bad as its reputation and as we see, even evolution is not exactly forging ahead with a type "A" personality. Hostile work environments--infested with backstabbers, freeloaders, and other lowlife entities--benefit us. Imminent danger to get screwed keeps our senses and pencils sharp. Imagine that: everything you hate about your job is actually good for you!

The fact that we won't look too pretty after a week alone in the jungle often obscures the truth that our reptilian brain is still fully functional. We do know how to suspend judgment, bypass the neocortex, and knock on the old lizard's bedroom door. SNAP! And this hundred million year trained fight-or-flight machine rips a chunk out of anything and is ready for a second helping ... unless you start thinking first and fast. You may not believe in dragons anymore, the guardians of your sixth sense. I do: I have seen them fly.

Hating your job feeds the dragon, sharpens its claws, and keeps the old freak loyal to you and to your purposes.

Yet dragons love to take long naps and interruptions displease them. You know what that means, don't you? Eh? C'mon. You guessed it: our instincts are sufficiently developed to know that hating miserable jobs for forty years is BETTER and infinitely safer than unpredictable environments of entrepreneurship. Employees know that hating a job, as awful as it may be, still allows them to go home at a certain time, play with their kids on the weekend and pick up a paycheck in predictable intervals.

Employees know that self-employment can mean years of hell, physical and emotional hardship, sleep deprivation, having to see their family under constant existential threat, and worse: living with the pain and the guilt of not spending enough time with their loved ones.

It is utterly irresponsible to promise employees a better world when they enter self-employment. If you have a job today, heed my advice and keep your damn job! Each of the alternatives may not only be significantly worse than what you are hating today. Anything besides the things you hate doing today could easily be classified as torture by you and by independent judges.

Yes, you got that right. What you hate doing is rather foreplay than torture. The things you say you'd love to be doing may turn into brutal and violent (self)-destruction once you realize there is no way back and you will be forced to do it to the very end, until you die. I am not kidding!

My father--a farmer--ridiculed employees who made twice the money he did and who could afford to go on three-week vacations year after year. He mocked government employees who could not get fired, were basically exempt from paying income taxes, and had generous pensions waiting for them at retirement age (no, of course he didn't make fun of employees to their face).

My dad didn't have a safe paycheck nor a secured pension. He did not expect to retire, ever. When the weather demanded it, he would work every day for months. Sometimes he had a bad year, financially. I saw him--and us--going through several meager years in a row. Vacations? Yep, he enjoyed about half a dozen vacations, 3 - 5 days long in his late sixties, totaling a month of goofing off during his lifetime perhaps.

My old man worked for more than fifty years on a "job" he did not initially choose. He felt he had to take over this 800-year-old family business when his older brother got killed in WWI. Most individuals in our society would easily label my father's life as 50 years of "Labor Camp." Yet, I never heard him complain. He whistled at work. He was a happy man. He never said it explicitly, but I do know he absolutely LOVED his life and his vocation. He CHOSE to work every day.

I have met hundreds and hundreds of self-employed men and women, entrepreneurs, selfmade individuals in all sorts of industries, in different countries on several continents. My father's story does NOT stick out as special. On the contrary, as far as self-employment goes, he was quite normal. It matters not that my dad lived in Germany all his life. What I have learned and what I continue to admire is that America and the greatness of the U.S. have been build by such "normal" individuals.

Ingenious tinkerers willing to go through hell for the people and for the work they love. Reckless idiots in the eyes of outsiders, like the Wright brothers. No, those who hate what they do won't risk braking limbs and necks without a reflection of that risk in a pay raise. Only people who love what they do are willing to destroy marriage, friendships, and their own health over their "love."

Do you really love what you want to do? Enough to die for it? Oh, that is just my negative programming? Yeah sure, you new age dork! Agreed, there is an off-chance that you are lucky. Maybe you will coast through self-employment with ease, wade through truck loads of cash, and all that's good will only get better throughout eternity. And boy, I wish that's true for you. But if you expect that to happen, oh baby, I'm afraid you are a doomed freaking wretch.

Choice can turn one man's (and woman's, naturally) torture into another man's paradise. It is pure idiocy to assume doing what you love will make you happy. You are the one who has to modify everything you do, the stuff you hate doing and the things you say you love. You have to breathe happiness into every single one of your endeavors. If you don't, the stuff you love today will taste like yesterday's stale beer tomorrow and turn into a heavy burden.

It is dumb to believe doing what you love will get you anywhere. "It" won't. YOU may and you may not ... if and when you are ready for it. Asking you to quit employment and to do "what you love" is the equivalent of asking you to jump into a volcano and to fight with dragons to your last breath. If you happen to love THAT, then by all means do it! If you don't, I don't want to be held responsible for talking you into it. Nope.

And yeah, if you are aware of the risks--in addition to the risks you will never be aware of in advance--you will probably enjoy it. At any rate, I beg you (on my knees): start a business but do it parallel to your sleeping-dragon employment. You'll thank me soon.

In short, job-hating is an insurance policy against possibly traumatizing and maybe fatal self-employment. I urge you to love the job-hating if you lack the balls to subject yourself to the fate of going down or up in flames by doing what you "love." Whether it'll be "up" or "down" is not for you to decide: whether you like it or not, the market always has the last word.

Love thy dragon as thyself,

Egbert Sukop

frontal attack

2008-09-07T20:16:00.000-07:00

"If you have a job without any aggravations, you don't have a job." --Malcolm Forbes

In other words, "loving your job" is not the equivalent of enjoying every damn thing that's part of your job. Every job has elements you won't like at all. Loving your children doesn't mean that they are sweet, well-behaved creatures all day, and just the way they "should" be. On the contrary, if our love for somebody or something doesn't absorb a good portion of adversity, love ain't love.

The quest to find something you love to do for a living is often carried out as a "frontal attack" of the problem. What do I enjoy doing? What am I good at? Where are my strengths? Not even a mad bull would expect to win with such a doomed strategy. It's not likely to work well for you either.

Jobs per se are not our last inhumane bastion of self-hatred, but certainly one of vast proportions. Most jobs are an expression of self-neglect and certainly the lack of self-respect. You think your individuality is a liability, your creativity is worthless, and you aren't worthy of freedom? Get a job. Any job will do, in fact.

Jobs are time machines transporting you into the dark ages of socialism. You don't matter. The stuff you do doesn't matter. And your paycheck is rather immaterial. You are doing it mostly "for the benefits." You really believe you can improve on a pitiful situation like that? Well, fetch my free ebook 'How to Better Hate Your Job', pray hard, and I wish you the best of luck.

Forgive me! I got side-tracked. Apropos, that's what jobs are in general: detours of life. Jobs distract you from doing something worth your while. Jobs divert you from being yourself and from the development of your individual genius. Jobs are coffins of individuality (and so is multi-level garbaging), but hey babe: Don't quit if you have a job right now! I am serious. Build a business parallel to this bloody black hole of individuality. Start something on your own! And--as I hope you recall--it does NOT have to be based on activities you enjoy in order for you to love it.

Have you watched "Glory" with Denzel Washington, Morgan Freeman, and Matthew Broderick--when Denzel could still act (and wasn't just Denzel Washington in a new setting)--or "The Patriot" with Heath Ledger and Mel (Oh-God-teach-me-to-be-a-less-obvious-antisemitic-ass-while-drunk) Gibson? You'll remember battle scenes with two armies standing vis-a-vis slaughtering each other, showing the brutal stupidity of frontal attacks.

When you attack your life's problems head on, you are becoming canon fodder just like dead soldiers of previous centuries. "I think only positive," or "I want to do what I enjoy for a living," are frontal attacks on your intelligence, and they aren't blessed with better chances to succeed than bitter exchanges of musket salvos in the 18th century. In order to do what you love, you don't have to do what you love.

Come again? Yep, you heard me perfectly well the first time.

Human beings have the incredible ability to love what they don't like. We can even hate what we're doing, and we can hate it so much that we love the way we hate it. Following our feelings is immature. "Yeah, but what if it doesn't feel right?" Your feelings and emotions got you by the nose? Not good. It's part of growing up to learn how to do WHAT YOU WANT without getting distracted or slowed down by the way you may feel.

You seriously believe Lance Armstrong could have won the Tour de France seven times--and he's preparing for the Tour de France 2009 as we speak--had he listened to his feelings all the time? Sure he likes cycling, but do you realize the inhumane pain he puts himself through to do what he wants?

If and when you do what you want, it will NOT feel good all the time. On the contrary, when you do what you really want you will go through so much pain that others would call it torture if they were forced to do the same, involuntarily. Doing what you want may cause you MORE pain than the job you hate so much. Being obsessed with feeling good is good only for morons. It's the frontal attack of loving what you do ... and childish: I love you as long as I like you.

In case you really want to to what you love, you gotta learn to love it while you hate it. When you do what you want it may hardly feel good at all. I promise, doing what you love will put you through more pain, trouble, and challenges than enduring a job you hate. And you got to love it.

The only thing that matters is that it is what YOU want. Who cares how that feels?!

Egbert Sukop

parallel universe

2008-08-22T18:29:00.000-07:00

Our realities differ: we don't live in the same world!

As a child, I could hardly suppress a gag reflex just hearing the word "asparagus." Today I find that stuff exquisite and delicious, as my parents had prophesied. We experience "soft" differences with other people--like a variety of opinions, theories, ideas, tastes--and "hard" ones, like two asparagus worlds defined by observable physical phenomena of a different nature. You may love strawberries while your boyfriend needs to be rushed to the next emergency room if he tries just one innocent strawberry. Parallel universes of the hard kind. No, it's non-negotiable. Some of us enjoy what may kill another.

For the time of the cold war, we witnessed socialist countries--member states of the Warsaw Pact, for instance--on one side of the fence and societies believing in a more or less free market on the other side. Fence? Not really: a wall, barbed wire, mine fields, and trigger-happy men guarded the line between those two worlds. People lost limbs and lives in the attempt to leave one universe and to enter the other. As a general rule, socialist governments and societies had a keen interest for their subjects not to mingle with the enemy, with evil capitalist pigs on the other and naturally greener side of the "fence." Negotiations were political charades, rituals bare of real meaning or purpose. Nobody expected to convince the other guy of anything.

Today, there are still--and again--socialist countries of one type or another. Charley Marx's legacy, as outdated and dusty as it truly is, continues to ail along through the 21st century. But that is not surprising. Interesting is what has happened under the surface. For Mr. Marx, religion was "the opium of the people." Over the course of some 150 years, socialism has become a new religion and the opium of the people. The tool of choice for thugs like Hugo Chávez and sick bastards like Kim Jong-il to oppress their helpless subjects. If socialist economies were ideal environments, you wouldn't need excessive violence to keep your people in your country, putting up with hearty tree bark for breakfast. On the contrary, the masses would be eager to enter your worker's paradise, but it looks as if North Korea is not today's immigrant country of choice. At least not yet.

