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“He only earns his freedom and his life who takes them every day by storm.” --Johann W. von Goethe |
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Damned fools we are, all of us. Rich or poor, we are inconsistent and so funny in the handling our wallets. |
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Your happiness and your money require your boundless and playful freedom to make mistakes: are you willing to screw up? Will you mess up good and often? Can you do regrettable things and decide not to regret them? You are entirely responsible for your adventure and for the outcome. More so, you must be able to laugh about issues that drive others to suicide. How much fun can you take? |
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Hope lies between you and your happiness. How can you be happy today if you are waiting for better times anxiously? Peddling hope can produce shit loads of money as you have witnessed and experienced unfortunately (ever been a member of a church or part of a network marketing religion?), but it is always a win-lose type of transaction. Being a sucker for hope is costly and it deprives you of your happiness, while your freedom remains uncultivated. The best thing you can do with hope is giving it up for good. |
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Abandon self-improvement. If there wasn't the Monday Morning After, motivational and self-improvement seminars could be such a meaningful way to spend your weekends and your money. And how has that been working for you? What more is it than plain addictive behavior on a deeper and more sophisticated level? Agreed, our silly attempts to improve ourselves do have entertainment value--as some sort of spiritual masturbation. Beyond that, all offers of self-improvement products imply that you're not good enough. Self-improvement is detrimental to your self-esteem. It destroys confidence and intuition, the most important traits you need to enjoy yourself and ultimately to make money. |
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Get rich quick! Come again? Making plenty of money can be fun and if I can contribute to your drastically or gradually increased income, I shall be grateful. However, neither I nor anybody else can promise that it'll happen to you soon or ever: There is NO "ironclad system for people like you"! In fact, there aren't even other people like you, because you are an individual with all the benefits and disadvantages that come with it. At any rate, you can have a grand time with or without accumulating assets. The discussions of "rich" and "poor", the differences, and how to make it from poor to rich are absurd and construed. Only bloody idiots try to get rich. Being rich won’t buy you anything, having cash in your pockets will. I suggest for you to stick with simply making money. There is nothing wrong with money and: the--legally and ethically sound--ways of monetary acquisition are practically unlimited. |
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Freedom is free. Duh! Happiness is easier to obtain than you think. And you got some money already. I won't teach you new tricks, I refuse to give you advice, and you don't have to learn anything. You are indeed good enough as you are today. What, then, is my mission? What's the purpose of my stuff? I'm not on a mission from god. There is no absolute truth to anything and I am not conceited enough to believe in any purpose. If my writing makes you laugh, great! If I can instigate you to explore your freedom and if you feel inspired to make regrettable mistakes, what more could I ask for? |
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Disclaimer: Note, that everything you are going to read and digest here is NO investment or professional advice whatsoever! My ideas have entertainment value at best and before you put any of them to use, do yourself a favor and see your damned physician! In a nutshell, this is what you can expect: No Promise |
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"Reason Foundation's tolerance, civility, and consistency in defending individual liberty make it a haven for believers in a free society of all shades of opinion". --Milton Friedman, Nobel Laureate in Economics "Reason," writes The Columbus Dispatch, "manages to offend leftists with its defense of biotechnology, free trade and school choice, even as it appalls conservatives by supporting gay marriage, open immigration and drug legalization." |
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“I never have time to think about the real Andy Warhol, I’m just so busy ... not working, but busy playing, because work is play when it’s something you like.” --Andy Warhol |
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 Click to join moneybymistake |
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“So glad to hear from you - your newsletter was great as usual. I think of the Mary Poppins song, "I Love to Laugh" - just insert "I love to hate," and it's hilariously true. |
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Money has less in common with money than you may be inclined to think. In fact: everything else is more connected to money than money itself. Weird? No need to panic: just get your mind off your dough for a minute or two. Profound, eloquent, and hilarious: Ajaban will "guide you through the Apocalypse for fun and profit!™" |
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"I'm dumbfounded, awestruck, perplexed, befuddled. I'm a miserable bastard going through a divorce and unemployed, who at 35 doesn't know what to do for peace of mind or soul. I'm not looking for you to solve my problems - I just find your writings fascinating." --B.T. |
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"Did you know that you belong in the loony bin, you screwball? No one can help you anymore, you idiotic imbecile." |
