fag…
This didn’t work so well for King Lear. Just sayin’.
Stranger
Sage Rat– my Father sold dental equipment & supplies for 30 years, & was once Vice-President of Sales in the largest dental supply company in America, & he never took that approach. He always emphasised that you need to take good care of your customers.
Sure, you can pull that garbage, & make money. For 6 months or a year. But then, word gets around, & you lose customers. And it is the long-term, regular, repeat customer that is your bread & butter.
But in order to be the kind of salesman (and I gave several non-sales examples) who knowingly lies to people, you have to be an asshole in the sense of disregarding the welfare of others for your personal gain. That is obviously the kind of asshole being discussed by the OP. Such an asshole may also be a nice person to friends and family, but is just willing to fleece strangers.
Okay, but the OP was asking about teaching your kid to be an asshole to be a success. With all due respect to anyone doing the job, I wouldn’t call working retail being a big time professional success. All you need’s a high school education and a functioning set of limbs.
… Aaaand you’re already admitting the profession has some decent people and some bad, like any other.
It quite certainly is not. The OP was talking about raising a child to be a full-on asshole, not someone who’s only a liar to customers. The OP’s list of suggested traits reads like the clinical definition of a psychopath. That does not get turned on and off.
Admitting? I think you misunderstood my point. I wasn’t arguing that lawyers are assholes. I was arguing that asshole lawyers often make more money than non-asshole lawyers, in certain legal fields.
Well, there’s no real need to try to parse the OP’s meaning. He’s perfectly capable of telling us whether he was talking about the kind of asshole who is willing to harm strangers to make money, or whether he was talking about the psychopath you describe who cannot turn off the assholishness when he’s around friends.
I teach my young children to always appear polite, courteous and altruistic—it’s a great diversionary tactic for maximizing our yield in the family pick-pocketing ring.
When I was in college, I worked retail to help pay my way through. I worked in a Radio Shack.
I got in trouble several times when the boss overheard me telling a customer to go to a different certain store, because the product they sold met his needs the best. But you know what? I wound up having the best sales stats of anyone in the store. Because customers trusted me. I was nice to them, and helpful, and they knew I wouldn’t snow them to make a sale. So the guy I’d send somewhere else to buy a cable or a headset would come back and buy a computer or a stereo from me.
This is a little-appreciated fact of sales. The assholes live in your memory, but it’s the nice guys who eventually make all the money. If you buy a car from a hustler who manages to fleece you for the undercoating and trick you into a bad deal, you know you’ll never go back to him again. But if you buy a car from someone who doesn’t pressure you, who doesn’t lose patience after you request yet another test drive in another vehicle, who goes out of his way to make sure you understand the costs and goes the extra mile in making the experience better, you’ll go back to him again, and again, and again.
And on the flipside, we’ve walked away from more than one car sale for no reason other than that the salesman was a jerk.
The value of niceness is especially true in Real Estate. Real Estate people become successful when they build up networks of people who always choose them. Our last realtor was one of the nicest guys I’ve met. We spent a LONG time looking at different houses, and he never complained once. He was always on the lookout for the kind of house we said we wanted, and he did tons of legwork. When we finally chose a house, he cut his fee in half to get the price to the point we were comfortable with. He also arranged a lawyer and mortgage broker for us, both of whom did a bang-up job and wound up saving us money.
After we bought the house, we recommended him to everyone who was remotely interested in buying their own home. One of our friends did hire him, and did buy his home through him. And he told us he had the same experience, and was now recommending that realtor to his own friends.
That’s how you become rich in Real Estate sales.
Think about the contractors you’ve hired or other professionals you’ve done business with. Now think about the ones you’d give repeat business to, or recommend to your friends. Were any of them assholes?
Being a jerk is a very self-limiting way to go. The only people who can pull off success while being jerks are people who are so talented in other ways that they are given a pass on their behavior. But it still doesn’t help them - they succeed in spite of it, not because of it.
No. Children should not be taught such antisocial and anti-American values. This generation of Americans is thought to be the New Greatest Generation who will acheieve Civic glory like our grandfathers did at D-Day and Iwo Jima. They had the virtues exactly opposed to what’s being suggested here and they acheived glory.
Sometimes it’s self-limiting, sometimes it isn’t. Best Buy hasn’t changed their sales training, and the most lucrative debt collection firms continue to be the ones who ignore due process.
My position isn’t that jerkishness is always the most lucrative option. My position is that it is sometimes the more lucrative option, and assholes are able to take advantage of those situations. I don’t have a strong opinion on which scenario is more prevalent, and I don’t really know how anyone could.
If your argument is that the asshole is incapable of capitalizing on the situations in which niceness it at a premium, then I take your point. This too goes to what we mean by asshole, I suppose. I understand the classic Machiavellian asshole to be capable of being nice, but perfectly capable of and happy with being mean.
