A friend recently sent me another set of rules that he sometimes calls Unconditional Truths. These will make you smile but they won't get you through college (or life) as well as the Nine Rules.
10. Life is sexually transmitted.
9. Good health is merely the slowest possible rate at which one can die.
8. Men have two emotions: hungry and horny. If you see him without an erection, make him a sandwich.
7. Give a person a fish and you feed them for a day; teach a person to use the Internet and they won't bother you for weeks.
6. Some people are like a Slinky. They are not really good for anything, but you still can't help but smile when you shove them down the stairs.
5. Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals dying of nothing.
4. All of us could take a lesson from the weather. It pays no attention to criticism.
3. A slight tax increase will cost you $200.00 yet a substantial tax cut only saves you 30¢.
2. In the 60s, people took acid to make the world weird. Now the world is weird and people take Prozac to make it normal.
1. We know exactly where one cow with Mad-cow-disease is located among the millions and millions of cows in America but we haven't got a clue as to where hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants and terrorists are located. Maybe we should put the Department of
Agriculture in charge of immigration. Or better yet, let AARP know that Osama is 50 and they will find him wherever he is.
Another Set of Rules
Take Pride in Your Performance
People need to take pride in what they do. There is extraordinary virtue in observing someone who does a job well.
This is true regardless of the nature of the work. I get joy out of watching an expert in just about any field. A good waiter is just as impressive as a brilliant pianist.
Daughter and I disagreed on this point recently. She thought I should feel bad about cross-examining someone to the point that they were destroyed professionally and their testimony had no negative impact on my client. I told her that, like everyone else, it is my job to perform my duties at the highest level. I told her there was virtue in doing that well even if someone was damaged as a result. She was not impressed and thought I should go easy on the witness.
The Nine Rules do not eliminate kindness but they absolutely require performance at the highest level. I am not sure I won the arguement but my position was certainly clear.
The unfortunate fact is that our service culture is at a crisis because so few people take pride in the work they do. What a joy it is to find someone that delivers good service beacause they take pride in their work and understand that service is what they do.
The Nine Rules teaches that there is virtue in doing a job well and that one should take pride in what they do. Rule 2, for example, teaches us that we should do our own work and reject others' efforts to do the work for us. There is nothing more fundamental in the advice to do your own work than the fact that you should do that work well and take pride in it. Rule 6 teaches us that we should never mess up good work. This is another part of taking pride in your work. When it is right, it is finished and until then, there is more work to do.
Anything less than pride in your own performance translates into a lack of success and, if adopted broadly enough, will translate into a deteriorating society.
Applying Rule 8
Rule 8 teaches us that, if you can't tell who the sucker at the table is, it is probably you. This rule, like the others, can be applied in many situations.
Daughter called from college the other evening with what she saw as a simple request. She wanted to know what her math score on the SAT was. I naturally wondered why that would be relevant to a Sophomore in college. She explained that, although she knew I would think she was crazy, she was thinking about taking Statistics and one of the prerequisites was a math score of a certain level on the SAT.
I told her that she was right. I thought she was crazy. Not only is Statistics notoriously difficult, but the concept of a non-numbers person taking a class that required a certain math score on the SAT is very close to insanity.
While the quick way around the issue was not having access to the SAT score, the application of Rule 8 teaches us that taking Statistics in this case would likely make daughter the sucker at that table. Declining to get in that position is the right thing to do. My only real comfort in this case was the fact that she knew, before she called me, that taking Statistics was going to be a bad idea. I would like to think that's because she was applying the Nine Rules.
Rules You Won't Find in the Nine Rules
You are right. We actually gave all of this some thought before we posted our Nine Rules. Here are some of the possible rules one could follow that did not make it in to the Nine Rules.
1. If you can't see it from the road, don't wear it. Believe it or not, this is actually the slogan of a local jewelry vendor. From the looks of their products, they believe it. When sending a daughter off to college, there is little or no point in suggesting what she should or should not wear because she is going to wear whatever she and her friends think is cool. More important, I am not sure that the ability to see it from the road is exactly what we are going for in daughters. Don't waste your time on rules about how a youngster should dress. Save your energy for the important stuff in the Nine Rules.
2. Do as I say, not as I do. You better be ready to practice the Nine Rules yourself if you are going to have any hope that daughter (or anyone else) will pay any attention to them. Indeed, if you read about the Nine Rules, you will see that they apply to all sorts of life situations. Take Rule 1 for example. Stay out of jail and your kids have a shot at following your lead. Land in jail and try and get out before you have spent an evening as a guest of the state and your kids have a pretty good chance of following that lead as well.
3. If you can't beat them, join them. It is important to be competitive and that is embedded in several rules including Rules 6 and 8. It is not important, however, to join the enemy after the competition. Whatever it was that made them the enemy in the first place is still making them the enemy after the competition. If you can't beat them, keep trying and improving until you can beat them or move on to a competition at which you can beat them would be a better, although long-winded, rule.
4. You can't beat City Hall. Again with "can't" and "beat" in the same sentence. These are not good thoughts. You can beat anyone if you find the right game and get good at it. See Rules 6 and 8. That could be another, less verbose, addition to the Nine Rules.
Rule Nine: Quid Pro Quo. Everything has a price.
I hestiate to use latin phrases to express myself but I thought it would be more educational than using my father's advice to me as a young child. "There's no such thing as a free lunch." He also told me, "You never get something for nothing." I landed on the Latin phrase because it is a little more elegant and is one that my daughter already knew and understood before she went to college.
While I was in college back in the dark ages I worked at the campus radio station. Yes, they had radio in those days. In an effort to decrease grafitti in the station control room, the General Manager, Gary Chew, hung a blank sheet of butcher paper and pen and encouraged people to record thier comments there. He made the first of our pre-internet postings writing, "There is no such thing as a free lunch -- G. Chew". By the next morning there was a new posting just below it, "There is no such thing as a G. Chew -- Free Lunch". That is the only evidence that I have ever seen that there is such a thing as a free lunch.
A number of years a go, daughter accompanied me to work one day on take your daughter to work day. She wanted to learn some new word so I taught her this Latin phrase and used the opportunity to explain its meaning and the life lesson behind it.
