“He only earns his freedom and his life who takes them every day by storm.” --Johann W. von Goethe
Geez, maybe my dear friend Tom thinks Mr. Goethe actually meant what he wrote. Tom is worse than the nastiest alarm clock attacking my sacred slumber. The man can wake you up from the doldrums of a so-so job: he will pester you into doing what you want to do. ’Hell beguile you, enthrall you, and invigorate you until you give up the pitiful misery of a disliked career. If Tom can’t stimulate you into your active pursuit of work life happiness, you’re doomed anyway.

Damned fools we are, all of us. Rich or poor, we are inconsistent and so funny in the handling our wallets.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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?

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
No Delivery
No Benefit
No Guarantee
No Satisfaction

"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."

“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

“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.
Thanks for the reminder!” --Kay G.

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!™"

"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.

"Did you know that you belong in the loony bin, you screwball? No one can help you anymore, you idiotic imbecile."
Anonymous, Schweinfurt, Germany

"You are a menace to society."  --S.B.K., AZ

"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."
C.K., CA

“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.

"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."
R.S., The Netherlands

"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

"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.
Indeed, there is at present not even agreement as to what the subject is about." --Christopher J. Bliss,
Capital Theory and the Distribution of Income

“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.

"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

“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.

“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.
Stay Foolish.

Measly $25 can increase quality of life, yours and theirs: kiva.org.
Be somebody’s banker. You’re rich enough!

“Thank you Egbert, your articles delight me tremendously!” --Christine

”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.

"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.

Employees hate their jobs almost by definition. According to Forbes Magazine, 87% of Americans don’t like their jobs. No surprise here. Shocking is that hardly anybody questions the status quo of modern slavery. We, the citizens of a developed country, scream for MORE jobs we can hate? That’s what “developed” means: hating what we do with our lives?!

If you despise your current job, chances are you won’t like your next job either. 87% hate their jobs today and 87% will hate what they do next month. Am I suggesting a revolution against “the oppressors?” Indeed, but who is the oppressor? The “evil corporations?” Absolutely NOT! Employers only provide the means for you to do what you crave to hate (“It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.” --Voltaire).

School and college have prepared us to live life in hatred, to live the best years of our life looking forward to end it--with retirement. It is insane to quietly accept being bereft of an enjoyable and productive life. WE are guilty ourselves of murdering our individuality, creativity, and our freedom.

You desire to love your job or to find a job you can enjoy? Are you out of your mind? It won’t happen soon, but if you hate what you do today you can hate it better in the future ... much better, in fact. My new book “How to Better Hate Your Job” seems crazy--and indeed it is unruly, wild, and provocative. No, it is not politically correct. I’m so sorry, dear!

Oh, you are self-employed, an entrepreneur perhaps, and you believe this book is not for you?  Think again:  can you afford not to know what’s going on in the minds and in the subconscious regions of job-hating employees? Really?! Even if you are not an employer, you deal with such people every day.  Even for you it’s time to get a clue.

Get your copy now--Paperback or FREE eBook download--and tell your friends, enemies, and your hunchbacked relatives about it. For the time being, it’s an “Advanced Reader’s Copy.” Some bugs still need to be eliminated and few things have to be altered before the final version will go to print. So? What are you waiting for? ’It’s important to do at least one regrettable thing every day ...

Evolution is still just a theory for so many of us.  Maybe it’ll take another 150 years to sink in and to make sense on a practical level. Even though it is generally accepted for “other species”, human beings have a hard time seeing themselves as part of or, god forbid, subject to evolution.

chance and lucky breaks

"Accident is the creator of life." --Charles Darwin

Yahoo News, April 22nd, 2007:

"SHANGHAI, China - Physicist Shi Zhengrong spent the 1990s in an Australian lab studying solar power, a field he picked by chance. He expected to devote his life to science.  Excited by a trip home that showed him China's rapid development, he startled friends by abruptly moving his wife and two Australian-born sons to his homeland in 2001 to launch a solar equipment company.

Four years later, Shi's confidence paid off when his Suntech Power Holdings Ltd. went public on the New York Stock Exchange and investors snapped up shares, turning him into a billionaire. Last year, Shi ranked No. 7 on the Forbes magazine list of China's richest tycoons, with a $1.4 billion fortune.  "We believed the share price would go up, but not so quickly," said Shi, a 43-year-old with a boyish face, chuckling at what he says was a rise marked by lucky breaks and timing. 'I never thought I would be a rich guy.'"

Anecdotal "proof" only of course, that my suggestion to make Money by Mistake is not too far off the mark. Both, financial success and the evolutionary success of biological species are subject to CHANCE and LUCKY BREAKS.

