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It’s Not How You Play The Game After All
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The only really important thing is who's standing after the fight
Most 1970′s and 1980′s sitcoms were not only poorly written, they gave us Generation X kids such a skewed view of reality with their hackneyed mandatory life lessons that, as adults, we have to unlearn while we endeavor to instill our Generation Z children with solid values that actually work in today’s world.
The cliché that “it’s not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game” has been spouted more times than some of the planet’s corniest pickup lines like “How was heaven when you left it?” Of the two, the pickup line has more value. Teach your son that pickup line and he’ll have (marginally) more success than teaching him that winning isn’t important if you play the game well.
The how-you-play-the-game line has very limited shelf life. Up until a child is 6, 7, or 8, you can probably shovel that manure down his throat, as you attempt to teach him the basics of teamwork. At those early ages, as the kid joins little league, every child gets a chance at bat, and everyone gets to play the game. After age 8 or so, reality slowly sinks in. In physical education classes back in my day, the gym teacher, always a male, selected two star jocks to be team captains, and these team captains got to alternate picking their draft choices from the rest of the class to fill out their teams. The best athletes got picked at the beginning; the dorks, doofuses, and uncoordinated at the end. It was humiliating to be the poor sod picked last.
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Experiment M: Why Most Multi-Level Marketers Blow It
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My bet is that the only money you'll see from Experiment M is what's in the picture. Kindly prove me wrong.
In a down economy, there are no shortage of people and companies coming out of the woodwork to encourage us to create our own income-generating opportunities who then bill us for the encouragement. Multi-level marketing (MLM) operations have field days when economic times are uncertain. They play off peoples’ doubts about their economic futures in order to suck in a lot of new enrollees, nearly all who are doomed to fail. A British friend just called me two days ago to ask if I wanted to hear a talk about a golden wondrous MLM opportunity new to Thailand.
Now here’s the million-dollar or perhaps just $1.25 question: do most MLM people fail because the MLM deck was stacked against them from the start or because they’re just plain lazy? In MLM Companies: Where’s All The Moolah? I discussed the reasons I thought most MLMers fail in the MLM game. I won’t repeat what I’ve already written there. Suffice it to say that a lot of people wind up dropping out of their MLMs companies with bitter memories and with lighter wallets and go out of their way to call the entire MLM model a scam. Experiment M, discussed below, proposes to come up with a more exact answer why and how many people fail with the model rather than rely on failure statistics anti-MLMers pull out of their asses.
The other day I got e-mailed a letter from South Africa. Three names were on the list. I was instructed to transfer R50 (US$6) to each name, then add my name to the bottom of the list as I cycled the other names up. I was to subsequently contact at least 200 people by e-mail and get them to do the same. In a matter of weeks, I was told I’d see R3,200,000 (about $389,300) rolling in.
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MLM Companies: Where’s All The Moolah?
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It's easy to theorize how multi-level marketing can make you a mint but theorizing won't get you rich
In case you weren’t aware, multi-level marketing (MLM) doesn’t have the greatest of reputations. People refer to one of the biggest, Amway, as ScamWay. I’ve often heard MLM compared to a giant Ponzi scheme.
To set the matter straight, MLM is not a Ponzi scheme. Well, not exactly. A Ponzi scheme involves earlier investors earning “returns” generated by capital brought in by newer investors. Bernard Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme in which many well known brokerages and celebrities were duped. The capital in a Ponzi scheme is never invested in a real wealth creation project that can increase the size of the pie for all the investors. The capital is just shifted from one investor to another to create the fiction that the Ponzi fund is performing spectacularly, which then brings in fresh investments to keep the scheme going.
MLMs work by members paying a fee, usually an annual one, to join up. Membership entitles a person to buy the company’s products at a discount. The idea is that you get other people who are interested in the products to join up as well, with you as their sponsor. You then get a cut off every product they ever by. You also encourage them to get their own buddies to join the MLM and purchase products for themselves. You’ll score a cut, albeit a smaller one, off those people, too. All the people whom you continue to make money off of are called your downline. All the people who continue to make money off of you are your upline.
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Mini Biography Of An Attempted Agenda Setter
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Even though I regularly seem to be missing the final piece, I have always preferred to build my own bridge
Years ago, in 1991, I was offered an interview with Proctor & Gamble in Cincinnati. I also vaguely recall being asked to come to interview for a management consulting position in New York (or was it Boston???). I can’t say how serious the management consulting company was about me because what stands out in my mind years later, more than the name of the company, was that I’d have to pay my own way to the interview.
Had I actually been granted and taken one of those two jobs instead of opting to go to Stockholm, Sweden for an engineering position I knew would be boring in a small upstart company, how different my life would have turned out. Do I think it would’ve been for the better?
My Swedish position offered me an annualized pre-tax salary of $36,000 ($56,000-60,000 in 2009 dollars). I was never given an official offer at Proctor & Gamble or the consultancy operation to know what I would’ve been paid there. As taxes and the cost of living in Sweden are quite high, even if the American jobs paid $5,000-10,000 lower, the take-home pay would’ve been about the same. This is all beside the point. I don’t remember dismissing the American job offers out-of-hand due to the expected salary or accepting the Swedish job because of it.