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"You are a menace to society." --S.B.K., AZ |
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"I'm listening to your tape on my piece-of-shit clock radio tape player. I love it because it runs slow and you sound like SATAN and Arnold Schwarzenegger all in one. I wanted to thank you because just reminding me to embrace my failures allowed me to drive through the city of Hollywood without being depressed by the concrete environment. I previously thought only when I "had it made" could I ever feel that way about that." |
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“You have unconventional wisdom that's unique to you. I'm not sure what the mainstream would think of what you have to say. I've noted when I talk to people along the lines that you lay out, they tend to get turned off or even a little pissed off. I think the reason for this is it tends to go against everything they have been taught and believed all their lives. Well, I'm going to go back and read some more of your rants as I find them quit refreshing.” --K.B. |
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"To me the ideas as published on your site are new and refreshing. I have done a lot of the other motivational stuff such as goal setting etc., and it is time to break out of that and get a life! Your approach seems much more natural and I would like to learn more about it." |
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"I have not laughed as much as I have reading the information on rumpelstilz.com. Laughing is something I have needed to do right now because I have been taking life all a bit to seriously over the last couple of months. I have been able to laugh at myself and the mistakes I have made with money as I read through your website. You know what? The sun will rise tomorrow whether I have money or not and it is up to me to choose the attitude of how I will greet the day and others around me." --M.P., Australia |
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"When economists reach agreement on the theory of capital, they will shortly reach agreement on everything else. Happily, for those who enjoy a diversity of views and beliefs, there is very little danger of this outcome. |
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“Oh, Egbert, you are so funny! I'm in stitches everytime I read your newsletter. To take an unvarnished truth and make it funny is one thing, but you are completely off the charts in driving home a point with such alacrity and humor! You hit the bull's eye and drive the arrow clean through the wall!” --L.C. |
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"You've got to follow your passion. You've got to figure out what it is you love — who you really are. And have the courage to do that. I believe that the only courage anybody ever needs is the courage to follow your own dreams." --Oprah |
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“I totally appreciate your reminders and insights. I need the wake-up call. It's comforting. I do print them out from time to time and read them out to my mother, and she loves it too. It lets us know it's ok to be more ... human. God bless U.” --P. |
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“You've got to find what you love. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on.” --Steve Jobs Stay Hungry. |
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Measly $25 can increase quality of life, yours and theirs: kiva.org. |
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“Thank you Egbert, your articles delight me tremendously!” --Christine |
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”Oh, by the way ... I really enjoyed your newsletter on 'will power'. It opened my eyes on how habits come about. I'll drink to that! You've been the highlight of my day.” --B.A. |
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"Wow, your site has an attitude. Every god damn site I go to is so politically correct, other than porn sites. You say it like it is. Thanks." --C. |
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Employees hate their jobs almost by definition. Gallup research finds 74% of employees are either 'not engaged' in what they are doing or 'actively disengaged'. According to Forbes Magazine, 87% of Americans don’t like their jobs. You are self-employed, an entrepreneur? Oh my, you must love every minute of your work! Right? I doubt it: There are areas of your work you hate, or do you not? Nobody loves everything she’s doing. Don’t lie to me! Face it: you are beyond help and certainly beyond self-help. So, you bought “The Secret?” Good for you ... you dork! The universe is anxiously waiting for you to change negative language into positive expectations? Cute--and endearing! There is no job faery showing up soon, fixing your messed up relationship with your work. Life is messy and so is our work life. Yet there is lots of fun to be had “hating” what we do: Egbert Sukop’s new book “How to Better Hate Your Job: hating what we do is what we love the most” is crazy indeed--crazy, wild, and funny. Is it MLM? Good God, NO! Motivational claptrap? The opposite perhaps. Goodness, you have never read anything like it. Be warned: this book is not politically correct. What the hell are you waiting for? Get your own copy--Paperback hard copy or eBook download--and tell your friends, enemies, and your hunchbacked relatives all about it. For now, it’s an “Advanced Reader’s Copy” you’ll receive. In other words, some bugs still need to be eliminated and few things may have to be slightly changed before the final version will be published. But once that has happened the price will go up, baby! I promise. Get your copy now! It’s important to do at least one regrettable thing every damn day ...