There is an obvious lesson here. You have to pay, in one form or another, for all of the benefits you get. Sometime payments are hidden or delayed but they are nonetheless payments. Some deals are better than others and some of those deals may include things that seem to be free but rest assured that there is a payment involved. A great example is the daily offers I get through emails that want me to take advantage of millions of dollars as my share of some ill-gotten gains if only I will trun over a small fee on the front end. We all know that is a dangerous and pervasive scam. Yet, on the face, it sounds like something for nothing. Rule 9 teaches that such propositions do not exist and, if one is presented with such an opportunity, one should investigate to find the real cost before one accepts the terms of the transaction.
On the surface, I simply wanted daughter to make sure she understood that everything has a price and that there really is no free ride. While that concept is fairly simple, Rule 9 says a great deal more about life in more subtle ways.
The more important lesson here comes from its application to the way we conduct ourselves in our personal and professional lives. Good marriages happen when both parties work hard at making the relationship work. Successful careers are made as the result of hard work. Good football players often have God-given talent but the best football players succeed because of hard work. The late Walter Payton is a great example. No one worked harder at his conditioning and his craft that Walter Payton and his astounding success is a testamant to the value of hard work. In short, success (at college and in life) comes at a price. That price is most clearly and regularly expressed in terms of hard work and devotion to one's craft.
I know that my daughter understands and applies Rule 9. She was only a Freshman in her high school band when she decided that she wanted to be a drum major. She devoted herself completely to that goal. She did everything that they asked her to do and more. She became the veritable picture of a student leader. In short she worked as hard as she possibly could to succeed. I was proud of her for working so hard and I told her that regularly. I wanted her to be chosen as drum major not because I wanted her to have what she wanted or I wanted the recognition that came with that post. I wanted her to be drum major so that she would really understand that hard work is the key to success. She was a drum major and that experience did more to make her understand the rule than anything I could have said or written.
There is another important life lesson here. Things that claim to be free rarely are. Indeed, all claims need to be taken with a grain of salt. I was on a cruise recently and the prize for winning one of the poker tournaments was a nice polo short with the cruise line logo and the designation on the front "Casino High Roller". It became clear to me very quickly, by applying Rule 9, that anyone who wore such a shirt (maybe even anyone who owned such a shirt) was clearly not a casino high roller. Companies that claim they are not responsible for what happens to your car while it is parked in their parking lot are wrong. They likely want you to believe they are not responsible and ceratinly some people believe that but the truth of the matter is that they are responsible for their negligence just like everyone else, regardless of whether they erect such a sign.
Another subtle notion contained in Rule 9 is the concept that one must understand the costs and benefits of their proposed actions before one acts. Successful businesses do this rigorously. We should do the same with our personal interests.
My wife sometimes misses the cost benefit analysis especially when she considers the price of gasoline. She is willing to drive half way across town to save a penny or two per gallon on ten gallons of gas. It does not make much sense to spend 50 cents in gas to save 20 cents on the total purchase to say nothing of the time and effort involved in driving across town.
To apply Rule 9 well sometimes requires that we work hard to find out the true costs and benefits of a proposed action. For example, it is not easy to understand the costs and benefits of a new job offer. One has to very carefully understand all of the elements of compensation and benefits and try to predict what they are worth before one can understand the benefits of the new job. One also has to understand the costs of the new job whether they are expressed in temrs of the amount of time away from one's family, the cost of commuting (see the gasolint discussion above), the cost to one's reputation, or the costs associated with security and insecurity if that is a factor. Any one of these costs can readily be turned into a benefit. For example, one might enhance her reputation by changing jobs or one might reduce commuting time. The entire analysis would be different for one looking for work while employed than it would be for one looking for work while unemployed or while facing a certain prospect of unemployment.
My brother recently offered a very good example of the need to employ rigorous cost/benefit analysis. He was working for a company that had been acquired by another firm. It was apparent to him that he would eventually lose his job but he was still employed. He found another job (or at least something resembling a job) but the new position would be available whenever he left the current job. The company that acquired his employer was requiring him to perform jobs for which he was not qualified and for which he did not have or expect to get adequate training. He was asked to make a presentation with the understanding that if it did not go well he would be terminated. The first effort did not go well but the new owners gave him extensive feedback that he could use to improve his performance and perhaps have a chance to keep his job.
He called me and asked for advice. His plan was to tell the old employer to forget it and leave with his dignity in tact. He had the good sense to call me and ask for advice although he clearly did not understand or practice Rule 9. I suggested to him that he do the very best he can at improving his performance and make it as difficult as possible for the new owners to fire him. I suggested that this approach would maximize the amount of income as long as he was confident that it would not negatively impact his future with the new position. He agreed and acrried on. I got another call a couple months later. He had since made two more presentations and neither was well received although he continued to get comments, continued to work on his new duties, and continued to collect a paycheck. Now he really wanted to tell the new guys where to put their job. Doing anything else was demeaning. I suggested that he stay the course and continue to do everything in his power to make them want to keep him and, in the meantime leave with as much of the company's money as he could. He took my advice and was eventually terminated but not before taking several additional months of salary.
He could have made a cost/benefit analysis himself if he had truly understood what Rule 9 means. The benefits associated with his inflated ego were cleaely not as valuable as the continued salary but he could not get there without considering one of the basic tenets of Rule 9. Since everything has a cost, you need to understand what that cost is and weigh it against the expected benefits. If you need help with this analysis, post your issue and we will help you work through it. Let us know if you want us to keep it confidential.
In some cases the challenge in applying Rule 9 comes in understanding the cost of a proposed action. In many cases, value can be gained simply by agreeing to accept a risk that someone else currently carries. nsurance companies provide an excellent example of this analysis. An insurance company will sell you financial insulation from an identified risk in exchange for your payment of a premium. How do insurance companies make money doing this? They analyze the losses that have historically happened with respect to the identified risk and, with the application of some math, determine how much money they need to collect in premiums to fund all of their loss payments, their operating costs, and a healthy profit. If they think there is too much risk, they will decline to sell the insurance or they might sell some of the risk to another insurance company. The company does not have any significant cost when it issues the policy so the premium may look like a free lunch. The cost to the company, however, is the assumption of your risk. That has a cost and the company understands that.