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Ten Different Children With Five Different Girls
Posted by: | CommentsGame for a trip to scenic Carmel, California
To meet ten different children with five different girls?
Their daddy’s a suave hot shot Hollywood performer
Who’s got ten different children with five different girls
He wasn’t born a Catholic, but man, he sure could fool ya
With his ten different children with five different girls
Five different girls
He’ll pop a teen dreaming and he’ll pop a senior ailing
Mr. Ten Different Children With Five Different Girls
His last mistress I hear she’s an Australian
He has ten different children with five different girls
Once she bore his child, there were fresh chicks he was nailing
To surpass ten different children with five different girls
Five different girls
He winks
And his female fan club swoons
They’re sure from his gaze he understands
Is he deep or does he just have deep pockets
To pay them off to keep them off his back?
He’s kind to his friend’s kids, he’s the godfather they desire
Ten different children with five different girls
Go read his recent bio, a good share of them he sired
Ten different children with five different girls
Maybe he’ll break a hundred by the time that he retires
There’re ten different children with five different girls
Five different girls
He moves
And his female fan club swoons
They’re sure from his touch he understands
Is he deep or does he just have deep pockets
To pay them off to keep them off his back?
Today, he’s a wizened man who wonders where the years went
He’s got ten different children with five different girls
He married a woman half his age after he got her pregnant
He’s got ten different children with five different girls
She believes he’s reformed, but come on, how stupid can a girl get
When he has ten different children with five different girls
Five different girls
Dated 7 January 2010. Click here to see a list of complete video and audio content on the Republic. Click here to read the Clint Eastwood article in which this song was mentioned.
The Opinion Addiction
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Multiple opinions are often worth the same as a 100% share in nothing
There’s an old joke I used to hear as a kid that went something like this. Put three Jews in a room and you’ll wind up with four opinions. Today, that joke sounds a tad anti-semitic and dated. The three people in the room don’t have to be Jews and would now lead to fourteen opinions.
Human beings are creatures of opinion. We love to give them and we love to receive them, with the hidden proviso that the opinion be what we want to hear. How else to explain people’s addictions to visiting psychics? We pay the psychic money so that the psychic can, ideally, tell us exactly what we want to be told. If it were the norm to be told we had a year to live, we were going to get fired, our spouse was cheating on us, I doubt people would be in a rush to hear about their futures.
Back when I lived in California and was reading lots of screenplay books and attending screenplay seminars, I remember one pundit’s advice. He said that after you finished your screenplay, you should give it to ten people you trusted and get their opinions. If the same suggestions kept coming up, then there was probably something to them. And when three of the ten thought your screenplay well polished, only then were you ready to submit to the professionals. This guru must’ve changed his mind about that in the intervening decade. I now see up on his own web site that you can submit your screenplay directly to him, and he’ll evaluate it – for USD 2,500. Maybe he is onto something. Depending on the subject opined upon, one opinion by a true expert is easily worth more than the opinions of ten laymen. I still don’t think it’s worth USD 2,500 for this guy’s opinion, but I’ll delve into that issue a little bit later.
There’s a difference between obtaining market research and getting opinions that count. When gathering market research about a new product or service, it can pay to speak to plenty of potential customers in the target market in order to find out what features might be desired, omitted, or improved. But this consensus opinion approach doesn’t always work. It’s become common in the last decade and a half for movie producers to conduct screenings of their films before release to see how audiences will react. Some films are shot with multiple endings, and the ending which gets the best response in focus groups is the one used in the finalprint. But the ending people think they want isn’t always the most appropriate ending for the story or best for the film as a whole. Had J. K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, conducted market research in advance in order to decide what events to include in the later novels, I think we’d all agree that the final product would’ve been inferior.
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X Marks The Spot For Generation Z
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Typical Generation Z'er member pursuing advanced studies on a plasma television set
It must be the hallmark of any earlier generation to promulgate to today’s generation the way things used to be and why they were so grand. We’ve all heard from parents or grandparents, “When I was your age, people used to have to do A or B,” implying that doing A or B back then was somehow better for your character. I used to tune most of the stuff out. As a teenager, I asked how could my parents, members of the Silent Generation born between 1925 and 1945, understand what it was like growing up as a Generation X’er, born between 1961 and 1981?
Probably less than I assumed they did. My parents were toddlers during the Great Depression and up until the end of the Second World War. They missed these major history markers in memory, but through their own parents who remembered these incidents very well, their generation’s thinking was shaped. By the time my parents were in their late teenage years in the mid 1950’s, the USA was experiencing a level of relative prosperity compared with the rest of the world it will never experience again. The USA had an industry, an economy, and job prospects no other place on the planet could match. There was one enemy, the Soviet Union, but it was far away and not an omniscient threat.
One paid a price growing up in this time period though. Buying into this prosperity meant buying into the system hook, line, and sinker, great if you were already the unquestioning type. The Silent Generation was silent, all right. They kept their mouths shut. They married right out of college to a partner who was probably more a reproductive mate than a soul mate, had kids almost immediately, and set about finding the safest job they could that would insure a long and prosperous career. Most women didn’t and weren’t required to work. There was little room for alternative lifestyles, doubting of authority, or breaking any molds.