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Money by Mistake Don’t learn from your mistakes. Repeat them. |
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“excellence and performance” book excerpt no. 2 from How to Better Hate Your Job
"Over-seriousness is a warning sign for mediocrity and bureaucratic
Dear Friend, Excellence is not a means to an end. If you don't strive to be excellent at what you do for the pure enjoyment of it, you are still Mama's boy. Excellence is its own reward. When doing anything it is simply more fun to do it well. It is harder, more difficult, to bungle along. Flying a plane poorly with the constant fear of crashing is more stressful than flying the damn thing right and with ease. Windsurfing well doesn't wear you out as much as constantly getting thrown off the board and climbing back on. Excellence is pleasing to the eye of bystanders and smoother to live through for the acting person. Being paid or not for what you do is not as important as it is to be fabulous for its own sake instead of being a greenhorn. Getting paid for an excellent job is great--don't try so hard to misunderstand me--but you got to be a moron to be excellent in order to get paid. Besides, in the market there is no measurable correlation between excellence and pay. More money is being exchanged for mediocrity than for excellence, with Microsoft exemplifying the rule and Toyota an excellent exception. Performance is a yard stick for people's monetary compensation? Dream on. Do you know somebody who doesn't perform as well as you do and yet he gets paid better? Do you know anybody who is so much better than you are and she gets paid less? So there you have it: as of this minute, it is scientifically proven people are not paid according to their performance level. Payment in correlation to performance is a myth. Companies push performance as an incentive to get the best out of their working units, their employees, without the obligation to pay a penny more. At a conveyor belt performance can be measured somewhat. In a cubicle, the stuff done by the obsolete caste of middle management is difficult to quantify. In higher executive regions you will find folks who get paid royally for gargantuan screwups and, believe it or not, some people get paid handsomely for not doing anything at all. If they lifted as much as their pinky or opened their mouth, they would forfeit their lavish "compensation." No person on Earth gets paid according to her performance. Don't kid yourself. Sometimes it just looks that way. Crap manufacturers like Microsoft and Starbucks, network marketing schemes and scams, and everybody in between try to dupe their job hating employees into the concept of excellence as a corporate value by promising all sorts of things. Yep, even a company relying on a crappy product still demands at least a hint of excellence somewhere. Real excellence doesn't have to make it into the hand of the customer, God forbid, nor does it have to show up in the pocket of the shareholder, but the perception of excellence must be evoked before it gets explained away. Excellence has its place, I agree. That does not mean the most excellent performers are making the most money, but a scent of excellence serves any operation as a welcome fig leaf. Perceived excellence is key. VWs and Audis have been garbage for decades, but their perceived value as products of fine German craftsmanship gives them the air of something worth paying for. Arrogance and obnoxious German management is no substitute for true excellence, however. Hey, I am obnoxious and German enough to say that. Excellence is not a necessity to make money. As in Microsoft's case, an excellent product may even be in your way and reduce your profits. Partially, Microsoft's success depends on selling an inferior product. Its flaws make you eager to spend money on the newer, better upgrade coming on the market soon. The advanced replacement, of course, will be delivered with a brand new set of flaws built in to it, installing the need in each customer for future You can overdue it, as we have witnessed with Vista, but that strategy has worked quite successfully for a long time. Combined with techniques to almost force your clientele into your newest deception, you can strike the mother lode indeed. Implementation of that business model, however, must be executed flawlessly and with the highest level of excellence you can employ. When excellence is not an option or too much of a bother, addictive products and services may work in your favor as well. The wireless world has managed to sell you air by the minute. Read customer feedback on any cellphone or PDA, and you know they all are far from being excellent. MP3 players and similar scrap work so well as cash cows because of their addictive nature. You don't want to tell me that several billion dollars of annual sales in the ringtone industry are based on excellence, do you? Employees survive in spite of the companies they work for, and employers survive in spite of their employees. Let's face it, people who hate what they do aren't at their best. Despise what you do and you will be a poor performer. Companies don't need or want creme de la creme employees to produce their mediocre gizmos. Mediocre ones will do. A company's obsession to look out for top people stems from their experience that the best job haters are mediocre performers, while the mediocre candidate is likely to hate her performance into the nether regions of unacceptable. Companies aren't proud of their people. They just put up with their units. Showing up is usually sufficient to get paid. Displaying a flicker of excellence now and then won't win you a lot of friends amongst your colleagues--especially not if they happen to be union members--but it may get you noticed for future promotions, besides excellent scheming and Too much excellence, continued outstanding performance, possibly combined with confidence that you are better qualified than your superiors, can get you fired rather quickly. Excellence is a double edged sword and not without danger. Employees, truly excelling at what they do, are oxymorons. If you are near perfect, incomparably magnificent, why the hell are you still a damned employee? You are excellent OR you are employed but you can't be both. Sweet severance packages