The college student is confronted with a similar choice whenever she makes a choice about some behavior that is suddenly available to her. Is eating whatever you want a fair benefit in light of the cost associated with adding the "freshman 15"? Does eating now do enough for you that you are willing to risk health, popularity, or whatever? Does drinking alcohol provide you with enough benefit to compensate for the risk of discipline from the school, arrest (see Rule 1), or poor academic performance? The choices at college are endless and each carries a benefit and a cost (often in the form of an identifiable risk). To be successful you must apply Rule 9 and always understand and compare the costs and benefits of your proposed actions.
Rule Seven: Always have a bag of pretzels available.
Like most kids, when mine were little, they would sometimes have stomach troubles. Also like most other kids, this usually happened at the worst time. It could be in church or on the way to school or just about anywhere else. My son had a knack for getting sick in the most artful of places. He once lost lunch at the entrance to the teachers' lounge in grade school. Another time, he threw up down my back while I was carrying him on an escalator at a busy shopping mall. I am not sure either of us can go back there even to this day.
I am not sure how other parents deal with the stomach problems of their children but we very quickly determined that a pretzel or two would generally calm things down until we could deal with it more comprehensively. We used this technique so often that we eventually started carrying a small bag of pretzels wherever we went. It was effective to a point.
The real lesson for success in this rule is the need to be prepared. College students will probably not appreciate the need to be prepared immediately. Business people either realize the need for preparation or they will find it hard to stay employed. I have several co-workers who are frightened to death by the prospect of meeting with the CEO. I was confused because I always viewed a meeting with the CEO as an opportunity to demonstrate my talents to someone who might be able to reward me appropriately. One of those workers told me that he did not like to meet with the CEO because he can be very mean and intimidating of you are not prepared. How dull is that? I suggested to the co-worker that he might look forward to meetings with the CEO if he took the time to prepare fully in advance. He looked at me like I was speaking a foreign language. There simply is no substitute for preparation.
There is a danger in using this rule. I refer to it as the Dumbo Syndrome. Some people might view the pretzels as similar to Dumbo's magic feather. With pretzels, one has super human powers but if the pretzels are not there we are all mere mortals. The true wisdom in the rule comes with the understanding that the pretzel you need has to be something that actually makes you prepared rather than just a placebo that has no real impact.
Rule Eight: If you cannot tell who the sucker is, it is probably you.
This is, of course, a famous adage by which poker players live. In poker, as in life, it provides two very fundamental corollaries. First, if you are playing a game (or doing anything else for that matter) with a group of people who all seem to be highly skilled at that activity, it is highly likely that you have found your way in to a group with which you cannot compete favorably. Second, if you are competing with a group of people, you must analyze the strengths and weaknesses of the group in order to compete at the highest possible level. All of this may sound a little excessively competitive, but let’s face it, life is full of competition. The successful princesses will be the ones who played the game better than the competition. If you want to succeed, you need to play better than everyone else.
The first corollary teaches us that we are unlikely to succeed if we insist on competing against people that are clearly more skilled than we are. It is obvious in the poker room but it is equally true in other endeavors. The average algebra student cannot expect to get the highest grade in a class full of algebra geniuses. The first year professional cannot expect to do better than the veteran professional. A freshman music student cannot expect to be first chair in the best orchestra.
Consider the novice, amateur poker player as an example of how we must apply this axiom. The new player enters the casino and joins a poker game in progress. He has two ways he can learn about the game and develop as a player. He can play lots of hands and rarely fold his cards. In this way he can observe how other players conduct themselves and can start to predict how they will play in the future or at least get hints at the nature of the unseen cards from the way they bet or other physical cues. The unfortunate truth is that the new player will lose a great deal of money by playing too many hands. For some real good poker tips, click here.
This rule also applies to raising children. You show up at the science fair with your child and her science project. You helped some by making sure that the presentation was neat and that the child followed all the rules. Billy and his dad show up at about the same time with a project devoted to the way that Billy saved his cat's life by transplanting an important organ. Nevermind that Billy's father is a renowned heart surgeon and probably had something to do with the project. Some parents would vow to compete with Billy and his father by doing something even better next year. Those who follow Rule 8, however, realize that such an endeavor would be destructive, especially for your child who is supposed to be learning something. I suppose he might learn the truth inherent in Rule 8 and that would not be all bad. The rule follower would make sure that next year, his child competed on her own, doing her own work, and learning something in the process.
Suppose you have no choice but to compete with others that may have more experience or better skills than you. If that does not sound familiar, you are probably self-employed and in a business with no competitors. In this case, you must whole heartedly adopt the second corallary. You must fully understand the stengths and weaknesses of your competitors and use that information to assure your own success.
For example, if the guy in the next cubicle appears to be smarter than you, better trained, better educated, or more experienced you cannot just sit idly and wonder why he gets all the breaks. That would be the role of the sucker and will result in low satisfaction and limited success. The rule follower will, instead, study his competition and learn his strengths and weaknesses. In his areas of strength, one would be wise to ask for instruction from the competitor. Who among us is not flattered when someone asks us how to perform? Having identified areas of weakness, the rule follower will do everything in his power to become thoroughly proficient in those skills. In this way, the rule follower becomes more satisfied with his job, his employer gets better service out of the combined talents of the two competitors, and the rule follower increases his chance of winning. That automatically means that he is not the sucker at this table.
Rule Six: Never mess up a 20.
At first glance, this rule may seem strange. One might even think I have lost my mind or my ability to form coherent sentences. You doubters obviously have not played Blackjack. This is an absolute, hard and fast rule that should never be broken when playing Blackjack. It also provides significant guidance for potentially difficult and perhaps even life changing events.
To understand this life instruction, you must first understand a little something about the game of Blackjack. For the complete novice, the object of the game is to get a combination of two or more cards that comes as close as possible to 21 without going over 21. If you get closer than the dealer or if you stay under 21 and the dealer goes over 21 you win. If the dealer gets closer to 21 or you go over 21, the dealer wins. Tens and face cards count as 10. Lower cards count for their face value. Aces can count as 1 or 11 at the player’s option. All of that is pretty simple. Computers could do that and do it very quickly.
