{"id":1253,"date":"2013-07-25T12:05:17","date_gmt":"2013-07-25T17:05:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/civilsocietytrust.org\/blog\/?p=1253"},"modified":"2013-07-25T12:05:17","modified_gmt":"2013-07-25T17:05:17","slug":"economic-success-isnt-achieved-just-by-working-hard-mr-president","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/civilsocietytrust.org\/blog\/2013\/07\/25\/economic-success-isnt-achieved-just-by-working-hard-mr-president\/","title":{"rendered":"Economic Success Isn’t Achieved Just By Working Hard, Mr. President"},"content":{"rendered":"

Like lamenting against your ongoing inability to levitate, as hard as you work at it, you\u2019re going to be lamenting for a long time, Mr. President, if you think the lack of economic progress by the middle class is going to change under your policies.\u00a0\u00a0 Such will be the case when you fundamentally fail to understand where economic success comes from.<\/p>\n

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\"Cover<\/a>Throughout yesterday\u2019s\u00a0self-proclaimed \u201cimportant speech\u201d on our economy<\/a>, you decried the seeming injustice of a person who \u201cworks hard\u201d, only to come up short.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 But if hard work were all that was required for success, we could simply encourage people to repeatedly dig holes with hand shovels and then fill them back up.\u00a0\u00a0 Backbreaking work for sure, and a task that has a great track record of not making people rich.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Where you and your fellow policy-makers consistently miss the mark is in never realizing that hard work for hard work\u2019s sake achieves nothing.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0What really counts is pleasing people.<\/em><\/p>\n

To please someone, you have to put that other person\u2019s needs ahead of your own.\u00a0 It\u2019s an inherently giving act.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 You have to know the wants of the other person, and then do something that\u00a0they<\/em>\u00a0value. \u00a0It\u2019s the very opposite of the \u201cMe Generation\u201d, the rise of which might just correlate with your noted middle-class stagnation.<\/p>\n

If you want to achieve a lot of success, do something that a lot of people value.\u00a0\u00a0 And if you want extreme success, do something that a lot of people value, but in a way that very few other people can do.\u00a0\u00a0 This, and only this, explains why top entertainers, for example, make what they make \u2013 they make a lot of people very happy, and their skills are incredibly difficult to duplicate.<\/p>\n

Continue reading at Forbes Opinions…<\/a><\/p>\n

Follow at Twitter<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Like at Facebook<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Like lamenting against your ongoing inability to levitate, as hard as you work at it, you\u2019re going to be lamenting for a long time, Mr. President, if you think the lack of economic progress by the middle class is going to change under your policies.\u00a0\u00a0 Such will be the case when you fundamentally fail to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,11,8],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/civilsocietytrust.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1253"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/civilsocietytrust.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/civilsocietytrust.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/civilsocietytrust.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/civilsocietytrust.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1253"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/civilsocietytrust.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1253\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1255,"href":"http:\/\/civilsocietytrust.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1253\/revisions\/1255"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/civilsocietytrust.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1253"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/civilsocietytrust.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1253"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/civilsocietytrust.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1253"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}