What about religion, you ask? It has become irrelevant. Irrelevant not so much for believers, but as a dividing force it is significantly less important than it once was. The discussion of socialist ideas versus free market economy separates us more than differing religious denominations or the existence of religion per se.

Let's get to the fun part, shall we?

Socialism--employed here as a general term, including a garden variety of its ideological offspring--used to be at the root of revolutionary movements against establishment and capitalists. According to Forbes magazine, a nest egg worth $900 Million has successfully trickled into Fidel Castro's socialist lap, and Mr. Chávez can't wait to follow into his hero's footsteps. Not bad for a revolutionary and murderer to end up richer than the Queen of England. Who says that socialism doesn't pay? Not only does it pay, but it's the perfect setup for capitalist progress as well. Enter China: more millionaires pop up in China than anywhere else on Earth.

The ideal symbiosis. If you own a company, employ socialists. They will serve you well, and they will hate you more--as a good socialist should--if you don't allow them to benefit financially from your profits. The worse you treat them, the more loyal they will be to your company and to their musty beliefs. If you have socialist ideals on the other hand, seek employment at a capitalist firm who happily finances you and such luxury as your whimsical theories. As a bonus, you'll find plenty of ways to hate your--self-chosen!--"oppressor."

The fight against the outsourcing of jobs proves that today's socialists are not engaged in an uprising against the evil bourgeoisie. Hell no! Marx would drastically increase the rpm while rotating in his London grave could he see that employees, "the owners of labour," are begging to maintain their status quo. Benefit: it allows them to stay socialists a bit longer.

That's what has become of the good old "class struggle:" Capitalists need socialistic oriented employees, and socialists need capitalist employers if they don't want their theory to collapse.

As employers, we run our businesses following capitalist principles and nothing is wrong with that. Strange only that from the largest corporation down to the tiniest mom and pop operation at the corner, employers do NOT care to employ capitalists: employers feed socialist employees who receive a paycheck whether they work hard or hardly at all. Employees expect to get benefits and an occasional pay raise, but neither employer nor the employee's union will permit them to work as efficiently as they could and would. Employees who are eager to work overtime are often considered a burden. The last thing an employer wants is for paychecks to reflect true performance and real market value of the employee. Capitalist employers somehow believe that their profit relies on employees with socialist values.

As employees, we live in socialist work environments. How so? For the average employee, few things matter besides showing up for work. Individuality, character, initiative, and creativity are worthless assets. Even the influence of your performance on your income is negligible. You are "a unit," most decisions are made for you, your responsibilities are limited, your ideas and even high levels of competence can easily turn into liabilities. If you really love your job you are likely to be a sick, twisted individual who thrives on bureaucratic irrelevance, on promotions based on back stabbing more than on cold hard currency paid in exchange for the market value of your productivity.

Employees give up because the very elements that make capitalism exciting and adventurous are meticulously filtered out of their lives. No risk, no opportunity, no freedom. Small wonder employees are bored out of their minds, hate every minute of their unproductive and meaningless lives, while looking forward to retirement. Uh, at least we can blame evil corporations for depriving their poor wage slaves of well-deserved profit and freedom?

No, we can't! Most employees--naturally we must include government employees--despise and condemn profit taking. And nothing scares average people more than freedom. Freedom is the last thing they want.

Conclusion: employers grant their employees a favor by allowing them to live their socialist dream a couple of decades longer than they could realistically afford otherwise. 87% of Americans experience the luxury and the privilege of hating their jobs in monetary limitation, while the rest of us have to make do in freedom and happiness.

And what about the opium thing? Why is socialism the new religion and opium? 'Cause socialists insist to lie and to be lied to. They don't fight to get out. They fight to stay in their universe marked by struggle and limitation. They get teary eyes, for instance, when some prick promises higher minimum wages. Milton Friedman said, "There's a great deal of agreement among economists, contrary to what people may think. You won't find much difference of opinion on the proposition that raising the minimum wage will cost jobs." That was in June 1995. To this day you can gain political mileage out of selling opium to the masses, promising the blue out of the sky.

Nobody will convince a socialist to switch universes and to live happily ever after as a member of a free market economy. Neither will a capitalist eagerly leave freedom--and risk--behind and voluntarily clip her own wings of thought and action. Both appear to like where they are.

Just in case: if you catch yourself bitching about your lot, you gotta choice to make which universe you want to live in. No stupid "class struggle" or fight necessary. Your "oppressors" are imaginary!

Egbert

P.S.: If you are wondering how a bastardized Marx would sound today, substituting "socialism" for "religion:"

"Socialistic suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Socialism is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people."

chicks and eggs

2008-07-12T20:25:00.000-07:00

Madonna's loving brother, Christopher Ciccone, barfs a new book on the market this upcoming week: "Life with My Sister Madonna." He reveals the incredible secret that his sister is a narcissist and the most important person in Madonna's life is ... oh-my-Gawd, nobody knew: Madonna!

Mr. Ciccone, the brotherly leech, has plenty of reasons to thank his sister for being who she is and how she is, because he wouldn't have written the book, neither would this tome sell so well--even before its publication date--without her. Madonna may not be perfect sister material, but I am quite happy not to have Christopher C. as my brother. Would you like to have your siblings publishing your family secrets? I thought so.

However, this story reminds me of a success related issue most people fail to consider when they dream and aim for wealth and fame. We want to "get" things and we are not aware that we must first become the one who can have that stuff:

When you were a child, I'm sure you heard this phrase ad nauseam in one form or another: "no, you can't have that yet. Once you are a little older (more responsible, 18, 21, etc.) we shall see." Our parents told us repeatedly we had to BE something FIRST before we were eligible to get the things we were after. They were not that wrong!

People, envious of Madonna's wealth and lifestyle, must know that they can't have all those goodies without BEING Madonna, and most people don't want to be her or like her. Not even her own brother wants to be like her. It's the same with success in other areas. A friend of mine, who is rather successful with MLM and who hates my rants against network marketing, refuses to see that in order to have a thriving network marketing business you need to BE that kind of person. No condescending judgment here: you must enjoy networking or you will fail (like over 90% of those who try).

Either you are a person who loves the MLM world already--the network marketing religion--or you must badly want to BECOME the type of person who feels home in that environment if you care to succeed. It is nonsense, a waste of time, and causing unnecessary pain trying to convince people that "the system", as the great equalizer and enabler, will turn everybody into a success story.

One of the greatest myths is that "money corrupts people." No, not even the largest amount of money can make you do what you absolutely don't want to do. It's kinda like the old hypnosis question, "will you jump off a building if the hypnotist asks you to?" You'd wake up out of the cash trance if someone asked you to do things that are against your nature.

Money operates like a looking glass and it shows you (and others) what you are made of. Huge piles of money make character traits publicly visible. Money brings out the good and the bad in you, but money is NOT responsible for you being the person you happen to be. If someone is corrupt, of course a nice chunk of money will help everyone else to see it. Most of us are so corrupt that we can be bought into doing something we don't want to do--lifelong--with puny wages, a couple of benefits, and worthless seniority babble at the water cooler. Similarly, piles of dough also show a compassionate and generous person clearer.

Again, it's not money first and then its owner changes mind, morals, and convictions: it happens the other way around. Who was first, the chick or the egg? When elderly people fall and break a hip, we know that's not how it happened: the hip broke first and then the person fell. Yet the falling is what we see as the obvious, first.

Usually we see first that someone must have oodles of money. We are not aware what led to that pile of dough. Blinded by good looks and money, people don't care about the details of development an individual had to endure to become who she is today. People judge other people as superficially as they possibly can.

And so it happens that many of us crave to punish the rich (a characterization based on nothing but a wild and ignorant guess), with an increase of capital gains tax, for instance. Since historical data show that a LOWER capital gains tax leads to HIGHER tax revenue, the call for raising that particular tax can only have the aim to punish people. Otherwise it makes no sense whatsoever.

We want to get rich (whatever we think that may be), but at the same time we want to hurt those who are "rich" already. Insane! Then, we think the amount of money one has alone--or his assets--are what got him where he is. Money is power, isn't it? "Money makes the world go 'round?" Claptrap. How much power means a bag with $100,000 under a little old lady's mattress?

In most cases it is the other way around. People have ideas, they act, and they move things. That creates money, and of course more money helps increasing the spreading of ideas, activities, etc. around the globe. But the people were first, NOT their money. An individual with tons of money was FIRST that individual person, with her particular ideas and her personal choices of how she wanted to live her life. Then she had a couple of lucky breaks or she didn't.

It is utterly dumb to believe, "I want money and then I can be who I want to be and do what I want to do." Childish, and still after being with his sister Madonna for almost half a century, Mr. Ciccone's foggy brain has not allowed him to see what's what. As a good, warm-hearted and caring sister, Madonna would have never been Madonna, and not worth writing a single paragraph about in the family scrapbook.

Be happy not to be Madonna! Be glad you are not David Beckham. Be grateful you don't have to be Rush Limbaugh. But stop this slimy envy, the vile bitterness of begrudging other people's money, or just the idiocy of comparison with individuals you don't care to be.

Now, I don't accuse you of doing such stupid things! But you and me, we participate almost daily in conversations where some airhead brings up that very issue. Set the records straight. To defend Mr. Limbaugh and Madonna? Good gawd, NO! To build an environment where YOU can live freely and unfold, privately and professionally, as you damn well please.

Freedom begins with you and it ends with the Ciccones. Everything you do is likely to be criticized by somebody some day, and possibly by your own children in a therapy session twenty years from now.

So what? Do what you want to do, today. Doing that and being you--the one and only original you--may earn you money down the road or not, lots of money or not so much. If you care for your happiness it's an easy choice to make.

Egbert

mules and horses

2008-07-07T23:02:00.000-07:00

Zig Ziglar once spoke about diet, and he said no sane person would feed her one million dollar race horse a single bite of the wrong food. If it's not conducive to the horse's purpose, it's not going to make it into the horse's stomach.

People, however, don't hesitate to eat all kinds of crap with full knowledge and zero regard for the consequences.

The average person thinks less of himself than we think of race horses. Our self-esteem matches more the value of an old and tired mule. We are neither sane, nor do we believe we're worth much. Hence we go out and buy another diet book. As if we didn't know what's good for us. And some of us have gone too far in our madness, so that we ended up "on the other side," as exercise and diet Nazis.