The tricky part of Blackjack comes when the player has to decide whether he wants more cards. The player and the dealer each get two cards to start the game. The player gets to see both of his cards but only one of the dealer’s cards. The player has complete freedom of choice. He can take a card or not. There are other more complicated options as well. If the player has two cards that count as the same number (two nines, two threes, two face cards, a face card and a 10, for example) he can choose to “split” them. He puts up an additional bet equal to his first bet and plays two hands with the first card in each hand being one member of the pair that he split. Splitting is a really good idea if you get a pair of eights because two eights are sixteen. There is little chance that a sixteen will win and a very high chance that taking another card will put the player over 21 because the high majority of the cards in the deck yield that result. An eight as the first card in a hand, however, is not so bad. A 9, a 10, a face card, or an ace gives the player a playable 17, 18 or 19. A two or three gives the player a 10 or 11 and a strong chance to get 20 or 21 on the next card. A four, five, six, or seven, leaves the player with a difficult hand but one that is not as bad as the original 16. If the player gets another 8, he gets to split again. Splitting eights is a good play. The same is true of a pair of aces but the probabilities are not important.
After his first two cards, a player also has the option to “double down”. To do that, he doubles his bet and gets exactly one more card. This is a good idea when the player has a 10 or 11 because the next card cannot put him over 21 and has a high probability of making a very strong 20 or 21. It can also be very powerful if the player believes that the dealer has a weak hand. Like splitting, however, it is risky because it requires the player to double his wager.
In Blackjack, a 21 wins the vast majority of the time and ties the rest of the time. That is a very good hand. Totals from 12 through 16 do not win unless the dealer busts. That certainly does not happen often enough to make those very good hands. Because those are not very good hands, in most cases players should take another card and hope to improve. Seventeen is a very difficult hand because it is only a winner if the dealer busts but the odds are very high that another card will bust the player. An 18 is a little better because it wins if the dealer has 17 or busts. A 19 is better still and will win more often than not. A 20 is a very good hand. It beats or ties every hand except 21. Getting a 20 is not perfect and does not assure victory but it is very good and is definitely cause for celebration.
How can a person mess up a 20? Suppose that your first two cards are an ace and a nine. You will recall that the ace counts for 1 or 11. The player could decide to count the ace as 1 and double down which would require him to double his bet and receive exactly one more (at this point unidentified) card. The other choice is to count the ace as 11 and stay with 20. Our life rule says we should stay with the 20 even though we might have an opportunity to make more money by doubling down. The reason is simple. The 20 will win the vast majority of the time and will lose to only a few extraordinary hands that allow the dealer to draw to 21. Never mess up a 20.
There is another way to mess up a 20 in Blackjack. If you have two face cards, say a Jack and a King, you have 20. Even though you have a good hand, you have a decision to make. You can double your bet and split the two face cards into two hands in which the starting card is a face card in each of the hands. You might think this is a good idea because you believe the dealer has some more face cards he is about to deal or he might even have an ace in there for you. You might think this is an especially good idea if you are convinced the dealer has a weak hand and will probably bust. If you think that sounds like a good idea, you are wrong. Splitting face cards means that you are trading a very good hand that is very likely to win for two hands, the fate of which is entirely up to the cards. Never mess up a 20.
How does this rule apply outside of a casino? We are faced with situations in which we have the functional equivalent of a 20 all the time. In life, as in Blackjack, never mess up that hand.
Take the example of the very solid marriage. The husband and wife truly love each other. They enjoy spending time together and have common interests and goals. The children are healthy and happy. The in-laws are no problem. Both spouses have good jobs in which their futures are reasonably safe. They make enough money to keep food on the table, a roof over their heads, and have a little left over for retirement savings, entertainment, vacations, and other discretionary spending. They could use more money so they could get a newer car, some nicer furniture and have enough to send the kids to private school. This is a classic 20. The spouses should not mess with the 20 by arguing over finances to the extent that they destroy the good relationship. They should not double down and take an extraordinarily risky job with a big payout and the risk of significant losses. They should not split their face cards by canceling their health insurance in the hope that they will raise enough money to send the kids to private school. Their 20 is a very good hand. They should stay with the hand and strive to make their lives better by avoiding huge risks.
This rule says a lot about how one should view the world. The idea of not messing up a 20 in Blackjack is all based on the probabilities associated with the other options. If you split face cards, you have to double your bet for two hands that have about a 50/50 chance of becoming losers. If you stay with the 20, you do not have to increase your bet and you have about an 80% chance of winning the hand. If you do the math, it becomes very clear that the expected value of staying greatly exceeds the expected value of splitting the cards. The decision will not be right every time but, at the time you make the decision, it has a greater likelihood of being the right decision. If we face every decision in life the same way, we will definitely come out better over the long haul.
Rule Four: Make your own money and marry someone who makes you laugh.
I have observed many married couples over my years. The significant majority of these couples have had multiple marriages. A few of them are happy in their current relationship, but most of them are unhappy with their current relationship. Even those who are happy with their current situation are profoundly unhappy about their prior relationships. There are a few – very few – couples that have been married exclusively to each other. The vast majority of those couples are unhappy and many of them have been unhappy for years.
There are many possible explanations for the difficulty that we have with long-term happy marriages. Some would suggest that the moral fiber of our society is in decay. Others would suggest that marriages fail because of an absence of faith. Some might argue that life is just so much more complicated today. I think there is a more fundamental problem. We consistently marry the wrong people.
Some of us marry for sexual attraction. While that can be fun for the short term, it will not keep a marriage together for any period that can be measured in years. I have known people who married because a relationship was comfortable. However, long-term commitments are rarely, if ever, the result of comfort. When the comfort that one seeks from a marital relationship is financial in nature, the relationship is doomed to fail.
Instead of resigning ourselves to failed relationships, why not practice Rule 4? That rule tells us that we should marry someone who makes us laugh instead of someone who provides financial support. The secret to good relationshps that can stand the test of time and adversity is to marry a person that you can talk to . . . forever. I would submit that it will be very difficult to talk with another person for 10, 20, 30 years or more unless that person makes you laugh on a pretty regular basis.
Have you ever noticed how some older couples eating dinner in a restaurant look like there are having fun and laughing about things while others have a look or resigned misery? Have you also noticed how many more couples fall into the later rather than the former category? Those who cannot think of anything happy while they are together are almost certainly married for economic reasons. They may be financially secure but they are clearly unhappy. At least the few in the former category are happy. If they follow all of Rule 4, they will also be financially secure because Rule 4 teaches us that, in order to be reasonably independent, we should make our own money.
