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The corollary to learning to be comfortable and even happy while serving others is learning to be comfortable while being served by others.
By and large, people may admire super intelligent people, but they neither like nor feel particularly comfortable with them.
If you really are to succeed in business, it won’t be because people think you are smart; it will be because people like you. There is an old adage, “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.”
Judaism teaches that God designed the system to reward people for not remaining isolated from one another.
When large numbers of people are unified within a common system of values and are located in close proximity to one another, in a real encampment as it were, the best circumstances for economically productive interaction then exist.
To change the way others see you, first you have to learn to see yourself as others see you.
How do you choose the doctors, lawyers, plumbers, and car mechanics that you need in your life? You seldom select them on the basis of their technical knowledge or their academic qualifications. Here is the shocking truth: You actually choose them on the basis of their business skills.
You can’t do very much about how well you did in high school or in college years ago. You may not be able to do much about the job you have, but you can change your outlook.
my triumphs taught me magnanimity, but it was my defeats that taught me humility.
Each and every one of us is, at one and the same time, both divine and animal.
Constantly struggling to follow head rather than heart, as Abraham did, has been one of the keys to Jewish success.
In the quest for increased income, it is wise to improve one’s tendency to act in accordance with what one’s mind advises rather than to follow one’s emotional tugs and the urgent summons from one’s appetites.
Wealth is produced by transactions. You need to drastically increase the number of transactions in which you get involved.
Each time you reject the destructive appeal and follow the voice of wisdom, your ability to do so again the next time is enhanced. Your system behaves just like a muscle that responds more effectively after it has been exercised. Conversely, each time you allow yourself to yield to the negative impulse, you subsequently find it harder to make the right decision the next time.
Long before you can hope to lead others, you must acquire the strength to lead yourself.
Being optimistic is one thing; being blind is something entirely different.
In the same way that it is valuable for you to understand exactly what drives other people, it is even more useful to get to know what drives yourself.
like most people you have a very real need for a sense of intellectual growth.
life isn’t easy. You can’t eat video games, designer jeans, or a big screen television. Those only become vital accoutrements to life after you have enough to eat and a way to be sheltered from physical harm. Once you are sheltered from harm, you can try to find shelter from pain, and eventually, even from discomfort. In other words, you can try to control your environment.
People attempt to adjust things in their immediate surroundings to suit their desires or what they perceive as their needs. To whatever extent you have the ability to control your environment, that is the extent to which you possess power.
Power, therefore, is a measure of your ability to extend your influence and control into the world around you.
“wealth” means the ability to survive on this earth.
the person is wealthy who is satisfied with his or her portion.
people with high self esteem tend to have low self-control.20
Those who want to succeed must concentrate on self respect and the esteem of others rather than on self esteem.
self esteem is what you try to gain when you haven’t achieved anything and thus don’t deserve any self respect. By achieving something, you earn the esteem of others and thus gain self respect, too.
Maintaining a Ben Zomah state of life balance makes it much easier to resist the temptation of premature retirement. Instead of promising yourself that you will play golf, read good books, and enjoy time with the family when you retire, you should heed Ben Zomah’s advice and take constant little slices of retirement as it were, each and every day of your life.
Jewish tradition teaches that only by not specializing, only by not excluding all the essence of life from your endeavors, will those endeavors be blessed. In other words, don’t specialize.
If you spend all your time and vitality exclusively trying to make money, you will make less than if you had properly balanced your efforts in all four vital areas of human motivation.
wealth is considered to be the consequence of a life well lived, in the company and companionship of others doing the same, rather than a purpose of life in itself.
Mountain peaks are almost never scaled by the direct approach. Successful climbers plot what usually turns out to be a long and circuitous assault. At times it probably even appears as if the climbing party is traveling away from rather than toward its summit destination. Nonetheless, that is the nature of mountain peaks.
desperate and determined attempts to pursue happiness directly often lead to spurious emotional substitutes and damaging excursions into the dark world of alcohol and other chemical abuse. Please learn to know the difference between happiness and fun.
money and wealth are exactly like mountain peaks, peace, and happiness. Attempts to pursue any one of them directly are seldom the most effective route.
if who you are and what you do fail to bring the success you desire, it is not sufficient to merely do different things; you also need to become a different person.
there may well be many management situations, both at home and at work, where radiating an impression of being really upset, even angry, might be called for. But that is entirely different from really being angry.
In your quest to increase the amount of money that flows toward you, getting to know yourself is vital. However it comes with some risk. Sometimes you do not much like the person you come to know.
Neither neglect the imperfect nor expend yourself on futile pursuit of perfection, while failing to make the most of less perfect circumstances.
When fire destroys someone’s home, we never respond by angry indictments of fire. It is a powerful agent of creation and destruction. When someone exploits trust and betrays business with dishonesty, there is no reason to indict business. It is seldom Ethical Capitalism at fault; it is the fault of those who practiced capitalism without the ethics.
for perceptive people there is a moral message in almost everything
there are countless ways to reassemble a clock, it only runs when you do it the one right way.
whether it is business or bridges, there is usually only one effective way that will achieve a goal and many other ways that will fail.
In spite of its proven record, the system of rules, conventions, and protocols that govern human economic interaction in the United States comes under constant attack. Paradoxically, those assaulting its moral legitimacy are often among the most richly rewarded by the very system they besiege.
Let nobody consider himself to be poor. Forming that opinion of yourself erects an insurmountable obstacle to becoming rich.
However, there will always be some people with less than you. They must not consider themselves poor, but you are obliged to give something to those with less than you.
A quick glance at reality reveals that business creates wealth, it doesn’t redistribute it. By contrast, governments have no capacity to create wealth, but they can and do redistribute it. Just ask yourself if you would benefit economically more by living among very wealthy people or among very poor people?
This is the magic of business. Through its alchemy, ordinary people interacting with one another increase everyone’s financial opportunities.
Equal opportunity for all is the promise of any civilized society, but equality of outcome is unachievable and will only be promised to the accompaniment of totalitarian elimination of free choice.
the common moral error of discrediting goodness if the benefactor also receives benefits.
Surely, wiping out malnutrition and disease are as praiseworthy as catering to the victims of it?
Somehow, people have uncritically bought into the notion that their acts of benevolence are negated if they benefit by those acts as much as, or more than, the beneficiaries do.
