The Thief Steals From Himself
An executive in Silicon Valley commissioned a group to hold a training program on negotiation for himself and some of his key people. After the program an invoice was sent to him. Weeks passed but he held off paying. When asked what was the cause for the delay, he replied that he took the program to be "promotional" and didn't expect to have to pay. With his newly acquired negotiation skills the executive was trying to be cute.
A month later the executive was laid off for incompetence in another matter unrelated to the program.
Emerson writes, "The thief steals from himself. The swindler swindles himself. For the real price of labor is knowledge and virtue, whereof wealth and credit are signs. These signs, like paper money, may be counterfeited or stolen, but that which they represent, namely, knowledge and virtue, cannot be counterfeited or stolen. These ends of labor cannot be answered but by real exertions of the mind, and in obedience to pure motives. The cheat, the defaulter, the gambler, cannot extort the knowledge of material and moral nature which his honest care and pains yield to the operative. The law of nature is, do the thing and ye shall have the power; but they who do not the thing have not the power." (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essay on Compensation).
Example - Software Crash
A week before a new software product is released after it has been advertised to 70,000 people, the installation program crashes, the "bug tester" walks off the job, and the software needed to design special effects is found to be incompatible.
The untrained player faced with this predicament panics and despairs. The trained player may also panic but only for a few minutes -- certainly no more than a few hours -- then becomes curious about why such singular things are just now beginning to happen. "Ah, we are really in the game!" says she, as she scrambles back.
Soon after she has reclaimed her integrity, she finds a new tester and a new installation program and devises an even more interesting way of putting in the special effects.
The program is improved. The programmer's knowledge of how to navigate in life is much improved.
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