My in-laws are the perfect example of this rule in action. They have been married for more than 5o years and have despised each other for most of that time. They never really enjoyed each other's company and neither found the other amusing in the least. Indeed, they have missed so much laughter that at this point they are no longer capable of being funny or laughing at anything. While my father-in-law was still working, he ran his own business and mother-in-law kept the books. That division of work has some pluses to it and does not immediately violate the rule. For them, the problem really arose after father-in-law sold the business and retired. They continued to live as though they had a substantial income choosing not to plan for retirement. In short, they did not maintain their financial independence. Now they cannot afford to live apart because there is simply not enough money for that. Now they are forced to stay in a an unhappy and unhealthy relationship because of their financial needs.
If only my in-laws had each made their own money and married someone who made them laugh, they might still be happy now. Indeed, if they had stayed financially independent, they could have gone their separate ways and found someone who makes them happy. Conversely, if they had simply married the right person, the lack of financial resources at this point would not make any difference. In the case of Rule 4, those who follow either part f the rule will be better off than those who follow none of it.
Rule For Life Number Four
Rule Three: If you cannot figure out which answer is correct, choose the longest one.
This very important rule has its genesis in my law school days. It is born of desperation. What does a person do, when faced with a time-sensitive critical test and a multiple-choice question that seems incapable of intelligent resolution? Pure guessing is not very helpful unless you always choose the first choice or the last choice or some other completely random treatment. I suppose you can expect to get 25% or so of the answers correct if you employ such a plan. Unfortunately, getting 25% of the answers right will not get you very far. In fact, if you are lucky or know a few of the correct answers and can increase your percentage to 50%, you are still pretty much out of luck. Law school is probably out of the question. If you manage to get in, you can pretty much count on never passing a bar exam.
Faced with those bad choices, I started to look for a more reliable method of “guessing” when the correct answer to a question is not obvious. I noticed that, in part due to the very nature of law tests, it appeared that the longest answer was the right answer in a significant majority of questions, including the ones I thought I could answer. I have subjected my hypothesis to rigorous, albeit anecdotal, testing. During law school and the 25 years since law school, the hypothesis has proved to be correct in an overwhelming number of instances. It has led to the adoption of this important rule for life.
The rule has obvious application to the academic world and even to the world of professional or certification exams. It is not a fool-proof rule and will not give you 100% of the right answers without the benefit of hard work and study (see rule 2) but it is a very good tool and will win you the correct answer often enough to be successful when you are taking a test (see rule 6). Learn the material so that you can be confident of most of your answers but if the test gives you a stumper, pick the longest answer and move along.
How does this rule apply to life generally? Life is full of little tests. Spouses and significant others test us from time to time. Children are constantly testing the boundaries of parental and other authority. Subordinates at work will test their boss’ authority and his resolve. We test the speed limit and the temperament of the police when we drive. We often test our own limits when we drink a little too much, exercise a little too hard, or spend a little too much. The rule applies in all of these situations although finding which answer is the “longest” can present a separate challenge.
Your child is testing you about doing his homework. Because you have read and are apply Rule For Life Number 2, you want him to do it, do it himself, and do it well so that he can succeed at school. He thinks there are about a thousand other things that would be more fun to do. You have had the battle repeatedly. You are at the point where you are about to give up. So what if the kid does poorly in school? He can be a day laborer the rest of his life. It is good honest work. It will build character. If he is as smart as I think he is, he might eventually get to be supervisor and not have to work in the hot sun all day. Like his grandfather. Who died at the age of 54 because all of his parts were worn out. I would submit that giving up in a case like this, while it sounds attractive, is the functional equivalent of the short answer. You should, instead follow the rules and choose the long answer, spending as much time as it takes to make sure that junior does the right thing.
The short answer in many of life’s situations is the answer that seems easy because it will take less time, attention, aggravation, emotional investment, or whatever. It may very well be a good answer for the moment because it will allow you to save time, money, temper, or some other valuable commodity. Those answers are seldom the right answer, however.
The correct answer in our “hypothetical” is to continue to work with the child to make sure he is doing his homework and advancing appropriately at school. That course of action is the “longest” answer in several respects. It requires the most effort from the parent and the most effort from the child. It takes the most time. It causes the most conflict between parent and child and perhaps even between parents. In addition to being generally more taxing, however, spending extra effort to get the child to do his homework is also the answer that provides positive returns over the longest period of time. The student will do better in school and reap the rewards of a better education for the rest of his life. Parent and child both will benefit from the bonding that naturally occurs (perhaps with a little screaming and disagreement thrown in for good measure). The benefits and memories from that bonding experience will also last well after the time-consuming efforts are complete.
Picking the longest answer has two important aspects. The longest answer is the one that takes the most effort to put in to place. Equally important, however, the longest answer is the one that returns the most important benefits over the longest period of time. Choosing the resolution to a problem that will return the greatest dividends over the longest period, even if that course of action takes greater or more time-consuming effort, is a course of action that will inevitably lead to success and happiness. That is why I counseled my daughter to choose the longest answer and that is why the rest of the world should do the same.
Let’s examine how this rule applies at work. Most of us work in some sort of job where our main function is to resolve problems of one sort or another. Teachers daily face the problem that their students (or at least some of them) are ignorant or even lazy and unmotivated. Their job is to solve that problem. Carpenters face significant problems every day when they have to find a way to build with wood and nails what an architect drew with paper and pencil. Architects have to solve the sometimes impossible problem of designing space for a client that wants the impossible. Salesmen are faced daily with solving the problem presented by potential buyers who may not know they want or need the product and definitely do not want to part with any money. I could go on but I think you get the picture.
Applying Rule 3, the correct answer to these test questions is the longest answer. For the teacher with a lazy, unmotivated student, that means spending a little extra time with the child. It may mean applying a little extra creativity to develop learning activities that will motivate the unmotivated. It might mean spending the extra time and emotional effort to call the child’s parents. These are the long answers to the problem because they are the answers that will yield the most long-term benefits even though they require an extra investment of time, effort, and emotional capital.
For the carpenter, the longest answer might be one that requires a special tool or raw material. The longest answer might be no more difficult than calling the architect and discussing the problem so that together, you might find a viable answer that will please the owners. The carpenter might even find that he can accomplish the task with an extra 30 minutes of work. These solutions to the problem all could qualify as the longest answer because they all, in an appropriate case, could yield the best results over the longest term notwithstanding the fact that they may take the most effort.