To Pope Benedikt XVI's chagrin, you and I aren't more or less than accidental mutations.  Why are we here?  Poor performing rubbers past their expiration dates explain a vast percentage of life's mysteries, and a whole bunch of us are here because two teenagers got drunk.  Who says the universe lacks a sense of humor?  Evolution is based on humor--often the darkest kind--and on not much else.

Measured over hundreds of millions of years, "Ninety-nine point nine nine percent of all biological species which have ever existed are now extinct." (Paul Ormerod, Why Most Things Fail) That's nothing to mope and mourn about, because thanks to myriads of mistakes and random selection, you and I showed up.  Apart from a few intelligent design freaks of questionable intelligence, we have accepted our lot that life is damn fragile and nobody survives, not even the fittest I'm afraid. We have not accepted the fact that we and our endeavors remain to be subject to chance and lucky breaks.  On the contrary, we believe we can control evolution, reduce and even eliminate mistakes--"learn from our mistakes"--and optimize chance.

It's worth a shot, sure, but before we get ahead of ourselves let's look at this strange event once more: Mr. Shi picked solar power as his field of interest by CHANCE. He could have picked his nose instead. He intended to be a scientist and he never thought he'd become rich.  By ACCIDENT he turned into a business man and a billionaire, it was a "mutation".  Most people who try as hard as they can to become successful business people and billionaires fail miserably and--I'm sorry to break it to you--will continue to fail in the future. Not all of them, but most of them.  To stay with the picture of evolution and biology, think of sperm cells.  Few, very few get to enjoy their nest egg.

The tiny number of those who will accomplish goals they lusted after are likely to LIE to their offspring and to everybody else about the foundation of their rare successes:  they won't be as honest as Mr. Shi. Instead they will say that early goal setting and hard work were crucial factors leading to their success, neglecting the fact that if that were so, it would work perfectly for most people who apply the same. 

The horseshit belief that the worship of goal-setting combined with hard work equals success won't die out soon, especially not as long as enough idiots pay motivational hacks to repeat that nonsense.  Those few who succeed do so in spite of their intentions and not necessarily because of them.

As a rule of thumb, people who claim to have found "a secret" or developed "a system" to beat the futures market, the options market, the horse races, the slot machines, or the plain old problem of making a decent buck are selling snake oil. You discovered a system how to screw the universe while making it believe that you're full of love? Right! You're full of something, but it ain't love, baby. Even if I believed you benevolently, the universe won't.  You know, the universe doesn't care either about quantum physics that every bag lady has on her chapped lips nowadays. Whether Schroedinger's Cat is dead or alive, if you want to pump good old gasoline in your car, you got to find money first. Quantum this or quantum that, the fact that even those are brandishing quantum stuff who can't spell it is a clear sign from God that quantum physics is outdated. No, I'm not joking.

Oh my God, what did I say? What have I done?  How did I get here? Uh yes, promoting goal setting, hard work, and general or particular "wishing" in all its abstruse incarnations as a rule or as a universal law--of "attraction", etc.--to get what you want is equally reckless and pathetic.  Systems don't work. Not even the cute and fuzzy ones do. Their only purpose is to peddle hope for cash.

Why are corporate behemoths like Microsoft, Merrill Lynch, or Siemens constantly pelted with legal investigations? Why do they pay hundreds of millions of dollars in settlements? They know that intention, planning, and hard work are not sufficient tools.  So they cut corners.  Why do more than ten percent of all companies in America disappear every single year? Each year over 600,000 firms become extinct, ranging from one-man businesses to corporations like WorldCom. Because a fine mission statement, 16-hour work days, and wishing the blue out of the sky is not enough. Between 1900 and 1920, almost 2,000 firms in the U.S. were busy producing automobiles.  You think these people didn't work hard, desiring, and planning to succeed? One hundred years later it still doesn't work too well for the remaining 3 (three) car manufacturers.

Since you are product of and subject to evolution, so is your wallet.  Mutations, accidents, and CHANCE play a serious role in your life and it doesn't matter how much you may hate that fact.  The bright red glowing pimple on your nose will appear on the wrong sunny morning without your written consent.  It's out of control.  Of the world's largest 100 industrial companies of 1912, 29 were bankrupt eighty years later. They didn't want that, and neither did their shareholders appreciate it. Trust me.  The best that 29% of the world's most successful companies could do was getting rid of ALL their money. "83 percent of Chief Executive Officers fail." (Lucy Kellaway, Financial Times) Why? Because they didn't write down their goals and haven't bothered to pick up a copy of 'The Secret', perhaps?  C'mon.