And sometimes drunk drivers don’t get themselves killed; that doesn’t make drunk driving the best bet for driving safety.
Let’s again go to a plain text reading of the OP, which was whether it was ethical to teach your kid to be an asshole. You can’t predict when they’re kids precisely what job they’ll be in, so you have to play the odds. The odds are heavily stacked AGAINST assholes. There are very few jobs where being an asshole is beneficial. There are only so many openings for confidence men, politicians, and assassins.
Not only that, but consider all the other things that go into having a successful life - having good friends, finding a decent spouse and staying married, having kids that don’t make your life a living hell… All of these things are much less likely to happen to assholes. There are a lot of hard-charging win-at-any-cost people out there who may have financial success at their jobs but are broke because of their alimony payments or because they couldn’t stay in a stable relationship long enough to build any kind of long-term assets.
Again, you’re conflating two varieties of assholes - you can be an hilariously over the top Machiavellian jack-off, and still have a happy life, friends, wives, kids. All you need is skill at rationalization and compartmenting your life, which pretty much everyone does to some degree.
When he wasn’t ordering people to kneecap other people with lead pipes or pushing mayors down stairs, Al Capone was a wholesome fellow - charming, friendly, gave quite a lot of his ill gotten gains to charity, did some good in the community. His wise guys liked him as much as they feared him, he had a wife he loved very much, and a son.
According to crime library :
To some extent, everyone operates on an in-group/out-group, us vs. them mentality. Assholes have a much tighter “us” than the rest of the world, but they do have an “us”. Just as saints have practically no “them”.
Some of these traits can be positive, or even essential.
You have to leverage your opportunities.
You are playing a game after all, shouldn’t you strive to win?
OK, this one I can’t find a positive spin for
Human nature being what it is, this is essential. You might say charm is the ability to please other people and make them feel important, without diminishing yourself to insignificance in the process.
Inspiring and motivating others to work towards a useful objective. The natural ability to lead and inspire confidence.
Can’t do anything with this one either. I studied Machiavelli my first term in college, can you tell?
Can’t really put these in a positive light either, except to say one shouldn’t avoid or defer blame, but it does help to be able to accept it in the most diplomatic way possible. Deferring responsibility to others is delegation by any other name.
I intend on raising my future children to care about other people and not cause them pain, to be polite and to take personal responsibility. While at the same time maintaining a realistic view of the world - it’s a hard place where many people will deliberately sabatoge you, and you should maintain a healthy skepticism of other people’s motives and of authority. Also, sex is natural and great, although you must be mindful of your partners mental health, and drugs and alcohol can be risky but are there to be enjoyed - with caution.
This is how I live my life and most people say I am ‘nice’ as opposed to being a douchebag. I have problems with people liking me more than I prefer and having to fend off potential friends. However I seem to get take advantage of far less than then average bear.
Unfortunately people who have the second list of traits you added often do not get ahead in life - it’s not easy to dominate and manipulate all the people you come across unless you’re naturally smart, aggressive, manipulative, and charming - traits which are more innate than learned IMO. Most people I know like this have alienated themselves from everyone who might have cared about them and make their meager living by scamming other people.
Arrrgh!!!
/Head-desk
Machiavelli wrote many books, his two best being The Prince, and the Discourses.
The Prince teaches you to be a great despot, The Discourses teaches how to rule a republic.
Machiavelli dedicated the Prince to a man who had him tortured, and actually favoured the government shown in the Discourses.
But, because the Prince is smaller, more people have read it, giving Machiavelli his bad name.
Machiavelli. Was. Not. Evil.
With that in mind, I’m nice to other people around me because they usually respond back in kind. It’s a win win situation.
I remember reading on here awhile back about mother Teresa and some people were slamming her for many various reasons, like she is only doing it for her own benefit, like to get brownie points to get to heaven etc.
I don’t follow the christian religion, but, if I was starving and had my mother Teresa on my left and a Wall Street Banker on my right, mother Teresa would toss me something to eat, it would benefit her and benefit me.
If the wall street banker could find a way to make a profit off me, to the detriment of my well being, he would do it.
Therein lies the crux.
Everyones action’s is self serving in that sense, but our your actions to the detriment of others, or to the benefit of others and yourself?
Uh, no. You don’t get the criticism of Mother Theresa at all. It’s more like this:
If you were starving, the banker would offer to loan you money for a meal, and expect you to pay it back.
Mother Theresa would tell you that starvation is God’s plan for you, and she would pray for you and tell you that you’ll soon be in the arms of the Lord while you starve to death.
I’ll take my chances with the banker.
I didn’t say he was Evil. I felt those books would be good reading because they would teach my Evil Offspring lessons on politics and strategy and to avoid thinking in traditional terms of “morality”.
Are you working off a prophecy or something? Where did this idea come from? And are you talking about Generation X/Y (the current adults) or are you talking about your own generation (the Millennials)?