Country and Western comedian, Jerry Clower, used to talk about how ethical choices were easy. Corporations did not need ethics departments to help people make the right choice. That choice is simple, he said. If you are faced with two choices and you have to ask someone else whether one of those choices is morally right, it is a pretty good bet that the choice is morally wrong. This is yet another example of how we need to choose the longest answer in life. The moral high ground is rarely, if ever, the shortest answer but it is always worth doing. If you have two choices and cannot decide which one is right, it is generally a pretty good bet that the more difficult or time-consuming choice is the right one. That is because it is the longer answer.
Rule For Life Number Three
Rule Two: Do the work yourself. Do not rely on study aides or crutches.
This rule, like most of the Nine Rules, comes to me from my educational experience. I went to law school without knowing very much about the law generally or even about law school specifically. I went to the school book store and spent a great deal of time worrying about how expensive the text books were. I was young, newly married, and on a tight budget. I didn’t notice that there were all sorts of other books one could buy that claimed they would make law school easier. If I had noticed them and believed the claims about how much better off I would be if I bought them, I probably would have avoided them anyway as a cost-saving measure. I eventually learned that there were a wide variety of study aids.
Law students learn the law by reading court decisions and discussing those decisions in class. First year law students are asked to read and brief several cases for each class session. When the student briefs a case, she picks out the important facts and procedural events, identifies the law that the court applied, and describes the manner in which the court applied that law. By reading and briefing several cases on a particular point of law, the law student begins to understand the intricacies of the rules as well as the manner in which those rules are applied to real circumstances. This is how the student learns to think like a lawyer. It is that ability to critically analyze facts and come to legal conclusions that professors are looking for on law school exams. They also look for clarity of expression.
The law school book store sold a series of books called “Case Notes and Legal Briefs”. There was an edition of this helpful series that corresponded to each of the text books that the store carried. The study aid offered you a brief for each of the cases in your text in the same order that the book presented them. I did not find out about these little gems until I had done all of the work myself for a month or two. By that time, I had gotten pretty good at reading and understanding the cases and writing briefs that would help me when it was my random turn to be subjected to the Socratic method. That is the horrible initiation into the law that law professors love to administer. The law professor calls on a student (not a volunteer) and subjects the poor soul to extensive cross-examination about a particular case. It is thought that the other students get something out of the experience because they have the opportunity to witness a discussion about the legal issues presented. It is thought that the student on the hot seat gets something out of the experience because he gets the chance to perform under extraordinary pressure, just like a real courtroom. The masochistic law professors love to inflict pain. The sympathetic professors reject the Socratic method as too harsh and dispense legal understanding through lectures and other less dramatic means.
I decided that I would not use the “canned” briefs because I was already doing the work and getting through it in an efficient manner. I also started to notice that the students who used the canned briefs were the worst performers when it was their turn on the hot seat. I assumed that there was a logical explanation for this. Perhaps the canned briefs just were not very good. Maybe the people who wrote them did not understand the material any better than I did. I rejected this as being unlikely because anyone who had ever heard of the law before had more background than I did. I thought that perhaps the people who were using the canned briefs were reading only the canned briefs and were avoiding reading the actual cases altogether. In that way they could avoid all that tedious reading and the seemingly endless writing of briefs. This seemed somewhat more plausible since the textbooks belonging to the canned brief users looked much newer than the book of canned briefs. This possibility was certainly true with respect to some of the canned brief users and probably presents enough support for the rule all by itself.
As I advanced through law school and eventually in to the practice of law, however, I learned an important truth about the use of canned briefs. The students who used them did not get the benefit of struggling through difficult material and finding the legal gem hidden in the always difficult material. I also discovered that it is through that process that the student actually does the real learning. Having to work through and eventually understand very difficult material is a great process. It is painful and unattractive at the time but the material that one learns through that process will stay with them forever. That is why we must reject study aids and do the work ourselves.
The lessons I learned in law school on this topic felt like new material to me but, as I reflected on my elementary education, I discovered that the axiom was true there as well. I had a very demanding teacher for fifth grade. Mrs. Hadden assigned a great deal of homework and she challenged us every day by advancing the material as far as she thought we could handle it. One of her major goals that year was to teach us how to outline. She did lots of examples on the board and required us to outline the entirety of our history text. She was a task master. Every (A) had to have a (B) and every (1) had to have a (2). I missed a lot of baseball games staying home and producing outlines. At the time I hated her and her stupid outlines.
By the time I got to high school, I noticed that I was producing outlines from class discussions automatically. In college I used outlines all the time. By the time I got to law school, the outline had become absolutely critical. There was no way that a person could mentally organize all of the material required to write an answer to a law school exam with out having first prepared an outline. Indeed, even the fictional accounts of law school like the movies “The Paper Chase” and “Rounders” focus on the work of study groups preparing outlines. I was no exception. I prepared outlines for every class in law school, some by myself and some with a small study group. I learned a great deal about how the law is organized from this process. That gave me the tools I needed to think like a lawyer. It also gave me a way to study for law school exams that kept me focused on what was important.
I eventually found out that the law school book store also sold outlines. I later looked them over and found them to pretty good work. Although the information might have been useful, I never purchased one of these commercial outlines because by this time I knew that the task of outlining was an extremely valuable study aid in itself. In fact, the outlines I prepared turned out to be sufficiently valuable that, later in law school, I sold copies of several of my outlines for the more difficult classes to younger students who did not have the time to do the work themselves. This may seem like a level to which I should not have sunk believing that everyone should do their own work. Recall, however, that I was young, newly married, and on a budget. I needed the cash. The students that purchased outlines from me or from the bookstore made the fatal error of believing that the wisdom was in the outline. In reality, the wisdom was in the process of producing the outline.
Ultimately, the reason my law school outlines were so useful was because Mrs. Hadden taught me how to produce an outline and the value of the outline once it was produced. That was hard work in fifth grade that I did for myself because I did not know there was an alternative. It has stayed with me for many years and helped me most when I was faced with the same problem more than a decade later in law school. I applied the lessons I had learned in fifth grade and did the outlining work myself. That allowed me to succeed in law school and graduate first in my class. That did not happen because I was smarter than everyone else and it certainly did not happen because I was lucky. I succeeded because I worked hard and did the work myself.
I am sure you are convinced that this rule applies to the academic life quite readily and with some very convincing results. But you are probably wondering how it could apply to life outside the ivy covered walls of academia. In reality, this rule applies to life just as readily as it does to school.