of a garden variety of executive losers in recent years--Carly Fiorina (Hewlett Packard - $42 million), Robert Nardelli (Home Depot - $210 million), Jill Barad (Mattel - $40 million plus), Stan O'Neal (Merrill Lynch - $161.5 million)--made me realize that financial success of a CEO depends on the ability to find an equilibrium between excellence and bungledom. You got to excel in messing up. Plain excellent performance won't do. These clowns with their platinum asskick into early retirement were already awful when they were interviewed for their jobs, and I bet my family jewels some esteemed members of the hiring squad were keenly aware of these people's shortcomings and possible consequences. Take Krispy Kreme's former Chairman, Scott Livengood. I am convinced he intentionally destroyed a fine company. Pick anybody in your neighborhood high school parking lot, choose the first guy you find sleeping under a bridge, and they could not have done worse. Troubling to me is that somebody responsible for hiring such douchebags may have sensed the outcome in advance and secretly hoped for it (guess somewhere inside me hides a conspiracy nut). Being awful at what you do can make you so much more money than simply hating your job. Becoming the worst CEO of the year is better than a lottery jackpot. It's pure gold. I wonder if any execustiff is still wasting a thought on trying to be good. And imagine a regular Home Despot employee being told by his half-wit supervisor that excellent performance counts. Not if you plan to get Excellence is unlikely to lift you into exalted positions, and if you're lucky to make it there anyway, your excellence may very well be your downfall. Excellence can be as much a hindrance to a high flying career as it is to be a bum. You, as a customer, however, are indeed required to provide excellence to companies you consider doing business with. Your paperwork needs to be in perfect order, and your payments must not be late, or else. But when was the last time you experienced excellent performance at a car dealership? Can you name an excellent insurance company? Another oxymoron. Excellent monopolies? Monopolies don't have customers: they have subjects like governments. And you, the subject, ought to deliver excellence! Some strange companies seem to prefer to treat their customers like governments treat their subjects. Condescending, deceiving, like dirt. "We are here to help you!" I am sorry, I don't mean to generalize. Not all corporations operate that way, but those with monopoly status sure do. Not all governments are rude and lacking manners either but, since my knowledge is extremely limited, please do inform me of good examples. Demanding excellence, perfectionism even, from your customers is the ultimate demonstration of confidence. And confidence, in turn, creates the perception of excellence in your target audience--unless they know better, that is. Lack of confidence has to be compensated with real excellence. Hence the requirement for new companies and for insecure employees to show some excellence. However, excellence is not what gets you paid so much. Your insecurities determine that you get paid so little. Markets don't favor products or services based on their quality. Quality helps but it's not always necessary. Any beer soaked family daddy can produce better burgers than McDonalds, but that's not the real argument here. The behavior of markets depends on you and me voting with our pocket books. We the people are quite erratic and nearly unpredictable. That's why products need testing. That's why even a superior and temporarily successful product won't make money indefinitely. Excellent stuff sells sometimes but not always. We the market are a fickle bunch, and excellence, quality, or high levels of performance are not the formula to ongoing success. Simply because there is no formula--no system--to figure out the market. No truth to be discovered. You have figured out what people need to do to be successful ("write down your goals," "be consistent," "follow the Law of Attraction")? That's fabulous baby, but you are full of it. You disagree? Fine then, get in line with myriads of individuals longing to "break the code." Somehow, the system believers and seekers--it matters not whether these crack heads waste their time on deciphering the patterns of slot machines, the market, lottery, or spiritual formulae handed down by channeled cheats--remind me of those diehards who hang on to their silly conspiracy theories. They're brethren, and I prefer to stay out of their path of raging Money is not a reward, at least not when it shows up in greater sums. In your early years, grandma may have promised you 5 bucks if you could improve your grades in math. Dear granny and the other people brandishing reward money right before your nose don't have the kind of dough you are actually after. You need excellent performances to benefit from reward related pittances or to avoid monetary punishment, but such peanuts don't count in your quest to Parents love to show off excelling brats and they gloat with their brood's straight As. Yet the most successful entrepreneurs were rarely students parents brag about. Flunking tests and dropping out of school is not a formula but still a relatively common denominator of some super successful people. Billionaire Kirk Kerkorian didn't make it through high school. Becoming an amateur boxer was more important for him. Ralph Lifschitz, college dropout, went to the army before selling neckties. You may know him better as Ralph Lauren. Here's a hacker, who built "blue boxes" that allowed people to place free and illegal long distance phone calls which he used to prank call the Pope. One semester in college was all he could take before backpacking through India, shaving his head, seeking enlightenment, and pestering us with his stupid iPhone: Mr. Steve Jobs. Taiwanese billionaire YC Wang has a complete elementary school education. Francois Pinault (Gucci, auction house Christie's, Samsonite) didn't finish highschool. Spain's richest man, Armancio Ortega: high school dropout. "He'll never go anywhere in life," said one of Michael Dell's teachers and who would question a school teacher's opinion? Richest Chinese and Asia's richest man, Li Ka-Shing--God, you gotta love that name!