I don't care about the stuff you stuff yourself with! Eat, get fat, live large--that's none of my business.

But I like Zig's race horse analogy and bloody horse thief that I am, it's worth stealing it for my dark and evil purposes. Would you put your million dollar race horse before a dung cart? Of course not. And no breeder will purchase sperm of that particular horse because it's so damn cute. The horse has a potential that is difficult to measure in monetary terms.

How about your potential? Do you pamper yourself and care for your well-being as you would if you were a horse?

If your self-worth is not above the value of a million dollar horse, I do feel sorry for you. And we squeeze ourselves into the harness of a job, to make "some" money that will cover the wireless bill. We'd prefer a job that pays better, with better hours, and superior benefits. Potential? Potential my arse.

Jobs are supposedly the answer to poverty? Jobs ARE our poverty! Temporarily a job may help you to get through a rough patch in life, but a life in jobs? I ask you one more time: would you let your thoroughbred horse pull a wagon, so that you can make a quick buck helping someone move furniture?

Yes, jobs make some money but more so, they destroy people's potential. Jobs end the development of your individuality. Retirement is not the end of life. That has happened much earlier: getting a job is what's ending your life. Freedom to discover one's true potential and to live it expansively often finds its abrupt end in a job. People get finished on their jobs.

Jobs are the expression of helplessness in our society to treasure individuals. 87% of employees hate their jobs according to Forbes Magazine. Oh my God, that must mean all 87% do what they're meant to do with their lives! As long as they hate what they're doing, they are on the right track. Let's tell the unions to force politicians to create more jobs we can hate.

Are we that nuts? How many marbles do we have left to lose?

Asking for more jobs means we are intellectually and creatively bankrupt. We are at our wit's end. We don't know better than to use the finest potential we have for the most foolish purposes. As long as they are kept busy and don't have too much time to think. Hitler thought that also: let them build Autobahns. Keeps the unemployment rate low.

There is a certain idiocy operating behind the intent to create jobs no matter what. Devious and devilish is the effort to just provide people with sufficient jobs to keep them occupied.

What a waste of human beings! We mourn our dead. I mourn the murder of individuals on their jobs. People fill out a job application willing to waive the better part of their lives. Barbeque on the weekend, a boat, a house, the kids, a pooch. That's it? People show strangers proudly the pictures of their "beautiful" brats--mostly ugly, insecure teenagers--as if finding a cheating spouse and feeding your accidental brood were amazingly unique accomplishments.

What on Earth is YOUR true potential? Every rabbit can make babies. What can you do? And how will you get it out of yourself for everyone to see and to admire?

There is beauty in you, and your job is to pry it out of its closet.

Egbert Sukop

P.S.: The final version of my book 'How to Better Hate Your Job' is not in print yet. That should not stop you from picking up an "Advanced Reader's Copy" through my website (http://www.moneybymistake.com/). Paperback copy for $11 or it'll cost you $1 if you want to download the eBook edition. Yep, a single puny buck for the entire book! Tell me what you think of it: your "blurb," positive or scathingly negative, will be printed in the First Edition. Condition: your blurb must be offbeat. Boredom verboten!

independence: long shot

2008-07-06T16:14:00.000-07:00

Search "employment" on Google, and you will find 309 million links.
"Unemployment" produces 35.4 million links.
"Self-employment" turns up a measly 4.8 million links.

Dare I say it seems to be more than 7 times as popular to be unemployed than to be self-employed? I can't do that, can I? Well, I just did, and you cannot deny that people prefer to be employed rather than working for themselves. According to an entire minute of my scientific research, I found 1.55% of our population is seriously interested in independence--workwise that is.

We don't care to be productive. The largest employer, the government, pays her people out of tax money. You tell me how many "products," manufactured by the government, are being sold successfully in a competitive market environment? How do you measure performance of a government employee, compared with someone who works at a conveyor belt and pops out a tangible product every twelve minutes or so? Hey, relax! I like having the police checking on bad guys. Parts of the government are indeed important. Government employees are quite alright, but the question got to be legitimate: what percentage of government employment is truly productive?

How about subsidized industries? From ethanol production to the ailing airline industry, or to call centers we hesitate to outsource: if tax dollars have to prop up jobs, they certainly lack productivity. Even good old Ted Turner gets paid handsomely--out of your and my pocket--to stop him from farming his land. I hope he at least is aware of how useless and unproductive he is.

As long as an employee gets a paycheck, she is not necessarily concerned whether she is part of something that generates real income or if she produces marketable services and products. If you are self-employed or an entrepreneur, you don't have such luxury. You have to come up with ideas someone somewhere is willing to give you money for. The government may bail out Bear Stearns' shiny behind, but they won't save your dry cleaning franchise from going belly up.

Independence is not attractive! School teachers won't prepare you for it. Unless your parents are entrepreneurs themselves, they will be scared when you tell them you're going into business for yourself. When John Drummond told his father-in-law he was planning to sell unicycles, he got the (understandable) response: "How many clowns do you know?" I believe John didn't know any clowns back then, and he still managed to take www.unicycle.com past a million dollars in annual sales, meanwhile.

Independence is scary and yet, America has been built on just that by notorious bunglers, inventors, and those who tried to do something without the slightest guarantee to succeed. Independence cannot be bought. You will never have enough assets to be independent, all of a sudden. Independence will always be fragile, uncertain, unprotected, threatened, lonely, unreasonable, and a fiercely individual commodity. You don't get independence as a group ticket. No one can bestow it upon you. And trust me on this one: if and when you take on the challenge to be independent, not one other person will be eager to get your kind of independence.

People will laugh about your silly form of independence, first. If that does not dishearten you, they will attack you. If they can't destroy your stupid independence with aggression, they will develop jealousy. Later on, they'll steal your ideas. They may want to copy your products at some point but they never want a part of the hardship you had to endure in the process. A new business needs care and protection like a newborn child, complete with frequent diaper changes and all.

Yet, that's the future: you being in business for yourself. Don't quit your job! Begin something parallel to your existing job (if you have one). People don't quit when they have a baby, either. Well, if they're smart, they don't. You still need to eat and having a roof over your head helps also. But sooner or later, within the next couple of decades, employment will shrink significantly and self-employment will grow. People hate their jobs for good reasons, and wage slavery will be abolished, step by step.

"With more than one million new businesses each year, America’s economy depends on small businesses for its vitality and growth. According to the 1997 report of the U.S. Census Bureau, the nation’s 17 million small, non-farm businesses constituted 99.7 per cent of all employers, employed 52 percent of private workforce and accounted for 51 percent of the nation’s sales. Small business-dominated industries provided 11.1 million new jobs between 1994 and 1998, virtually all of the new jobs created during that time period. Small businesses are most likely to generate jobs for young workers, older workers and women, provide 67 percent of first jobs and produce 55 percent of innovations.

"Thousands of people with disabilities have been successful as small business owners. The 1990 national census revealed that people with disabilities have a higher rate of self-employment and small business experience (12.2 percent) than people without disabilities (7.8 percent). The Disabled Businessman’s Association estimates that 40 percent of home-based businesses are operated by people with disabilities." (source: U.S. Dept. of Labor, http://www.dol.gov/odep/)

If self-employment required especially strong, well-to-do, and able people, there would be a lower rate of individuals with disabilities in business for themselves than of people who aren't suffering any disabilities. The average person still believes in her strengths as an income source. A growing number of those who had to learn to live with disabilities have discovered that you can exploit your weaknesses just as well as strengths, and possibly with greater success.

You don't need to learn the hard way through disabilities or pain: wherever you are currently in your career or financially, there are ways for you to gain independence, enjoyment, and additional income. Strength or obvious weakness, it is possible to exploit both for fun and profit.

That's what freedom is for.

Egbert

P.S.: Final version of my book 'How to Better Hate Your Job' is not in print yet, but you may pick up an "Advanced Reader's Copy" through my website (http://www.moneybymistake.com/). Paperback copy for $11 or it'll cost you $1 if you want to download the eBook edition. Yep, a single buck for the entire book!

independence: short cut

2008-07-04T12:47:00.000-07:00

Pursuit of happiness is your right, I know. I do appreciate to live in the only country on earth that acknowledges and protects the individual's right to freedom and happiness. It's huge and not to be taken for granted!

Yet, your right to be happy is not enough if you care to be happy. No one can make you happy: your country can't, your spouse or lover can't, your children can't. Sure, there are people around us who make and bake children for their--the parents'--happiness or as a device to "heal" their broken marriage. What horror for a child to grow up with parents who cripple their kids from day one with the weight of such impossible responsibility! Child abuse of the highest order.

Don't try to misunderstand me: of course, children add to your happiness! AND they will add to your problems. Such is life. But those of us who desire children and have kids IN ORDER TO be happier in life ought to burn in the hell of their daily misery. Guilt is the end product of a doomed undertaking of this kind. Guilt ridden kids who realize they will never be able to satisfy their insatiable and whacko parents. Later on, the crooked parents will--hopefully--grow into lifelong felt guilt for having committed this crime.

There is no long route to your happiness. We could go on and on, to house vs. apartment, living in the mountains or at the beach, being financially well off or struggling: your circumstances, as ideal as they may look from someone else's perspective, are NOT guaranteed resources for your happiness. Not even doing something you love is better suited to make you happy than kvetching along for decades on a disliked job. Yeah, but more money in the bank would definitely make me feel better. Horse shit! We are more creative inventing reasons for our misery than we are willing to be happy.

Studies show that happy people are not wealthier than unhappy individuals. Happy people are not healthier, and they don't have less problems in life than their miserable friends. Regardless of their income, happy people seem to donate more money to charity--to religious and non-religious causes--they even donate more blood and time. The happy ones also appear to belong to religious communities of their choice.

All fine and dandy: it includes the answer but it isn't the answer of how to be happy. Here it is--well, if you can take it, that is:

You cannot become happy. You can only BE happy. Instant happiness kicks in when you ADMIT that you, in fact, are happy already no matter how your life's circumstances may present themselves currently.

It's a tough one, I do know, but you got to bypass the reasoning of your intellect every single time if you care about your happiness and about the happiness of those around you. Being happy is not a selfish act: being miserable is! And both are somewhat contagious. It's not easy to display how happy you are when your loved ones are emotionally down. Happy individuals may feel the need to subdue their true emotional make up in public and especially in the presence of a depressed family member. The one feeling the "emptiness of the big black hole" controls her human environment. No one dares to admit happiness around such a person.

Unhappy and miserable people are the greatest egotists you will find! Don't fall in love with them. Don't marry them ("oh, I will change him"). Stay the hell out of the way of moping people! Unhappy people are the scourge of the earth.