I have worked in large companies for a number of years. The problem I observe most often is the large group mentality that allows or encourages people to rely on others to do the hard work. If enough people do that, giant organizations come to a grinding halt. Innovation comes to a standstill. Profits disappear under the weight of bloated overhead costs. No one engages mentally and, eventually, the organization ceases to exist either in fact or in the minds of the people who work for it. Those who end up continuing to work in such organizations are unhappy and cannot wait until retirement. Unfortunately, by the time they retire, they have lost the ability to think for themselves or do anything that requires an investment of time, effort, or emotion. Those people are doomed to lead unhappy, unfulfilling, lives. I do not want to sign up for that duty and neither do you.
Let’s take the example presented by the very talented writers of “The Sopranos”. In the last season of that very popular series, Tony’s son, Anthony Junior, gets kicked out of college because he is failing most of his courses. He gets a job at Blockbuster but eventually gets fired. Tony cannot believe how someone could be so stupid as to get fired from Blockbuster. It turns out that AJ was stealing the large cardboard depictions of movie characters and selling them. He neglects to tell his parents and, instead, spends most of his time doing nothing useful. Tony sees the light and starts to get tough with the kid, forcing him to take a construction job outdoors in the winter.
As part of his own life adventure, Tony finally realized that he had been too soft on AJ. This was at least in part a reaction to the violent way that Tony’s father treated him. Tony ends up regretting that he had not forced AJ to do the hard work himself earlier. Tony’s realization is an important one for all of us. If we really love our family, especially our children, we will force them to do the hard work for themselves. It will pay benefits for their entire lives as they learn to grow, take on work that fulfills them, and, eventually be happy, productive, independent people.
It is true that hard work is difficult and time consuming. It is equally true, however, that hard work is essential to success and, in turn essential to happiness. Do the work yourself and, more important, force your children and loved ones to do the work themselves.
Rule One: If you get thrown in jail, you are going to spend the night so don’t even bother to call me until the next morning.
This first rule may sound a little harsh, especially in its application to teenagers. In the long-honored tradition of legal scholars, this is a perfect example of how hard cases make difficult rules.
The rule has its genesis in the early days of my legal career. I received a call very late one night from my neighbor across the street. He was at the county jail and wanted me to bail him out. I knew that he had three children at home and that his wife was out of town. Since the last thing I wanted was rampaging children across the street, I quickly dressed and headed for the county jail. It turned out that he had been picked up for driving under the influence. By the time I arrived, he did not appear to be intoxicated but I knew that he was having troubles with his business and it did not surprise me that he might have been drinking. I used my bar association membership card to get him released without posting bail.
Over the next few months, I helped him through the court system. As with most people accused of a crime, he maintained that he was innocent and that he had only had a few drinks. By this time, the court system was not yet as strict on drunk drivers as it rightfully is today but the system still required that he do some community service, pay a fine and court costs, and attend a few AA meetings. I thought all of this would be good for him and would significantly decrease the chance that he might drink and drive again. He was, unfortunately, not very impressed.
Six months later I received a call from his wife very early one morning. My friend and neighbor had died the night before in a terrible crash in which the other driver was drunk. As we would later find out, my friend was also drunk at the time. Based on what we learned of his business affairs later, it was entirely possible that he may have committed suicide in that crash and depended on the drink to give him the nerve to do it.
The death of my friend was devastating on his family. One of the three kids had trouble coping with school and other issues. His widow found her way into serious financial trouble between a life insurance premium that did not get paid and some ill-conceived spending following the tragedy. She married a man on the rebound who turned out to be abusive at best. The family eventually righted itself and they are all well and happy but for a decade or so after the wreck, they suffered needlessly.
As I worked to help them pick up the pieces of their life and cope with tragedy of unfathomable proportions, one thought occurred to me over and over again. Would my friend still be alive if I had helped him see the error of his way when he was first arrested for driving while intoxicated?
My fears were confirmed when I received a call a few months later from another neighbor and friend who had been put in jail for the same offense. I decided that I would try my best to keep this one alive by forcing him to stay overnight in jail until I bailed him out. When I arrived at the jail the next morning, I had to wait with the others who were picking up friends or loved ones at the jail, likely for similar offenses. This was the toughest group of people I had ever seen. If I had encountered this group anywhere other than the police station, I would have run away as fast as I could and promised whoever I saw that I would never return. When they finally released my friend, he was very thankful and was especially grateful for my rescuing him before he actually had to eat any of the jail food. I suspect that if he had seen the group waiting for the other inmates, he would have been more grateful than he originally realized.
I helped this friend negotiate his way through the justice system as well. By this time, the courts had become a bit more serious about drunk drivers. As a result, his fines were more expensive and he served more public service time. At the end of the process, he paid his bill, thanked me for the help, and said that he would never do anything that would put him at risk of going through that again. I believed him at the time and, as it turned out, he was right. He never spent another night in jail and is alive today.
I decided at that point that I would apply this seemingly harsh rule to my children who were obviously much more important to me than my neighbors. At the ripe old age of five, if you had asked either of my children what happens if you get thrown in jail, they would have said, “You spend the night in jail and in the morning Daddy will come and pick you up.” To this point neither of them has committed an offense sufficient to put the rule to the test and they are both now in college. That is a good thing on two levels. It is obviously a virtue to have stayed out of jail through your teenage years. It is even better, however, to survive your teenage years. For that I am happy and more convinced today than I was 25 years ago when this story started that rule number one must be nobody gets out of jail until they have spent one night behind bars.
Another friend and neighbor from a different chapter in my life had the right idea about instilling responsibility in her children. Her oldest child was arrested for a relatively minor offense. She called me to ask some questions and seemed to be leaning toward the utterly stupid response of many parents when their child is disciplined. She seemed to be asking about ways she could get her son out of trouble so that his records or his insurance or whatever would not be negatively impacted. I asked her to describe her encounter with the police. The police started to tell her what was going to happen to her child. She stopped the officer in mid-sentence and said, “You do whatever you need to do with him. There is not anything you can do that would be worse than what I am going to do when he gets home.” That is the right attitude. If you are faced with a loved one who has engaged in some sort of transgression, whether it is minor or major, there is no greater gift you can give that person than to force them to be accountable for their actions. You will be glad you did it every day of their life while they are behaving properly and acting like solid members of our society. Imagine what a better world this would be if every troubled youngster had received that same gift.
