Not being an asshole will make you more money
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Not being an asshole will make you more money
1–10 of 314 posts
Re: Not being an asshole will make you more money
#2I don't see any evidence to support the assertion unfortunately :)
Also, the huge difference between emotional/perceptive aggression, and actual aggression.
There are loud, crude people who like to push for a fair deal, or who are not aggressive terms.
There are 'nice', cunning manipulative people who seek excessive terms.
There are actually truly nice people, who push for assertive terms, not realising how far they are going.
And of course, there's mostly tons of misinterpretations: people who have totally different needs, perspective, expectations with respect to how to go about a situation. A founder seeing aggression might actually be an investor taking a perfectly normative demand.
But yes, I've seen utter stupidity in deal making.
Relationships do matter, and you need a working agreement with whoever you're working with, investors included.
Re: Not being an asshole will make you more money
#3I don't see any evidence to support the assertion unfortunately :) Also, the huge difference between emotional/perceptive aggression, and actual aggression. There are loud, crude people who like to push for a fair deal, or who are not aggressive terms. There are 'nice', cunning manipulative people who seek excessive terms. There are actually truly nice people, who push for assertive terms, not realising how far they…
I think you’re missing the point.
Make “rising tide lifts all boats” deals. Here, you’re entering in a deal to create additional value to the world.
Don’t make deals with a zero-sum outlook. Here, you’re entering into a deal for, at best, a transfer of existing value within the world.
Re: Not being an asshole will make you more money
#4I don't see any evidence to support the assertion unfortunately :) Also, the huge difference between emotional/perceptive aggression, and actual aggression. There are loud, crude people who like to push for a fair deal, or who are not aggressive terms. There are 'nice', cunning manipulative people who seek excessive terms. There are actually truly nice people, who push for assertive terms, not realising how far they…
Indeed: "So many people are straight assholes in business. Especially the more you climb the ladder."
This sentence alone contradicts the title...
Re: Not being an asshole will make you more money
#5I have an example. In a previous role was in a position where we were negotiating a large-ish (>1M USD) multi-year contract when our client asked us to also do a proof of concept about some topic. It was just 1 week or 2 weeks so I said it would be free but because of various regulatory stuff we needed a contract in place.
I was dealing with the same purchasing lawyer on both contracts. The process was super-standard: someone sends a first draft, the other side redlines (proposes changes and makes comments), then the first team redline, etc, at some point you all compromise a bit and someone makes a clean copy of the document containing all the agreed changes for everyone to sign. So we got to the point we had all agreed and the purchasing lawyer on the other side produced the "clean copy" but he obviously thought we were a bunch of rubes so he produced a clean copy for us to sign by backing out all of our changes and only putting in his changes. This is a ridiculously low-integrity bush-league stunt and he did it on the zero-cost POC contract while we were still negotiating the >1m big contract.
Some people just want to win so bad it doesn't even matter to them that they are being total assholes, the prize is zero and it's outright harmful to their own interests. I bet he cheats when playing his own kids at boardgames.
Re: Not being an asshole will make you more money
#6Most of the billionaires are assholes and/or criminals with a couple of noteworthy exceptions. So maybe not being an asshole will get you ahead in the middle but it won't get you all the way to the top of the foodchain.
So this is solid advice, but unfortunately the role models are exactly those people that didn't follow this sort of advice. Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle, Apple, Google and Facebook all would not have been as large and would not generate as much money for their founders if the founders had been nice guys. Fortunately we also have Woz and a couple of others like him to balance things out a bit.
Re: Not being an asshole will make you more money
#7Most of the billionaires are assholes and/or criminals with a couple of noteworthy exceptions. So maybe not being an asshole will get you ahead in the middle but it won't get you all the way to the top of the foodchain. So this is solid advice, but unfortunately the role models are exactly those people that didn't follow this sort of advice. Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle, Apple, Google and Facebook all would not have bee…
That's what bothers me about all the adoration "billionaires" are getting lately. These guys got where they are by taking advantage of whatever they could, not by being generous or nice.
Re: Not being an asshole will make you more money
#8Most of the billionaires are assholes and/or criminals with a couple of noteworthy exceptions. So maybe not being an asshole will get you ahead in the middle but it won't get you all the way to the top of the foodchain. So this is solid advice, but unfortunately the role models are exactly those people that didn't follow this sort of advice. Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle, Apple, Google and Facebook all would not have bee…
Can anything actually realiably get you to that top though? Even though a lot of asshole are there, I would doubt that being an asshole is a pre-req, and that in fact it's extreme luck - these people are > 6 sigma outliers when it comes to a lot of things. And it could very well be a learned behaviour of being that rich. Either way, it's pointless to aim to be one of those people - you just can't without the stars aligning in so many ways you can't control. Instead you're just an asshole who wants to be a billionaire, which probably makes you more of an asshole.
Re: Not being an asshole will make you more money
#9I don't see any evidence to support the assertion unfortunately :) Also, the huge difference between emotional/perceptive aggression, and actual aggression. There are loud, crude people who like to push for a fair deal, or who are not aggressive terms. There are 'nice', cunning manipulative people who seek excessive terms. There are actually truly nice people, who push for assertive terms, not realising how far they…
I think you’re missing the point. Make “rising tide lifts all boats” deals. Here, you’re entering in a deal to create additional value to the world. Don’t make deals with a zero-sum outlook. Here, you’re entering into a deal for, at best, a transfer of existing value within the world.
That is the point of the article, yes. But it doesn't offer evidence that that is a financially better strategy.
It is self-evidently morally better, of course. And it may be financially better too. But the article just flatly claims it in a number of single-sentence paragraphs without communicating any real data.
Re: Not being an asshole will make you more money
#10Ok no i