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The Right Time To Jump Ship
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Inspired or suicidal depends on when you jump
Standing on the viewing platform of a cruise liner, gazing out at the seagulls, azure blue skies, and snowy white clouds, you’d have to be seriously mental to consider jumping ship. Where you land could be shark infested waters. You might think differently about jumping if the ship had just been hit by a torpedo and was sinking faster than your chances of getting into a lifeboat.
In life, jumping ship refers to abandoning a job or activity rather suddenly, usually when an opportunity perceived to be much better comes along. There’s also this idea that the jumper is leaving a position of some importance or responsibility from which there is no turning back. A cashier at McDonald’s quitting without prior warning would not be seen by any as jumping ship. The person is not indispensible, and the quitter could almost certainly get rehired in a similar position at a similar salary elsewhere with very little difficulty.
In my grandparents’ generation, jumping ship wasn’t commonly done. One graduated college, got a job at a company, and stayed there for most or all of his career. This salaryman-type of employment is still common in East Asia, though not as common as it once was in a world of corporate downsizing and outsourcing. Today’s young job seekers have no expectations of staying with one company for the length of their careers. It’s not even an option for most. Jumping ship is expected for one to advance. Moves can be made laterally, via a competitor’s business, to better position oneself later for a vertical move. Career experts advocate that you should be planning your next ship jump the day you start your new job.
But when to make the jump? In the real world, it’s rare that your ship will be sinking so rapidly that you’ll receive ample forewarning when to stage your move. You have to jump before the downsides fully show themselves. However, if you jump too early, you’ll be stranded in the water and possibly drown in the Sea of Desperation. And if you jump too late, you go down with the sinking ship and drown in a lack of future career prospects.
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Would You Rather Be A Has Been Or A Never Been?
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Has beens don’t have it so bad unless they get obsessive about what they used to have
In the wake of the brand new remake of The Karate Kid, twenty-six years after I first saw the original on movie screens, I rewatched it with my girlfriend and her son. Though I’m sure this was not the intent of the filmmakers at the time, the film captures the very different feeling and atmosphere of the mid 1980’s. It also captures something else: a teen-aged-looking Ralph Macchio, aged 22 at the time, at the peak of his acting career. Macchio went on to star in a few Karate Kid sequels and a few other pics in the mid 1980′s. His last big screen part was in 1992’s My Cousin Vinny in a supporting role. By most conventional assessments, Macchio, now pushing 50, is considered washed up.
We can cite countless other examples. Think of Gary Coleman, mega-star of the late 1970’s and early 1980’s in Diff’rent Strokes, whose career languished in the toilet thereafter. Danny Bonaduce’s most popular acting gig was playing Danny Partridge in The Partridge Family between 1970 and 1974. Nancy Sinatra, the Chairman of the Board’s daughter, had a singing and acting career in the 1960’s. That career was over by the mid 1970’s. In 1995, she posed nude in Playboy as one means to get attention to promote her ‘comeback’ album.
In some way, I think we, the average Joes of society, get some perverted pleasure seeing people once on the top of the world now running up to us like lapdogs trying to get back into our good graces. It makes us feel justified with the average heights our own lives have probably risen to. How else can you explain the success of a show like The Surreal Life, which brings together celebrities past their prime living together in a Los Angeles mansion?
It’s interesting that we don’t usually apply the term “washed up” or “has been” to those in other fields whose greatest achievements are behind them. In business: Sabeer Bahtia co-founded Hotmail and sold it to Microsoft for $400m at the end of 1997. Jared Polis made over $100m when his Blue Mountain Arts was sold to Excite@home in 1999. Although Bhatia has gone onto other business projects and Polis has become the first openly gay man elected to the House of Representatives as a freshman, neither has since scored as lucrative a financial payout as their successes more than a decade ago. Yet neither would ever be described as a has been.
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Is Being Your Own Boss For Everyone?
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It's great being your own boss if you never have to work
There’s not one among us who hasn’t been exposed to the image of the overworked, stressed out executive unappreciated by his bosses, given an endless amount of tasks for which he earns too little praise. Perhaps you’ve been or are that very executive, eager to raise your middle finger in your superior’s direction so as to advise the boss to stick it where the sun don’t shine.
Gurus, work-at-home schemes (or scams), and multi-level marketing operations thrive on this imagery. Why spend hours commuting and working for someone else when you can be the top dog working for yourself? You will be endlessly urged to become your own boss and earn what you ‘deserve.’ Seminar legends promise to instruct you, for a hefty fee, how to become an ‘expert’ and position yourself so you can charge thousands of dollars per hour working when you want, with the implication that this will be as little as you want. Not long ago a bestseller came out with the assurance to teach you the magic formula to have a single-digit work week and live a life of leisure.
It’s really critical in situations like these to separate the sizzle from the steak. What the consultants and seminar stars and self-help coaches dangle before you is achievable . . . for some. It’s just not achievable for all and doesn’t come with hours per week of effort.
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