Lie to others, lie to yourself (spiral together; either fantastically poor or spectacularly rich)

Lie to others, tell yourself the truth (manipulation, morally broke, but materially rich)

Tell others the truth, tell yourself the truth (integrity, barely scrape by)

Tell others the truth, lie to yourself (be used by the system, usually end up poorly)

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.”

https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/5410546/jewis...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillel_the_Elder

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:

https://www.cjr.org/language_corner/font-knowledge-fount-wis...

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.

AI notwithstanding, of course.

Made a lot more money than I could have on my own.

"Ray, when someone asks you if you're a god, you say 'YES'!!"

2 Timothy 4 (NLT), circa 65 Anno Domini