You think Arthur Andersen and Enron executives could have avoided disaster and demise had they listened to Brian Tracy's Nightingale Conant program:  "With greater self-confidence, with an unshakable belief in yourself, nothing would be impossible for you."  NOTHING?  Damn, had they just written down their goals neatly and visualized the crap out of their companies, they could still be around, honest and successful.  Sure.

Did I say you should freeze your desires, stop working, and super glue your heavy hairy keister to the couch? NO WAY:  Work more!  Wait a moment.  Didn't I just announce hard work won't cut it?  Let me explain and drastically simplify:  It doesn't matter if you are aware of being part of evolution, and it is meaningless whether you like or hate the fact. Unless you hang yourself today, you won't escape evolution any time soon.  Your options?

1) Retire, don't move a toe, and wait until it's all over.

2) Continue to hate your job and pretend to be a living organism.

3) Get to work:  Fail as often as you can. Fail as fast as you can.

Say what?

For too long we have tried to be creators, successful creators of course.  We created gods in our image--a tad better perhaps, but still pretty messed up in the head and sociopathic--and then we turned around proclaiming that we were created in our God's image.  Result: People are busy trying to CREATE also, money, reality, the perfect world. And how is that working out for you?

I thought so.  After 70 years, the Soviet Union gave up on its intentions to create a functional five-year-plan. Hitler's creation of a 1,000 year Reich was cut short by 988 years. Coca Cola's attempt to create New Coke was aborted within less than three months.  Creating is hard work because it can't be done.  In fact, hard work becomes hard only when it's approaching the impossible.

Good news: Avoid hard work and stick to the possible. Hard work will never be considered an intelligent solution. The alternative? Instead of doing few things you have a hard time doing, do a lot of things you can do more easily.  Adapt to the process of evolution.  Can you fail? Sure you can and it's not that difficult, is it?  Fail readily. Do what's doomed.  Screw up.  If you feel compelled to write things down, don't write down goals. That's reserved for chumps.  Write down every bad and crazy idea that crosses your mind. And then what? Write down the next four thousand worthless ideas mindlessly. By then, you may not have to ask anymore what to do.  You may be busy mutating, innovating, lactating, or whatever.  

Temporarily surviving species are the result of mass extinction. Thousands of species have come and gone before we grew the balls to call ourselves homo sapiens.  Constant failure, accidents, and mistakes are the foundation of evolution.  Functional economies, profitable companies, and successful individuals aren't any different. It's messy, I agree, but that's how it works.  Out of thousands of ideas only two may be extremely valuable.  The others will be forgotten within minutes. They will die before the end of the day. You will try some and drop them. Even the great ones may shine for a couple of weeks or months and then join the legions of bad ideas in idea heaven.  You can't control evolution and you won't control or predict the markets.

Of course, you are welcome to ignore my suggestion and marry the one special idea you have held sacred for a long time. I've had droves of people come up to me asking what I think about an idea they have. It doesn't matter what I think about your stupid idea.  If you have an idea, and one idea only, it's already dead or it will be soon. I am quite confident that your next hundred ideas will be flops ... except for one, maybe. But, unless you're eager to come up with hundreds, better thousands of surefire duds your chances are slim to discover a gem.  Desperately clinging to one idea is not unlike arranged marriages. I wish you the best of luck, but it may turn out like any other job you despise so much.

Our governments aren't much more successful than extinct or barely vegetating socialist governments with their planning.  We have all seen, and paid for, those silly projects.  Companies have replaced most of their planning with R & D, which translates to: "We have no clue what works, but we try new stuff every day."  It's expensive but less expensive than futile planning.  In other words, the willingness to fail all day, every day, is our greatest prospect for a profitable future.

The ancient adage, "If you fail to plan, you plan to fail" has been beaten like a dead horse by generations of network marketing liars. I shall give you something new to ponder:

If you don't plan to fail, you will.

Egbert

P.S.: "Life is at best a tenuous and hazardous enterprise, but mankind's puny efforts to protect himself from its instability and randomness seem worse than futile. It appears the best course is simply chancing it." --Emerson

P.P.S.:  If you enjoyed it, hated it, or if you are not so sure, go to Yahoo Groups and read past issues of my free money-by-mistake newsletter: http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/moneybymistake/.  And, while there, go ahead and subscribe also: You will receive upcoming issues via e-mail.

P.P.P.S.:  You think I should cough up some blog type thingy related to issues discussed here? Why not? Check it out at Google Schmoogle.