As with the rest of the Nine Rules, this one has numerous parallels. The concept that people are and should be responsible for their own actions seems fundamental enough. It is clear, nonetheless, in our modern society that the public is generally unwilling to accept that tenet. A football super star is acquitted of murder when his blood was all over the scene. Some of us are actually surprised when he later writes a book contemplating how he would have committed the murders, if he had done it. A sitting President is allowed to continue serving after lying and degrading the office with nearly unbelievable sexual encounters. Notwithstanding those facts, his wife stays with him, even if only for the sake of political expedience. These are the acts of a society that is unwilling or unable to hold people responsible for their acts. I gave my children the clear message that they would be responsible for their own acts and I gave them that message at a very young age. They certainly are not perfect but they understand responsibility. I submit that the world would be a much better place if everyone was willing and able to accept responsibility for their actions. A few nights in jail might go a long way to making that dream come true.
If you want to grow to an old age or if you want your family to grow to an old age, you must take responsibility for your actions and see to it that your family is held accountable as well.
Fortunately for most people, the night in jail rule is never actually put to the test. Very few of us get that call at midnight from one of our children who is, through no fault of their own, temporarily residing in the custody of the state. Very few of us have to agonize over the tough love we are giving to our child for what must be a very long night. So how can we apply this rule in the real world? Some examples should clarify the point.
My son was a reasonably well-behaved student in elementary school. He was not exactly genius level but he made acceptable grades for the most part and seemed to get along reasonably well with his teachers. We had never really received any harsh messages from teachers or administrators. That all changed literally in his last week of fifth grade when I received a call from the principal. My first reaction was to assume that she was going through her list of fifth graders and calling the parents of the ones who had not yet gotten in trouble just so that we could have the experience of a call from the principal. I was wrong.
My son had written the principal a letter. In it he described a variety of grievances resulting from mistreatment by his teacher. At about the same time, he had neglected to hand in an important assignment that was going to have a profound impact on his final grades. I was proud of the fact that he had composed a well-written letter that commanded the principal’s attention but I was concerned about his failure to hand in an assignment on which I knew he had worked.
Some parents would have immediately seen a connection between the letter and the supposedly lost homework and would have immediately turned on the teacher in an effort to defend their offspring. The problem with such an approach is that it teaches the child that blame for their current problems can be readily shifted from them to others without any real regard for where the problem actually lies. The night in jail approach, however, teaches the child that he is responsible for his lot in life even if others may have had an impact on his current position.
I have no idea how the homework got lost (neither did son, by the way) but I did not especially care. I let him know right away that it was his responsibility to turn in his homework and that I was disappointed he had failed in this regard. This should not come as much of a surprise but this was neither the first nor the last conversation we had that was consumed, for the most part, by this same theme. I also let him know that it was not a good idea to consume my time dealing with his school problems because my billing rate at the time was a seemingly reasonable $200 per hour. He offered to pay for my time which I thought was a nice gesture, even if somewhat hollow given his annual income as a fifth grader.
I agreed to go with him to visit with his teacher. We did not mention either the letter or the substance or fact of any of his complaints. I told the teacher that I knew he had worked on the assignment because I had witnessed it with my own eyes. I also said that he accepted responsibility for not turning the assignment in. I told her that I was going to make him do the assignment in any event because I wanted him to learn the material and I also wanted him to understand that he cannot avoid work by ignoring it. By this point, he was willing to accept any conditions to get out of his mess. She agreed to give him one-half the normal credit if he handed it in the next day. He thanked her for her understanding and did a nice job on the assignment that evening. He did well enough to earn an A which the teacher reduced to a C as we agreed.
At the time I am sure he thought this was all about getting a good grade. Of course, that was not the point at all. The point was that he had to accept responsibility for his actions and, while this lesson probably did not make that happen, consistent delivery of that message to children drives home the point. Imagine how different our current legal system would be if OJ Simpson and the members of his jury had understood this basic concept and applied it to regular people and celebrities alike.
Learning to accept responsibility is an absolutely critical life skill. Giving those who you love a complete understanding of the principle of accountability is even more important.
Why Publish Nine Rules?
This site was inspired by an assignment that I received from one of my daughter’s teachers during her senior year of High School. This was a new approach to school right from the outset. I do not recall having signed up for homework when I registered my daughter for school. And I sure do not recall my father ever completing assignments sent home by my teachers. Being a contemporary Dad, however, I put all of that aside and considered the assignment.
I was asked to write down advice that I would give to my daughter as she went off to college. I gave the assignment more than a little bit of thought. I considered writing my daughter a letter that would try to anticipate all of the problems and issues that might come up and providing solutions to those problems. I rejected that course of action because it did not appear to serve any real purpose and because I did not think I was qualified to anticipate all of the problems a young college woman could anticipate. I also was repeatedly drawn to a set of fairly simple rules I had shared with my daughter from an early age. Most of them were crafted from specific circumstances that likely had little or no application to daughter’s life but in a strange way, they all seemed applicable not just to her life at college, but also to her life beyond college. Best of all, the rules were quite familiar to the Princess.
There is a great deal of wisdom crammed in to the Nine Rules. The rules sound quite specific in many cases but with a little imagination (some of which I have tried to inspire) the rules are really very broad and will apply, with a little friendly bending and stretching, to all kinds of difficulties we face every day. I offer them for your use and enjoyment. I hope they make one of your more difficult moments easier to resolve or at least that they give you the opportunity to, as I have, laugh at myself and my own problems as a highly evolved coping mechanism.
The Nine Rules
The next four years may be the most enjoyable of your life. Take advantage of this opportunity. Enjoy yourself, and take time to learn something while you are there. Dad’s nine rules for college and life are the ones you already know. Apply them every day.
1. If you get thrown in jail, you are going to spend the night so don’t even bother to call me until the next morning.
2. Do the work yourself. Do not rely on study aids or other crutches.
3. If you cannot figure out which answer is correct, choose the longest one.
4. Make your own money and marry someone who makes you laugh.
5. Be good. If you can’t be good, be careful.
6. Never mess up a 20.
7. Always have a bag of pretzels available.
8. If you cannot tell who the sucker is, it is probably you.
9. Quid pro quo. Everything has a cost.