Admit to being happy, baby! Almost always, you'll have to do it in the face of adverse forces. Is it worth it? You decide.

Happy Independence Day!

Egbert

P.S.: Final version of my book 'How to Better Hate Your Job' is not in print yet, but you may pick up an "Advanced Reader's Copy" through my website (http://www.moneybymistake.com/). Paperback is $11 or it'll cost you $1 if you want to download a copy. Yep, a single buck for the entire book!

money tantra

2008-06-29T19:09:00.000-07:00

Is there a connection between money and our sex life or not? My good friend and "inspirator", Tom Volkar (http://www.delightfulwork.com/) recently joked about me telling people in this blog to get laid. Another subscriber from half around the globe asked me to write about how sex and cash connect. Gawd, I feel so torn ...

Firstly, money is more intimate an issue for us than sex. You and I know individuals who can walk into a bar tonight, establish a casual connection with a stranger, and have sex with person X within hours. Exchange of bodily fluids with a stranger is quite normal for some of us--including the taking of risks: manufacturing children (couple of decades of child support can easily be costlier than today's bank balance permits), serious illness, death--but none of these people would feel as willing and comfortable to exchange credit cards or to share their bank accounts with that same random acquaintance. On average, we care about those last $500 in our bank accounts more than about our very lives! On average, our sanity isn't worth much, is it?

Yeah, but that separates sex and money. Where is the junction between the two? I thought you'd never ask. Bad sex is better than no sex, just like some money is better than no money. Sure, we'd love to have a lot of both and of supreme quality, naturally, but reality may have humbled some of us here and there. Both, too little cash flow or a lack of a decent sexlife often translate to desperation. Desperate individuals are nervous, can get pushy, they're prone to use emotional blackmail, and they are likely to develop typical stalker qualities. We can smell such creepy folks from a twenty feet distance, and in business or in relationships we better run from them as fast as we can!

Here's the kicker: I know guys who believe women have no interest in them because they don't earn enough money. Wrong! Women sense desperation--a lack of confidence--and they don't waste their time on figuring out where its roots may be. No money is no problem, no self-respect is the problem. No sex is no problem either but feeling low, incomplete, and stressed about it is a huge disadvantage. People may shy away from doing business with you, "knowing" something is out of balance with you. Sex, money, who cares what caused it? No money or no sex did not cause anything: YOU are the cause of anxiety and of other people's response to it. When you are needy in ANY department, it will come out of your pores and most people around you will know. Neediness affects all other areas in your life negatively and it is between hard and impossible to fight against it. It is an uphill battle if there ever was one.

That's what I have in mind when I suggest to people who struggle with money issues, men and women alike: hey, why don't you get laid. Even your wallet may thank you. If and when you feel desperation somewhere in your life, locate a different area--seemingly disconnected from the painful subject--that allows you to make immediate improvements easily and playfully. That will do more for the complicated departments in your life than feverishly trying to force yourself to succeed where you've been stuck for awhile. By the same token, individuals with messed up relationships turn into workaholics, because that's what appears to work when nothing else will. It's o.k., but only temporarily. Use this technique as a trigger and not as a solution, or it will quickly become a new trap.

La petit mort--the small death--is a common way to experience orgasm and possibly a period of melancholy right afterwards. Bunches of people can't wait to get there, and then they realize they have just lost what they were after. In other words, people use sex to make the feelings (they so cherish) GO AWAY. Has the idea ever crossed your mind to compare orgasm with goal achievement and success in general? For lottery players, winning large amounts can be the worst that can happen to them. Success can be devastating and even deadly. Example: Amy Winehouse, Britney Spears, and Co.

Nothing wrong with success or orgasm but if that's the only thing that counts: you are doomed, with or without the orgasm, with or without material success. Performance anxiety, fear of not being able to make it or to get the partner where we believe she or he "should" end up, works nicely as a self-fulfilling prophecy. When we are anxious to get there--whatever "there" may be for us at the time--we are royally screwed. There will be no enjoyment of the entire process. No surprise people hate their jobs. We work for the weekends, for our goals, for successes--and we have sold our ability to be happy the entire time. We are having sex with an eagle eye on orgasm, and sex turns out to be stressful, a fine reason for arguments--verbal and non-verbal--and maybe the reason for extended stretches of no sex. Nice!

Our very goals can become reasons for under achievement. Having to make or fake an orgasm is likely to prevent the real thing from happening, and if it happens it'll be too quick. A small death: so frustrating and tiresome an experience that the guy will want to roll over and forget about it. The girl will lie awake for awhile, disappointed. And that's with orgasm, mind you. People are having some sort of what they call a sex life and they end up being more desperate than when they had no sex at all.

Success in life, your damn orgasms, windfalls of cashola--that stuff is meaningless and next to worthless, unless you enjoy and savor as much as you can whatever you are doing right now. Quickies can be fun, I agree, and so can lottery jackpots be a cheap thrill. But those things are not satisfying longterm. Idiots want to get the money and run from their pitiful cubicle life, just as thousands of couples want to get to the goodies as fast as they can, to get it over with. Rat races are for rats, and I refuse to race anywhere.

Are sex and money connected? Duh. I watch individuals breathe, and I know how their money life looks in general. I hear people bitch about their relationship to their work, and I have a pretty clear idea what's happening--or not--in their bedrooms. I cannot and I will not teach you tantra. In fact, I categorically refuse to teach anything to anybody, but I suggest you stick your nose into a couple of tantra books (for example: Diana Richardson, The Heart of Tantric Sex, A unique guide to love and sexual fulfillment).

I don't care about your stupid sex life: it's none of my business! But translate any tantric idea you come across into your work environment, and your happiness will get a kick in the buttocks that your money can feel.

Apropos books: final version of my book 'How to Better Hate Your Job' is still not in print yet, but you may pick up an "Advanced Reader's Copy" through my website (http://www.moneybymistake.com/). Paperback is $11.00 for this "Uncorrected Proof," or it'll cost you a puny buck if you want to download a copy. One condition: I want your feedback, a brief "blurb" I can include in the first edition! I don't care if it's positive or scathingly negative, but your feedback must be offbeat. Don't even think about boring my readers with normal niceties.

I love you too ... oh yeah, and your money!

Egbert

P.S.: There is no long road to happiness, you know? Only a short cut: admitting happiness, no matter what the circumstances may be like.

hunter and gatherer

2008-06-15T13:40:00.000-07:00

I admit it: I watched 'Sex and the City'--by myself. I don't have the excuse that a girl dragged me into a chick flick. It was my own doing, and I'm not even that gay. Here's what I saw:

We are a silly species. Rational decision makers? What are you talking about? No, we are nuts and obviously we have found sophisticated ways to enjoy that fact. Oh, this is just a stupid movie! Really? Sure, it's over the top, but you and I have met people who have made similar choices as the characters in Sex and the City. Damned, even I have married people while I should have followed my gut feeling and canceled the wedding on the wedding day, regardless of consequences and implications. Millions of people have watched this stuff season after season because too much of it rings painfully-enjoyably true.

Four girls move to NYC to find love, and twenty years later that dream hasn't materialized as intended. What a surprise! Some of them may have found what goes by the name of 'love' but, as you know, we get bored with what we have and we want more. Love won't do and we want marriage, a baby, or a $50,000 ring. Once we get that we are upset because it didn't show up "the right way." Remember Christmas gifts of your childhood: by mid January most of them had begun to collect dust.

Now, had these girls found love in the first episode of the first season, you wouldn't have seen hundreds or thousands of designer dresses--some cute, others so aggressively hideous that I wonder if women are too proud or too insecure to get their guys' opinion on their outfits before they attack the public. Even the cute ones aren't cute for everybody but a lot of girls apparently don't care or worse: lack taste. Selling haute couture was doubtlessly important to produce the series and the movie. But there is something else preventing these four girlfriends from finding love:

We don't want to find love!

We want to "pursue" it. The quest has more value to us than finding love and the impossibility of having to live with it. The pursuit of happiness is your inalienable right, as the Declaration of Independence states so prominently, NOT happiness itself. Same with love. The pursuit of love is so much fun. Once we believe we found the damn thing, we treat it and the other person in the most crappy ways. The person who loves us may be worth less to us than "the way he gave me that ring." Or a marriage becomes more important than the girl or guy we pretend to love. Love looks like a great idea for individuals who don't have it. The pursuit of love is cool. Once accomplished, the pursuit of something else is cooler. What we can't have has a higher value than the contents of our pocket. People are interesting until we "have" them ... or until we discover we never will. After that moment EVERYTHING changes! We resent people for succumbing to us, and we resent them for never giving in. There are exceptions but not many.

We live for the tension of hope, the electrical charge in the "becoming" phase, when we don't know if or when or how. We are junkies. Deep down in the core of our spines, we are hunters and gatherers. Some of us believe we evolve, learn, or spiral up to higher spheres of consciousness and higher vibrations. That's fine, but you better realize it's just another form of the same pursuit and no more sacred than hunting quail or carving another notch in the butt of your pistol. We learn how to operate cars and computers, but to this day we haven't figured out how to "operate" children and for sure we don't have the slightest idea how to be ourselves. Wow yeah, we sure have learned a lot! Throughout the millennia, we remain hunters and gatherers, and we are pretty good at it. Only problem is we think we should be somebody else.

There are parallels between the pursuit of love and our pursuit of money.

We are afraid to get there because dreams end with accomplishment. You know plenty of stories about lottery winners who literally destroyed themselves within a few years after being cursed with a jackpot. They discovered they were the same useless fools after than they were before, and self-destruction kicked in. Money in large quantities just makes obvious who we are. It takes away the mystery we treasure. Money works like a looking glass, making clear--painfully so at times--and public what we are made of. Money makes good people visible and it makes idiots visible. A great number of people hesitate making huge chunks of money, because they are scared to remove all doubt. We want the pursuit but spare us the sobering experience of end results.

The dumb thing is we don't admit how much we enjoy the pursuit. We claim we hate our jobs, and we would be willing to leave our despised jobs if we got the big pile of dough. Nonsense! We love the work we complain about and we love it MORE than anything else, including quick riches. That's why we work where we work. Duh.

We love the hunting and gathering part (of money, goals, husbands, one-night stands, diamond rings), and we do well to stand up for it. Not getting there is not a problem! Naturally there are challenges during any hunt, but they and exactly the stuff we hate are what turns an otherwise instant collapse of our dreams into a drawn out hunt. Reaching a goal "collapses dreams?" Yep. Poof, and the precious tension, driving force and your energy source, is gone. By definition, lots of the stuff you acquire become worthless in the instance of success.

