Heh, well I was kind of thinking, this sounds like something someone in sales or content management or marketing might think is pithy and thoughtful. And we are (or just were) in the "Information Age", so that's what has value. But also, there are lots of other ways to um... make money. Unless you try to twist your brain around "well selling kids' toys to parents is selling lies to someone who wants lied to" or something perverse like that. shrug Maybe the big article does a great job of exploring these ideas, but I don't think they stand up to much scrutiny.
It's not really a rule of thumb that "Tell others the truth, tell yourself the truth" means you have to barely scrape by. Plenty of people make good money that way.
It sounds like another way to put it: tell people what they want to hear and you'll go far. Most people want their beliefs confirmed, whether what they believe is true or fiction. Unfortunately it can lead to an echo chamber-y world where people only associate themselves with others who have the same core beliefs, which is even easier when communities are online.
When I worked at BigCo [1], we were interviewing a candidate for a position. He was pretty good, and we were in the process of making him an offer, but he was asking for more money and trying to negotiate his salary higher.
I don't have an issue with this, BigCo has plenty of money, but other people, including a manager, were complaining. They felt that this is a good job and he shouldn't be doing this for the money.
I, not realizing that this was controversial, said "yeah, but come on, we all do this for the money."
Some people got defensive, explaining that they love the job. I responded "sure, it's good to like your job and your coworkers, I'm not trying to discourage that, but if BigCo stopped paying you then you'd probably stop showing up for work. At least I would hope so."
They kind of begrudgingly agreed, and the day went on as normal. The next day, I have an impromptu meeting scheduled with my manager's manager, explaining that I have a "bad attitude" and he mentioned that specific comment as a reason that this meeting was being called.
Now, to be fair, at the time I did have a bad attitude (in no small part due to at-the-time-undiagnosed sleep apnea), but the fact that I got in trouble for mentioning something that is objectively true really confused me. We weren't working for a charity, we weren't trying to cure cancer, we were working for a for-profit corporation. Of course we were doing it for the money, just like the corporation hired us so that they could make more money.
But I guess people just like to believe a collective lie.
[1] I'm sure you might be able to go through history and find the specific BigCo, and that is fine, but I politely ask that you don't post it here in relation to this comment.
I've been at BigCos in times past where there was some plausibility to this, but in the current BigCo workplace climate, anybody who tries to claim it's not about the money has a long row to hoe!
My father, who died in 1981, was an inexhaustible font of wisdom and wit. I don’t know when he told me this particular three-part rule, but I’ve never forgotten it. I tweeted it three years ago, but people keep asking for it in one place, so here it is.
There are three ways to make a living:
1) Lie to people who want to be lied to, and you’ll get rich.
2) Tell the truth to those who want the truth, and you’ll make a living.
3) Tell the truth to those who want to be lied to, and you’ll go broke.
The rest is commentary.
---
That last line is undoubtedly a reference to:
> When someone challenged Hillel the Elder (b. 110 BCE) to teach the entire Torah while his listener stood on one foot, he famously replied, “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the entire Torah, and the rest is commentary. Now go and study.”
Aside, I've always seen it spelled "fount of wisdom", but either spelling is acceptable and this seems to mostly be an American/British spelling difference:
I was offered a project to develop a game for this sweet old lady once.
She'd heard that if you made a video game and sold it, you would make a lot of money, so she'd decided to take her life savings, $200k, and hire someone to make a game. She didn't know what kind of game or anything, just "make a game".
I was really worried about her and spent two hours on the phone with her trying to educate her and help her protect herself and her savings.
At the end, she just got sort of mad at me and I could tell she was just going to get someone else to do it.
These are "ways to get paid", but "jobs" implicitly may or may not be relevant to the topic. If there's no game, politics, or sales aspect whatsoever, which is rarely but not never the case, then it's kind of irrelevant.
There are very rich/powerful people that do #1 shocking well and I kind of wish I had figured it out sooner. Having a moral compass apparently set me back irreparably. I could've been somebody!
Apparently if you're a YC alum you can get to the top of the front page of HN posting an advertisement to go read someone's paywalled Wall Street Journal op ed, with a broken link when you click "read the rest".
It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds.
In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic. More here.