--($18.8 billion or so) in Hong Kong was forced to drop out of school at age 15. Stanley Ho was once in charge of a trade at sea when the ship was attacked by pirates, who then shot dead his partners. Today, Stanley Ho's company accounts for one-third of Macao's GDP. (Source: pennylicious.com) The list is endless. Bored yet? What excites me is to see the remarkable concentration of wealthy individuals who were either unable or unwilling to follow society's established success formula--the venerable school system--that sells hundreds of thousands of children into slavery each year. Each one of the mentioned people had to invent their ways and their lives from scratch. And now they're being asked all day, "What was your formula?" "How can I do the same?" Silly. Research the history of outstanding accomplished individuals and you'll discover a significant proportion of misfits and black sheep. You know what else many of them have in common? Parental or society's approval is not that important to these guys. They don't care to be liked. Excellence and performance oriented thinking may limit your income. You know the pitfalls of perfectionism. So there, striving for top quality is powerful enough to prevent you from making money with your products. You may have something you could sell today, but your pathological obsession to meet your impossible quality standards guarantees that your valuable something will never turn out a single penny. Wasted brilliance. In fact, a plethora of businesses does NOT get started because people believe they are not good enough. Erroneously, they think their education is not good enough, their idea is not good enough, or their bank balance is not good enough. Close to 100% of employees fit into that category: they "know" something about them is not good enough. They live their entire lives under the spell of the damaging excellence myth. Almost every employee marks a wasted opportunity for some crazy ass product that would have a chance to make a shitload of money while turning your and my world into a more interesting and playful place. If you can still afford to hate your job, you don't hate it enough yet. Reward and punishment thinking combined with excellence and performance oriented strategies is perfect for the business of pimps and whores. If you are in a similar profession, yes, I can see how that furthers your interests. If not, it doesn't mean you shouldn't implement excellence but you may gain from rethinking its value and its place in your operation. I have said it before, pimps and prostitutes can be respectable members of our society, often more so than their deranged customers. I don't think they are in any way less truthful than the average politician. On the contrary, representatives of "dark side professions"--preferably hidden or denied by so-called respectable society members--are usually refreshingly honest about their intentions. Anyway, I'm not peddling "moraline" and you must evaluate for yourself how important key elements of pimping are in your business environment, like reward and punishment, excellence and performance. Performance and excellence are fine. Relax! If you do the same thing continuously you can't help but becoming better at it. If you enjoy a large chunk of your work, good for you. It'll increase the quality of your output tremendously. I am not promoting intentional screw ups. That would be insane and equally dumb as it is to develop fake excellence for the business' sake. I am confident you are excellent at being yourself. If not, you have larger problems that I refuse to address here. If you are good at being you, products resulting from your ideas and character will have excellence built into them. Naturally. Your neck hair would stand up if you forced yourself to perform poorly. Embarrassing theory, this excellence and performance stuff. I don't know whether school teachers continue to pester their kids with such nonsense. It has always been and will be subject to ridicule, like teaching ethics. If someone has to teach you, it's too late. Money is never the measurement for performance. I must tell you once more, performance related pay is one of the nastiest myths pertaining to money. Money and performance have no correlation whatsoever, anywhere, anytime. That theory has only been used to turn school children into employees, and employees into lifelong dependants. People know the performance myth is not true, yet they don't stop deceiving their own children with it, as if "it should be true." Performance related theories exude the musty smell of fairness. That's what makes it so difficult to root it out as the weed that it is. Instead of cleaning it out of their back yards, people smoke it. Life should be fair, and if it were fair, money should be and would be paid according to people's excellence and performance. Endearing but a loser theory, nevertheless. Freedom is a nice word and waving it like a flag always has an effect. But hardly is there another term or "value" as void of meaning. People want freedom but do you have it? Reminds me of the sticker "Safety is our goal," on work trucks. Ridiculous. I don't care for safety as a goal. It scares me. I want safety right now, please! Same with freedom. Unless you claim it this minute, nobody is preparing to give you permission to be free anytime soon. Laboring and longing for financial independence suggests the proper size of your portfolio will give you permission "some day" to be free. I hate to break it to you but that won't happen. People tend to misunderstand me. My use of the term freedom does not imply you can drop the money making process today and go on a permanent cruise around the world or buy yourself a dozen of mansions in exalted locations. 'You have the freedom to do what you want to do' means here: take one of the 479 ideas that have crossed your mind in the last ten years and do something practical with it, with the intention to make an extra buck. Choose the most simple idea you can implement and execute it with the change in your pocket. Do it PARALLEL to what you are doing anyway or the pressure to succeed will kill your new "freedom" in its infancy. Really, you are free to get off your arse. Everybody is. Egbert
P.S.: If you intend to share newsletters in their entirety with your |
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