Should you stop pursuing goals, money, love? Of course not! But you could do the same and enjoy the happiness OF the pursuit. Eventually getting what you were after will not take away from the happiness you already have. The stuff you want will then fall into the hands of someone who is worthy: You!

Egbert Sukop

outsourcerer

2008-06-08T18:34:00.000-07:00

I grew up in Germany on a water mill and farm that had been in my family's possession for over 800 years. Farmers love to see their kids become farmers also, and so did my parents. They talk their brood into developing love for the soil and for hard, honest work. They proudly tell their children about generations of down-to-earth business as down-to-earth can ever be. Aah, farming! One of the two oldest professions, both trustworthy and noble ...

It didn't take long for me to figure out that farms in Northern Germany made most money producing sugar beets, a highly subsidized crop. For decades German farmers survived--some of them quite comfortably--by destroying the livelihood of cane sugar farmers worldwide. The German government--the tax payer--has a nice history of preventing outsourcing.

Before I hit age 21 I learned that, to a degree, starvation in developing countries was caused and maintained by people in civilized (sic!) countries too proud and arrogant to let go of their outdated jobs. I was one of those people. As if it's not enough of a guilt trip to grow up German, the idea of continued farming and family tradition made me sick to my stomach. If you dumb yourself down enough and numb yourself sufficiently, you can do it.

How deeply can you be in love with "your own" soil, your clod of earth, when you know it's been financed by people who have nothing to eat, and paid for by your fellow countrymen who actually produce something of real market value? Hell, I probably killed people (in the Third World, as it used to be called back then) just by growing up peacefully.

It never seizes to amaze me how murderous non-violence can be. Apropos, the holocaust was not based on violence and hatred, either: it was made possible by a non-violent society, by people who wanted nothing more than their damn peace, by individuals like you and me lacking balls and spine to stand up for themselves and for another person's very life. You know, it took me many years to realize this, but the dirty truth is I have no respect whatsoever for a soft spoken ass who wants peace no matter what. Peaceful people can be of the most cruel nature.

Uh yes, we do have a subject. Prevention of outsourcing the sugar production in Germany not only guaranteed existing jobs, but permitted for new generations of farmers to grow into the same position of down-to-earth thievery. Yes, I learned that too: someone who tells you he is down-to-earth may just as well be a thief, willing for others to pay exorbitant taxes so that he can pretend to be needed in his society. Moreover, the down-to-earth person may not stop stealing from you until all you have left is the bare earth you are sitting on. Down to the last bit of earth you got ... if you happen to live on the wrong side of the globe. For the last thirthy some years I have not trusted anybody selling herself as a down to earth individual.

Remember "the elevator man?" These guys--yeah, definitely a vocation too sophisticated for women--spent their miserable lives in uniforms, riding up and down in a stinky cube with people too elevated to have a one-minute conversation with. There was a time in the history of employment when elevator operators were scared to lose their dreadful jobs! You think you hate your job? Pussy (I won't apologize)! No matter what you do for a living, it can't possibly be as dark and doomed as being literally stuck in an elevator your entire adult life. 30 - 40 years in an elevator, imagine that. And they still hated losing their jobs to computers that would allow a five year old to reach her destination if she was tall enough to push the correct button.

I can relate to folks afraid to lose their jobs to someone in Asia who can do the same for a fraction of the money you demand. But, do you miss the career opportunity of the elevator man? As high up as he got from time to time, how sad and disappointed are you that you are denied his kind of life? If you don't suffer from the absence of superb elevator operator job opportunities, nobody will miss the jobs you deem worth defending today--thirty years from now. Sooner or later the stuff you are doing will be obsolete.

People hate their jobs, and then they hate it even more when their object of hatred has been given to someone else to hate. Sure, we want to end poverty in the world and we like to help people, but giving them what we hate--our most useless jobs--is still too good for them. We like to help people in developing regions with goodies that are worse than what we hate. Quietly we hope these people in India, China, Vietnam, and Pakistan will become as civilized as we are. We hope they will become thieves like us, also willing to steal tax money from productive people. We hope they too will be callous enough one day to take from the poorest who'd love to do better--uh, when it comes to your job you don't think cheaper is better, do you?--what we can do so wonderfully expensive. For those who object to outsourcing, civilized equals superfluous.

If your job can be given away, there is something better for you to do, something more meaningful, with a real market value and most likely greater compensation. Being pissed off at "evil corporations" for losing hated jobs that lack sophistication and can't pay for their existence is one of the dumbest things I have seen our societies capable of. Why aren't we upset with an educational system and with school teachers who fail to teach what we need to make money without reaching into other people's pockets?

Funny, some of the wealthiest individuals on planet earth don't have a complete college or even high school education. They did not learn their trade or craft in school. They certainly didn't learn in school how to be successful. Teachers can teach you how to become a slave, how to get a job you will hate for life, and how to hold on to your subject of hatred until you retire and die (peacefully). School teachers have learned from their teacher's union--one of the most powerful organizations in the country--to use political leverage to maintain outdated, idiotic, and useless things.

Teachers are failing daily to teach what a human being needs to know to adapt to quickly changing markets, to be creative to invent your own opportunities as you need them, to keep you out of slavery, to--God forbid--make yourself and those around you happy. Too much to ask, I know. I don't blame the teachers. But by Gus, I cannot blame companies for their interest in making a profit for their shareholders--for you and me--and for moving to other locations that which everybody here has hated to do for years. How nuts are we, really?!

Who has taught us to crave slavery so much? We are willing to do what we hate to put $2,000 rims on our cars? What a crooked, corrupt bunch of useless pricks we are! My shiny rims are more important than a dumbass in India who wants to feed his damn brats? Fifty years from now, most of the employment market as we know it will have disappeared, and rightfully so. Our modern day job slavery will be abolished. Those who hang on to it are not on your side, nor on the side of humanity.

Motivational speakers? Gone, 'cause only people who hate what they're doing need motivational snake oil. Blood sucking slave traders, I'm sorry: employment agencies like Monster, will not be looked at as favorably in the distant future. Preparation for retirement will be called by its name: time-released suicide. Hey, you want to retire some day? You know already your life sucks!

We hate it, and therefore it must be a good thing? If that's what you learned in school, you should have spent that time with a truck load of bourbon. It could not have been worse. I do what I hate and I hate what I do until retire, is a statement of a wasted life. How pathetic!

"What do you want to do?" means for too many people, "I don't know. I have to see what's out there that I can hate doing." I am confident that's not you, but we spend our lives next to people who think and suffer that way through their desperate existence.

Instigate individuals to make a buck in their own name, outside of the slavery of jobs. It costs you nothing to make someone else hungry to take initiative for her own business. Question the status quo, and you may help a person realize there is a "parallel world" of more fun, more profit, and perhaps more happiness ripe and ready to be picked.

Egbert

conflict

2008-05-25T18:30:00.000-07:00

Recently, a friend asked me to throw my two worthless cents into his blog. I did so viciously, with the immediate result of the most beautiful conflict and controversy. Some folks--especially those who claim to have "lost their ego"--suddenly reveal their true belief that the world only revolves around them.

I tell you, the I-have-no-ego people have larger ones than Donald Trump himself. Even though I don't like Mr. Trump too much, I do respect him for not denying his ego and aggressive self-interest. Self-appointed egoless and holy individuals are worse than a used car salesman proclaiming to be an honest business man. Creepy! When you tell me you have lost your ego, I know you have lost your marbles.

The other reaction was a non-reaction: people shy away from tension. They wait until the waves have calmed down before they stick their heads back out of the water, even if that requires them to drown meanwhile. They love peaceful and quiet environments, and certainly they don't care to be shot at. Well, if you happen to be one of those two characters, I suggest you get a job or you keep the one you have because without a healthy dosage of self-interest and enjoyment of conflict you can't run a business. Hell, theoretically you can't even run to the grocery store without those two character traits.

Most people not only despise what they do, they are BORED out of their minds also. They are bored because they are BORING people (both possible meanings intended)! How many teenagers do you know who are bored and angry, with the supersized self-importance of an I-have-no-ego freak? All of them, perhaps?

God, I love accusing people of something randomly, and then lean back and watch the responses roll in!

Patrick Lencioni says in his book Death by Meeting, "When a group of intelligent people come together to talk about issues that matter, it is both natural and productive for disagreement to occur. Resolving those issues is what makes a meeting productive, engaging, even fun." According to Mr. Lencioni, problem No. 1 of boring and ineffective meetings is "lack of drama!" A movie without conflict is not a movie you pay money for, but in your life you crave peace and boredom? And if you are pretending to be self-employed, an entrepreneur oh-my-god, you think you get far by offering peace and boredom for sale?

Yeah, yeah, I know you peddle goodies and services that aren't labeled "boredom" or "peace," but that's what is behind your stuff if peace is all you want and boredom is your most natural state of mind. Potential customers smell the ailing rat and leave you in peace. Bored and boring individuals are still teenagers, emotionally, angry at the world and believing they are owed what they deserve. The basic baby boomer fallacy.

You watch hockey and football because you love peace so much? The NFL makes money with peace? Right!

Agreeable "discussions" and the faked politeness I witness all day makes me puke. No, I do NOT promote the rude behavior and name calling you see when online babies believe to be shielded by their anonymity! But we do love real conflict, tension, authenticity. We don't care for faked orgasms. We want to be grabbed by the lapels. We like to feel our hearts pound faster, and not just in the dark of a movie theater when we're armed with popcorn and a bag of m&ms.

Peace! What? The deceptively fascist John Lennon peace: there will be peace when everyone thinks like me?!

Wannabe productive? Seek conflict, cause tension, exploit controversy ... yep, for fun and profit! Hey, don't hurt people!

You know, what people say they want often turns out to be the opposite of what they really want. We lie a lot.

Egbert

regrets

2008-03-09T01:21:00.000-08:00

Regrets are painful. Are they? You have made mistakes in your life, plenty of them I hope. Perhaps you have done things that were not only painful for you but you have hurt other individuals. How can you live with that? Hardly anything in life is as important as our mistakes. The cutting edge, turning our actions into roaring success or into miserable disaster, brings us to an intensity we cannot experience playing it safe. Regrets can be milestones. Tell me, are your extraordinary successes sticking out in your memory as noticeably as your worst screw ups? If I'm not too mistaken, you are aware of your greatest mistakes every day, day and night. I am, and by Gustav, my closet is choke-full of skeletons.

