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Not being an asshole will make you more money

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Re: Not being an asshole will make you more money

#81
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that is true Warren Buffet' father was a congressman Larry Page's father was a professor of computer science at University Sergey Brin's father was professor of mathematics at University and his mother worked at NASA these are the first three I looked up and they don't look like low or middle class

How are professors not middle class, financially? Academia doesn't pay particularly well.

I wish my father was professor at University.

How is it not upper class?

Re: Not being an asshole will make you more money

#83
I totally agree. A business school professor of mine, Stuart Diamond, wrote a book called Getting More about using these ideas in negotiation. His theory is that you should always be leaving money on the table. If you're not, you're playing the short game.

https://www.amazon.com/Getting-More-Negotiate-Succeed-Work/d...

Re: Not being an asshole will make you more money

#84
post #33

Don't respond to emails from random people trying to buy your business. They're all scammy. If you respond to these, or offers to re-fi your house, or help someone move their royal fortune out of Nigeria, you're indeed going to be dealing with assholes. If you want to sell your business, take charge and run a competitive bidding process. But ignore unsolicited offers.

It's tough when someone in your industry with a big name reaches out but in general, you're right. Very rarely do people come to you with good intentions. You generally have to seek out good people.

Re: Not being an asshole will make you more money

#85

Of course it won't. Otherwise the advertising industry wouldn't exist. More than that. In general, the market rewards being asshole and borderline fraudster. Reputation is a thing within smaller groups, but what matters is primarily reputation related to your behavior towards your peers in that group . And if your peer group is composed of assholes, then being an asshole is a positive trait as long as you're not an a…

Was Food Lion the meat bleacher?

Re: Not being an asshole will make you more money

#86
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that is true Warren Buffet' father was a congressman Larry Page's father was a professor of computer science at University Sergey Brin's father was professor of mathematics at University and his mother worked at NASA these are the first three I looked up and they don't look like low or middle class

Your model breaks down. 99.9999999...% of children of congresspeople, professors and NASA workers are not billionaires.

I think you made some mistakes in your math.

There are 535 Congressmen in USA, 99.99999999% of them is well... 535.

If I find the son of a Congressman that made billions your model will prove wrong

Warren Buffet is one.

Re: Not being an asshole will make you more money

#87

The major flaw in this article is that it does not defined what constitutes "asshole" behavior. There is a difference, for example, between being vindictive towards others, and simply pushing people out of their comfort zone. The term "asshole" is so vague that it borders on useless.

Because it depends. Certain things are generally asshole behaviour tho:

- beeing unfriendly when someone has a bad day

- going out of your way to make someones life harder

- unemphatically beeing to hard to someone in the wrong moment

- participiting in badmouthing or mobbing

- pushing work and tasks that you should do onto others without explicitly talking about it

- beeing snarky to people who know less than you

Etc.

Re: Not being an asshole will make you more money

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That so feels like a mistake because that's the sort of tactic that would completely and utterly remove your capability of ever working as a corporate lawyer ever again for any company. No, that's basically SOP for big corporate lawyers.

No it isn't.

You both have different experiences, and the reality is somewhere in the middle........

Re: Not being an asshole will make you more money

#89
post #6

Most 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…

I think a lot of people confuse "being an asshole" and "playing the game." If you ever play poker with people who don't know they're doing, they'll often accuse you for "being an asshole" for making an optimal decision. The point of the game is to make as much money as possible, so it's a bit silly to be upset when someone is leveraging every advantage they have as long as they aren't cheating.
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