I have been very blessed in my life and rewarded with good friends and good health. I am grateful and happy to be able to share this.
Sometimes, idealistic people are put off the whole business of networking as something tainted by flattery and the pursuit of selfish advantage. But virtue in obscurity is rewarded only in Heaven. To succeed in this world you have to be known to people.
In a world where discovery is more important than delivery, it's the people who find, remix and direct attention to old stuff that should be rewarded, not the people who deliver it or sit on it waiting for someone to show up.
Most people have an aversion to risk, my college economics professor told me. Which means they have to be rewarded to take on that risk. The higher the risk, the higher the possible payout has to be for people to jump.
Avoiding maturity is, for many men, not just a cute hobby, but a life's work - often handsomely rewarded in the infantile popular culture of the West.
Being nice to everybody, saying hello to everyone in the room, signing every autograph; it was instilled in me at a very young age that this was what I was suppose to do. But I don't think it helps at all. I see more people who are rude or arrogant being rewarded - but, this way, I can put my head on the pillow at night.
The threat posed by Bank of America isn't just financial - it's a full-blown assault on the American dream. Where's the incentive to play fair and do well, when what we see rewarded at the highest levels of society is failure, stupidity, incompetence and meanness? If this is what winning in our system looks like, who doesn't want to be a loser?
In reality, everyone is good in bed. Close eyes. Shutdown brain. Pause as necessary. Restart brain. Open eyes. What's there to not be good at? Bed is the one place where laziness is rewarded.
When things could've gone really bad, rugby caught my interest and I really stuck with it. The sport brought me, maybe off the streets where we'd be fighting, into putting in a good effort in the rugby field where you're kind of rewarded for that rough behaviour instead of in trouble with the law.
The perennial conviction that those who work hard and play by the rules will be rewarded with a more comfortable present and a stronger future for their children faces assault from just about every direction. That great enemy of democratic capitalism, economic inequality, is real and growing.