People you have met may think of you as the greatest loser and asshole they have ever come across. For you, that same incident woke you up perhaps, enlightened you, and dug a real sense of integrity into your hide that you believed you had had long before you messed up so badly. Regrets are precious commodities, cornerstones of your character. You would not be you without them. I know--as much as plenty of people will disagree with me--you are a finer person because of every single thing you regret.

Regret what you have not done. You will never find out what would have happened had you taken that trip on the Trans Siberian Express. No regret is more horrible than the "I wish I had done that," type. "I wish I had talked to that girl 20 years ago." Awful!

As brilliant as our noodle may be, we cannot figure out intellectually what we can find out practically. We can't predict the future of markets, relationships, or anything else. We cannot predict the response of a stranger we are interested in talking with. Mind over matter? Yeah, right. We can't even predict the next move of a damn cricket we're struggling to get out of the house. In most cases, we must DO things to discover what works. Doing allows us also to access the enjoyable. You can't "do it" in your mind. You ought to practically do what you are after to see if you like doing it or not. Sure, with action things get messy and that's what we prefer to prevent by playing it safe. As human beings we will never be safe. If it's legal, go do what you have in mind or you are in hell already--literally--in the hell of "I wish I had tried that."

Doing what you have not done is easier said than done, obviously. Otherwise you would have done it. You gained something from not doing those things. At least, you believe you benefited from not doing it. You didn't risk losing your inheritance or the family jewels, for instance. You could have attracted HIV or knocked up more moms than your budget permits. Yet you don't know. None of those terrible things may have happened had you followed your dreams. Maybe and maybe not. You will never know. The benefits of not acting are baseless beliefs for the most part, justifications to compensate for missing out. And you are right: hideous things could have happened in the wake of your unlived life's activities.

Consider this: in a lot of instances we don't know what's crowned with the better outcome until we act. We must choose if we prefer to die in bed, eventually, or on the "battlefield of our dreams." Once that is settled your regrets will stop. If you chose the "bed" option, you don't have to worry about not doing anything. Doing stuff and risking your toupe to shift positions is just not for you. If you picked "battlefield," you won't have time to contemplate doing or not doing, to regret or not to regret. You'll burn in the middle of it.

Regretting mistakes you have made in the past is a waste of time. Nothing can be changed. You did what you did and no regret can undo it. I suspect our regrets are internalized actions of self-punishment. Mom told us to feel bad after messing up, and regret is the adult equivalent of her asking us to stand in the corner for awhile, to think about what heinous crimes we committed. Perhaps we were grounded for our mistakes, and regrets do just that: self-grounding immobilizes us and we become inactive. Think about your three most grave screw ups in your life and chances are you'll be paralyzed and useless for the rest of the day.
Adults may indulge in self-punishment by ways of regrets, but mature it is not. Procrastination has its beneficial sides--and I am the first to defend procrastination--but denying ourselves the joy of life because we are so busy feeling bad is pretty dumb. You are regretting mistakes you have made in the past? You are wasting precious time. Grow up, and make more mistakes.

Relationships are messy, and so are our relationships with our own mistakes. Mistakes are results of actions with a different turnout than the one we anticipated. When the result is better than what we had planned, we don't call it mistake. Some of us thank God for that stuff or we call it luck, but we don't take full credit. Well, kinda depends whom we are talking with. When results are worse than the achievement we had in mind, we feel solely responsible for the outcome or worse: guilty. We don't thank God for it, neither do we blame God. Why? Since I don't peddle religion nor its opposite, I shall leave the answer up to you.

As poor as our judgment has been historically, it's not probable that a high percentage of our actions yields exactly the results we had in mind. My wild guess, in most cases we were wrong. Honestly, results deviating in any way from our plans are mistakes, and it matters not if they are better or worse than what we wanted. In both cases our judgment is off, and we are responsible for the surprising outcome. Wrigley's chewing gum was a mistake: they did not plan to make money selling chewing gum. The gum was a freebie in their packages of baking soda. Moral: be happy and grateful for both kinds of mistakes. Or, if your world contains a God, thank God for all deviations, for your lucky breaks and for your most embarrassing screw ups. Love thy mistakes as you would an ugly child.

Mistakes are the bread and butter of our lives. Chances are most things we do will reveal themselves as mistakes because it's not probable to judge life correctly much more often than 50% of the time. If you are better, play roulette and you should do well for yourself. It is not that easy to predict the future. Of course, if you don't start anything new, you can't do much wrong. Holding down the same job for 30 years doesn't leave you much of a chance to make grave mistakes. Well, unless getting that job 30 years ago was the dumbest thing you ever did. Let's assume more than half of our business ventures and decisions are wrong, and we can't figure out which half is bad BEFORE we act. We decide to
a) never make a decision again and refrain from any and all action
b) hope to get lucky with our next move; if that fails, we never do anything new again and feel like a loser for the rest of our miserable days
c) increase our failure rate: we increase our output of ideas and action, and we radically increase frequency of possible mistakes

As the bible says, "Love thy mistakes as thyself and make more of them more often--or hang yourself young." Mistakes are crucial elements of life in freedom, if not the most important ones. How free would you be if everything you did, I mean everything, had to bring no less than perfect results? Twenty years from now, even in hindsight, planning, execution, and outcome would have to look immaculate from your perspective and from everybody else's point of view.

You would not be able to live another day. You'd be afraid to pull up your pants in the morning. If the making of mistakes were out of the question, all of us would be inhibited little creeps, too scared to say a word. And damned, in some ways we are like that, scared of life and of the pathetic opinion of people we don't care about.
There is no freedom for you without the freedom to make mistakes. Freedom requires mistakes. Freedom can thrive only in an environment where you can do things wrongly. It's not pretty, nice, or pleasant. Freedom is a painful thing, and you better enjoy it, baby.

Egbert

blame and credit

2007-09-16T16:27:00.000-07:00

Taking credit for winning and blaming ourselves for losing are sure signs of lacking self-confidence. When we use a winning incident to build ourselves up and we tear ourselves down because of a loss, our sense of reality is impaired.

Both winning and losing occur naturally in everybody's life. Often it is a matter of perspective, whether we have won or lost. While we are winning at the stock market, somebody else loses. In this case, losing and winning happen simultaneously. Pretty stupid if the “winner” takes credit for the fortunate turn out and the “loser” blames herself for the loss. The following day—at times just minutes later—the roles may be reversed. Let's say winning and losing “happen” if you are an active person, and you cannot control any particular outcome beyond a certain degree. Larry Ellison, the CEO of Oracle, wins or loses sums of a billion dollars or two on an average trading day. I'm sure he likes winning better, yet I don't believe one or the other affects is self-confidence or his decision-making much.

Of course, you must have an eye on the pulse of the markets. But you are doomed if you take factually and emotionally credit for winning situations and if you beat yourself or your people into the ground because of a loss.

If—and only IF—you are active and you try new things and new approaches, will you experience wins and losses. The less you fear losses, the better. Maybe 95% of your ideas will bomb and only 5% have a chance to survive. Realistically, only one or two percent of your attempts are truly grand and only 1% may thrive. That will be plenty for you to call yourself successful and to live happily ever after.

If you don't try anything or you think it got to be sufficient to shoot off three or even ten ideas, you are trying to found your confidence on some quick winning experiences. Confidence based on winning is deceptive and short-lived. It won't work for you, and unless you're the luckiest dumbass in your town, a dozen ideas will just sink your ship. You must produce a hundred ideas at least, and another hundred, and then some to taste continued success. You need to get excited about losing to make it somewhere, like Mister Lightbulb Edison himself.

Any idiot can win with confidence. Losing with confidence gets you places. Yes dear, be happy when you are winning AND when you are losing!

Egbert

what scares you the most?

2007-09-11T22:15:00.000-07:00

"What scares you the most? What do you run up against when you entertain the thought of creating a happier work life? What circumstance, belief or fear has caused you to settle for less than you could enjoy?" ... asks my friend Tom on his blog (http://www.delightfulwork.com/)

A legitimate question!

Who of us would actually get a job if it wasn't for the demons we'd have to face while pursuing bliss and happiness? We do what we don't want to do because we think we have to. Gullible creatures we are, we believe misery is the currency to pay rent or to make our mortgage payments with. No self-torture, no food on the table. We think S/M in bed is crazy but a sado-masochistic work life is normal.

We believe in science, we believe in higher education, and we believe in our favorite myths. The idea that suffering is the best way to make money is one of those myths. And we don't use precious cubicle time to make other people's lives easier, do we? Oh no, if we have to experience pain, so will "they". And we distribute pain with the best intentions: "no pain, no gain." Myth number two. The more I hurt you, the better it'll be for you! We even make sure our children will have plenty of pain in their lives, 'cause we desire for them to have plenty of gain, eventually. Since we wish for our children to gain more than we ever have, they will--nolens volens--also have to put up with more pain from us. They may not appreciate it now, but increasing pain in their lives prepares them for a hard reality and anyway, it's how we express our deepest love for them. Yes, we are good people.

Good God, the stinking bladder of your pooch is smarter than that! Back to Tom and his idea of promoting luscious and thrilling work. Here are some thoughts his unusual yet most important questions tickled out of me:

“Luscious and thrilling work?”

Tom, are you nuts? That's not exactly what God cursed Adam with when he kicked his sorry apple noshing ass out of paradise: “Because you listened to your wife: Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food.” --Genesis 3, 17-19

Thanks! Yeah, thank you so much! Leading a messed up work life like good ol' doormat Adam and Sisyphus is alright if you listen to your wife, to your loving husband, to cousin Clara, or to your know-it-all brother-in-law Hugo. If you don't listen to anybody but to your own gut, you do have a choice: painful toil or rather something more delightful—what's it going to be?

'Doing what I want to do' is the most scary enterprise of all because it's so utterly selfish. Where is the sacrifice in that? Exactly: sacrifice is unnecessary humbug! Unless you find it important to please people, that is. People pleasing and being happy exclude each other. Worse: while we pretend to be so ridiculously selfless, the people we're trying to suck up to don't give a rat's behind about us, about the stuff we do, or about our noble and idiotic self-deprivation.

Nobody cares about what you do. Nobody cares how much you suffer. Nobody cares if you are happy. Do you care? We are quick to perform worthless chores but it takes the utmost discipline for most of us to do what we want to do. Before we follow up on a joyful idea we clean the toilet bowl first. Insane! Trust me, dull diligence doesn't provide valuable service to your community.

“Giving back to the community” with sacrifice and harrowing labor is the idea of fools for fools. When you're actively busy doing what you really want to do, you are at your best. And when you are at your best, your family, your clientele, and your community get the best out of you. Truth is, there is hardly anything more selfless than the most selfish thing you can think of doing. Think Tiger Woods.

Last but not least, when we're limiting joy in life our income is likely to be limited also. Being insanely happy has no limits, and money based on happiness has more potential than our in-laws can stomach.

Good luck, Tom! You're doing the finest thing you can possibly do for an individual.

Egbert

what do you want?

2007-06-24T14:56:00.000-07:00

A friend asked me for advice.

Here's my—slightly altered—response. This gentleman's favorite activity happens to be watch repair. It doesn't matter. Yours will be something else, but my answer would be the same had you asked me similar questions. Throughout my material and throughout the years, I have made sure to be redundant about the fact that I cannot and will not give advice. Please DO NOT take my "answer" as advice. I am confident you will take full responsibility for all actions you take--and for the ones you won't take. In other words, what you do in the future is based on your decisions, of course, and not on my stuff.

"What do you tell a person who KNOWS what needs to be done and just won't do it?"

Nothing.

We need to figure out our individual "moving speed", and I vehemently disagree with you that you have "wasted the first 34 years of [your] life." Your first 34 years were important. Maybe not to get things done, but that won't count in the end anyway. You needed to discover what you don't want and apparently you found out what you do want: watch repair. Your last 34 years were extremely valuable, as most people NEVER find out what they want. They allow themselves to be distracted their entire lives by the garbage they don't want, like jobs for example. You are--as bleak as it may look at times--in a privileged position. You know what you want to do.

Do you, really?

I am playing the devil's advocate. So, forgive my nasty question. Here's what I mean: you are pissed off about not getting ahead with your dreams. THAT is the energy you need to utilize. You being upset or frustrated about your last 34 years is pure URGENCY for you to do what you haven't done. "Sometimes I wish I could just give up all emotions--like a Vulcan--and live my life as it is right now." Give up all emotions? No, USE them! Indeed, you are sitting on a Volcano. We all do. You want to waste the steam, the pressure, and curl up in a corner and die? Tap the immense power of YOUR Volcano and funnel it into what you want to DO. If it's watch repair, fine. If you find out it's not at all watches in a couple of weeks, that's alright also. It got to be something that can handle the unbearable pressure and urgency you will be doing things with from now on. You hear me?

URGENCY!

Your emotions aren't to be neglected nor thrown away for nothing: You must translate your emotional Volcano into the urgency you are longing for, and you will begin doing a bunch of things you haven't done yet.

"Will I become one of those old people living in poverty? These are my fears. "The fear of living in poverty may never leave you: Plenty of millionaires are scared throughout their entire lives that they may end up dying in poverty. Well, lots of people do die poor, but you better get used to the fact that some of your idiosyncrasies or quirks maybe part of you and they won't go away no matter how much money you have and make. You can't wait until the fear--any fear or emotional condition--stops before you act. Neither can you make enough money, so that fears and emotions quit bugging you.

You "chose" to pursue watch repair. Bull! Maybe that is a great idea for a hobby, but it may not be what you really want to do. You need to find out. I don't "choose" to pick my nose. I pick it!

You say, "Everything I've ever done in my life, came back to wanting to collect watches. I realized last year that if watches are my love I might as well make that my career." "Wanting" to collect watches? Did you collect watches? And if collecting watches is your love that does NOT mean repairing them will be. "... I might as well ..." Forgive me, but that is the most lame excuse for "love" or for a professional choice I have ever heard. I am not surprised you don't start or you don't get further into it. I'm surprised you didn't fall asleep while writing your e-mail to me.

DO WHAT YOU CAN'T NOT DO.

Forget love (I want to do what I love to do). Yesterday, two murder cases made the headlines on yahoo news: Guy shoots his wife and his two children, and another guy butchers his pregnant girlfriend. And don't forget the preacher's wife blasting her sleeping husband in the back with a shotgun. Most murder victims have had a loving relationship with their killer. Marriage is supposed to end with death. Well, if all goes as desired, that is. “Until death do you apart”, remember? And lots of marriages begin with love. Love, my dear friend, is not at all free of risk.

And if you really love watch repair so much that you can't help but doing it against everybody's advice and better judgment, then you may be on the right track. May that lead to doom or to success, you shouldn't care. But that is not--as I understand--your relationship with watch repair, or is it? It's lukewarm, a typical relationship, like government employment, a slob job. It's predictable, boring, and predictably bad. And in your case even more costly than profitable.

What pisses you off so, that you can't stop thinking/talking/ranting about it for hours/days/years at a time? Love is heavily overrated! “Love what you do and the money will follow,” is so 20th century and utter nonsense. Wussy and--god forbid--pussy talk. Even if you do what you “love”, you'll always have to do plenty of things you hate ... preparing income taxes, for instance. “I want to do what I love,” makes me throw up.

Anger or frustration are fabulous money makers. Give your HATRED a try. For instance, Mr. Gillette was so pissed off about his clunky shaving equipment--he traveled as a salesman--that he invented a disposable shaver. He sold all of six or eight shavers in the first year. Not encouraging, but "his Volcano", the fire in his belly, didn't allow him to stop. History proved him right, as you know. More examples? MADD (mothers against drunk driving) begun with a pissed off and terribly wounded mother. I can't stand MADD's politics. Nevertheless, it exemplifies my point of starting something powerful with uncomfortable, so-called "negative", emotions. Cindy Sheehan: same thing. I don't like her and I do NOT endorse her nor her message, but that's how it can be done. PETA (people for the ethical treatment of animals), etc., etc..

Money: MAKE MONEY. I admire your wizardry of getting by on peanuts but man, start using that brilliant head of yours and make an extra $50 this upcoming week. When you can do that every week, raise it to $100 extra weekly. If you have no idea at all, sell something on ebay.com to supplement your income, but do shake up your tired wallet. Take money for the things you do and begin doing things you can take money for. NOW! THIS WEEK! Urgently! You'll like it!

One more thing--and it's none of my business--but then it is, because these things are LINKED to each other: You need to get laid! Maybe that's a tad too personal, but trust me, our income situation and our sex life have more in common than our parents and school teachers wanted to admit. Start reading David DeAngelo's newsletter (http://doubleyourdating.com/). It's free. And no, not even if you purchase his materials will I get a commission. It's so sad, but I won't—unfortunately.

Last thing: Are you doing anything physical for and with your body? It doesn't matter what you do, but you got to do something. I cannot be happy or sufficiently productive without DAILY (six days a week at least) physical exercise. Mentally, emotionally, and physically I need to DO something--and if it's just a long walk. Your pooch needs exercise seven days a week, but we think three days a week are good enough for human beings. Say what?!

Do yoga, martial arts, Tai Chi, weight lifting, anything, or best of all, begin Matthew Furey's “Combat Conditioning” (http://mattfurey.com/). Personally, I hate Matt's sales pitch, but his material is worth its weight in gold. Buy Combat Conditioning and nothing else for now, and something amazing will happen to your emotional and mental makeup as well as to your body. You can do it in the tiniest hotel room or in the forest. Again, I don't get a commission if you buy Matt's stuff, boohoo.

Take CASH for the things you do, in fact take LOTS OF IT. If you do your stuff for free, “for the betterment of the world”, you are just another self-serving hypocrite and asshole. Hordes of fake followers may believe your humble schtick and the pope may steal your popularity by forcing you into sainthood after you are dead, but I know what a creep you probably are: People who pretend to do everything for free are creeps and dishonest. Just like everybody else, they do NOTHING for free. They get something out of it that they don't care to disclose publicly. They feel good and even better than others!

Saints have dark sides and that includes Mother F. Teresa. And your dark side maybe the most important commodity you own to develop a satisfying productivity. Taking money for your services is as INNOCENT as a baby's freshly powdered ass. Being meek and pious, not taking cash and thinking smugly, “I'm so much better than the rich who make and take money for everything,” has fascist elements that are dirtier than money ever will be.

Heal your damn self and the world by making money for yourself, hand over fist. How's that for a change?

Good luck, Egbert

P.S.: Note: I am giving you this valuable--and free--information because I am such a creep, just to make myself feel good about myself. But then, my ancestors were the nastiest genocidal fascists on earth ...

corrupt retirement

2007-05-13T17:49:00.000-07:00

Retirement is the opposite of independence. You don't enjoy your job too much? Since jobs occupy most waking hours of our day, it's relatively safe to say that people who look forward to retirement don't just despise their jobs. They hate their lives. And if you hate your life, it is no surprise that you are dreaming of and planning for your retirement to gain independence.

Independence, however, is NOT the engine driving you towards that goal, unfortunately. Your hatred is. Loathing what you do currently gives you the idea of retirement. Not only that, add a decent portion of self-loathing. Why? You may despise your job, but you hate yourself much more for being so corrupt that you can't let go of your job, because you'd lose all the benefits you have accumulated with your impressive seniority. You gave permission to be bought into corruption and out of the independence you once possessed. True independence lies in your past and naturally: you want it back. Now you're thinking about the conditions you may be able to purchase independence with, called retirement plan.

Retirement maybe a situation you desire to achieve, but it's burdened with too many ifs and whens that you can hardly call it independence. Most people's retirement doesn't look like their golden age at all, and why would it? If you insist on calling it freedom, that freedom is flawed and fraught with more conditions and limitations than you would like to experience. Retirement as an equivalent of independence is a fraud. No wonder you hate corrupt people so much. You are one of them--if questionable benefits entice you to aim for retirement instead of establishing and living your independence today and tomorrow.

No, don't quit your job! Keep it. You deserve each other and the inner turmoil that comes with it. But if it's independence you want, you better quit waiting for retirement:

Do What You Want ... and more of it, EVERY DAMNED DAY. If you “can't”, shut up and grind your teeth some more. Perhaps retirement will save you from yourself.

Egbert

modern laziness

2007-03-29T02:07:00.000-07:00

Risk is a four letter word. Risky driving is quite popular. People are yakking away at their cell phones without paying attention to anybody else's interest of simply staying alive. Today, a cop almost rammed me because he was so busy doing important work on his computer while swerving into my lane. Had he killed me, I'm sure it would have been my fault. Any idiot takes risks daily, powerful enough to cause the death of half a dozen people, but the majority of us is afraid, very afraid, to live as we please.

We risk our lives every day in traffic. We shun the risk to live a life that's worth living. No way we would risk to be happy. Benefits have corrupted our senses. We have settled for 40 years of time released suicide. As long as we can make ourselves believe that our jobs are safe, there's no problem murdering our potential for a life in mediocrity and misery. Now, that is true laziness.

Modern laziness doesn't equal couch potato. Modern laziness is an active lifestyle sheltered by an employer who does the dirty work for us. Dirty, as in being responsible for soliciting new business, negotiating prices, and making money. Employees, kept safe and innocent with wage or salary, mistake receiving a paycheck for making money. A job is the lazy person's way of “making” money. Somebody else is really making it and passing a small portion on to you. Of course, it'll never be as much as you'd like to see. Having a job is like wearing a rubber to protect ourselves from contact with real money: risk appears to be contained and naturally, your fun is limited also.

Change it! Make money yourself, for the time being PARALLEL to your current job. Take initiative and offer your service or product to other people. If you don't quit your job, it's not even such a risk—just an increase of fun and profit. Too much effort? Right. As I said: laziness.

The hardest working employee is too damn lazy to do something for herself. No wonder, employees are unhappy. Our priorities are messed up. Health and fitness? Oh my God, that comes first. Education is crucial. Good and warped parents we are, we teach our children how to hate life also, and then we pretend to be bewildered when we discover their developing drug habit. We save up money, so that our brats may go to better colleges, ending up on better jobs, hating them better than we ever did. We desire for our children to screw up their lives more comfortably, with a fatter nest egg. We want them to be neat and healthy idiots with nice husbands and good jobs. Insane.

Granted, it can be a difficult task to discover and establish a business, sufficient and stable enough to replace your job with all its benefits. I understand. Hence, my suggestion: take it easy. You don't have the perfect job. So, why trying to find the perfect business? Since you don't give up your job safety, you can enjoy the luxury of abandoning perfectionism. PLAYFULLY, try out something that catches your interest and has the potential to make an additional buck this week or next month.

If you must, sell something on eBay you want to get rid of. It's alright to supplement your income that way for awhile and it's a start, but NO, No, no: I do not want you to become a professional eBay seller, another network marketing clone, or franchisee. That would leave you as empty and drained as the regular job does.

Strengthening and expressing your individual freedom while making money is our objective here. This is not about other people's shady money making opportunities. It's about you and you alone. Your interests and your ability are key. What is your passion? What is so special about you that you can use to SHOCK the world into business with you? How much longer can you hold yourself back?

Explode onto the market. It's easier than you think.

Egbert

hard work

2007-03-28T00:40:00.000-07:00

Efficiency is more important than how hard one works. Really? As proud as so many of us appear to be about our hard work, I am not that sure anymore what counts. People love to make their money with hard work. What is the true value of hard work and where did the idea originate?

Genesis 2, 17 – 19: Adam got his sorry ass kicked out of Paradise. He was condemned to hard work for life. Why? Because he listened to his wife too much. Hard work is the ultimate punishment for those who give somebody else's opinion weight and value, while neglecting their own better judgment. Hard work is the dumbass treatment for mediocrity. Actually, mediocrity and hard work resemble the chicken and egg syndrome. No one knows for sure what came first. We do know hard work struggles to compensate for mediocrity, and the result of hard work will always be mediocre at best.

Remember high school? Your mediocre classmates were working the hardest. Your loser colleagues and the best performers didn't seem to work all that much. Being terrible in school requires nothing, and the best didn't have to work because things were falling into their laps, or so it looked. The top people were busy, perhaps, but they were also relaxed and had reserves.

Serious hard work has no room for relaxation. It's nothing to be proud of. The harder you work, the tighter you become and the closer you are inching up to the brink of failure. Success is a rare and random result of a hard-working person and by definition extremely temporary. It is simple, when you work hard you are operating near your limitations. There is not much room for improvement and expansion, and sooner or later someone will surpass you. Hard work traps you in the status quo.

Parental approval may have been the first questionable gain motivating you at a young age to buy into that cute yet futile ideology. In the adult world, no one cares for hard work. Markets don't reward it. The hardest working people in any society are the poorest and it has always been that way. Socialist societies are no exception. You work hard, you lose. You are out of breath, you can't win, you won't be happy. Not even money approves of your daily grind.

Did I say you should do nothing, instead? Not that I recall. The alternative to hard work is not some sort of catatonic state. Being active and busy is more fun than laziness. Indeed, it is impossible to do absolutely nothing, unless you are dead of course. Whether you like it or not, whether you're consciously aware of it or not matters little: you are active 24/7, even in your sleep.

Some activities feel like work, while others feel like fun. Interestingly, what's perceived to be hard work for you may be someone else's recreational enjoyment. How so? The average car mechanic whines about his hard job, but you can find an architect somewhere or a lawyer who spends every free minute under his vintage Jaguar. I know commercial airline pilots who seem to be working pretty hard, but when they come home their idea of relaxing means flying experimental aircraft. These guys may be working a lot, certainly not hard. No motivation needed to get them to work. Incentives? That type of B.S. is reserved for people who hate what they do and who beg to be dragged through life like dead rats.

What gets your juices flowing? Think Lance Armstrong. Riding a bicycle hundred miles per day, almost every single day of the year, years and years in a row, looks like an exhausting task to me. For Mr. Armstrong it meant life. What do you do when you find yourself in “the zone”? What sort of activity does not feel like work for you at all, and others are surprised how you can keep at it for so long without taking a break?

It is your work to find the work that is no work. That will make you efficient.

Screw hard work,

Egbert

matter and mind

2007-03-27T01:47:00.000-07:00

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you did not do than by the things you did.” --Mark Twain

Imagine all you want: write down your goals. Wish, hope, desire. If you don't DO something about it, nothing is going to happen. Your mind won't move the chair under your keister. You do stuff physically and things start moving. Without your body there is no mind. “Mind over matter” is an insult to anyone's intelligence.

Move it!

Granted, your mind is a brilliant tool and I don't recommend you lose it. Still, just as computer simulations can't predict reality precisely when the input is lacking a variable or two, our minds cannot foresee the future. You mind can't predict if you will enjoy pistachio ice cream if you have never tried it. You don't know the list of ingredients, and even if you did, you'd have to taste it. All theory ends here. Your taste buds like it or they don't. Basta!

Mind depends on the body, matter, all day long. You get a toothache and the reliability of your mind's output is even more questionable than usual. We are making mistakes because mind does not control matter well. Welcome and embrace your mistakes. They show you more clearly than your thoughts which way you do not want to go next.

We must do regrettable things. We need to engage in wrong activities to find what we prefer to do. “Do the right thing,” is the number one jackass theory of schoolteachers. First of all, teachers are scared out of their wits to do anything for real: that's why they chose to become teachers. It's safer to lecture others with worthless hearsay than to get your own feet wet or to collect serious dirt under your fingernails.

Nobody knows what “the right thing” actually is until you do it. Hell, Japanese kamikaze pilots of World War II staunchly believed they were doing the right thing for their immortal Tenno and to make their daddies proud. The minds of kamikazes—lots of them were extremely bright and well educated—could not figure it out in advance. Even the most brilliant dumbass has to actively do the regrettable. Matter comes first.

If we were capable of outsmarting matter, we could and would develop systems to beat the stock and futures markets. So far, we haven't come up with ANY money making system, ironclad or otherwise. The mind can't even produce a no-brainer. Long ago sports betting, horse races, and card games would have become serious income sources for the mindful masses. Alas, reality—damn matter, if you will—does not behave the way we think it should.

Agreed, I can make up my mind and visit the grocery store or found a company. But if the body doesn't make a move to get things rolling, the mind is powerless amidst its glorious ideas. Remember when you bought your last car? Did your mind decide which kind and what color? Be honest: most likely, your body moved towards The One—your mind may have made a slight adjustment—but your body steered in the general direction and you “knew” all of a sudden which one it would be. Your spouse couldn't move you, neither could your mind.

With a measurable delay, your mind was struggling to come up with the proper reasoning why you did what you did. Buyer's remorse wouldn't exist if it wasn't for the weakness of the mind compared with forceful matter. To prevent buyer's remorse and to protect ourselves from looking stupid when we have to justify our purchase decision in front of family including brother-in-law, we employ the mind to connect the dots. THEN we claim to have made a rational choice. Our mind proudly announces that the check writing movement of our hand was premeditated and explicitly ordered to be executed by body and matter.

Mind over matter? Cute! I know plenty of investors who can't follow their own exit strategy they patronize and pester others with.

Do more regrettable things. Try stuff. Keep that body moving, and you'll discover more of what you don't like and more of what it is you do want. Expecting a 19-year-old to predict whether she'll enjoy being a lawyer is insane. She'll has to find out by going in that direction. Change directions frequently. Charge forcefully further into the direction you have been going lately. But move, move, DO something, anything. Doubtlessly, you'll regret a few things you do. Myriads of ideas your mind comes up with that remain UNDONE are even more regrettable.

Don't mind your mind. Do what matters to you, move freely and expand your sphere of operation. Your mind will flex its muscles accordingly.

Egbert

inhibited love

2007-03-22T20:22:00.000-07:00

My friend Cheryl sent me the following story:

It doesn't hurt to take a hard look at yourself from time to time, and this should help get you started. During a visit to the mental asylum, a visitor asked the Director what the criterion was which defined whether or not a patient should be institutionalized.

"Well," said the Director, "we fill up a bathtub, then we offer a teaspoon, a teacup and a bucket to the patient and ask him or her to empty the bathtub."

"Oh, I understand," said the visitor. "A normal person would use the bucket because it's bigger than the spoon or the teacup."

"No." said the Director, "A normal person would pull the plug. Do you want a bed near the window?"

Sex is not unlike work: people hate it. Yeah I know, we don't hate sex per se, but talk to the gynecologist of your choice and she'll tell you how frustrated women are with their sex lives or the lack thereof. Talk to the average guy and you'll hear a similar response from the husbands of these complaining women. As frustrated as the girls are, as bored and dissatisfied are their faithful husbands. And both parties hate their jobs. No, there is no connection between love life and work life, or is there?

People don't hate their spouses and my wild guess is, we don't really hate our jobs either: what we really really hate beyond anything else are our inhibitions. As in the joke above, we spend years and decades choosing between spoons and buckets, but we're scared shitless to pull the plug. Yep, that's "normal" and equally insane in people's sex lives and at work.

So many guys are afraid to tell the missus flat out what they desire sexually. Chicks want their men to be psychics and mind readers who figure out nonverbally what is expected of them. And? ... Nothing exciting or pleasurable happens for a long time. How surprising!

Confining ourselves to fabulous cubicle careers, we don't even have the balls to tell OURSELVES what we want to do with our lives or what we once dreamed of. Instead, tolerant domesticated dumbasses that we are, we dutifully hate our jobs and we're looking forward to the upcoming weekend and to early retirement—decade after decade. Duh.

Truth is, we defend our inhibitions as religiously as we despise them.

I'll give you a choice: enjoy my condolences or pull the damned plug.

Egbert