Do You Have to Be Evil to Succeed?
Is decency a disadvantage?
I’m 45 now and as I look back at my life I see numerous situations I could have leveraged into a lot more money. I’m not talking about mistakes where I failed to perceive an opportunity. I’m talking about opportunities that I recognized and intentionally rejected because they didn’t comply with my sense of personal morality.
When I look at the lives of some of the people I grew up with, it’s not so difficult to deduce where their assets came from. As a matter of decorum, society conditions us not to consider ill-gotten gains. This lack of awareness is similar to the concept that we shouldn’t discuss politics or religion at a family dinner.
“See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.”
But our willful ignorance does not provide us with a reprieve from the consequences of evil. I personally believe that it is better to adopt a moral code and live a life of honesty and dignity. However, it’s disingenuous to say that liars and cheaters do not gain a significant advantage. We must also not fail to acknowledge that some of these disreputable people escape consequences entirely.
Cheating
I’ve been fortunate enough in life in that I’ve always been able to do well on tests without cheating. In school, I flirted with the idea of making “cheat sheets,” but I found that by the time I had finished writing them, I generally knew the material.
Other kids cheated, of course, and sometimes those kids ended up with better grades than I did. Consider that for a moment. First, our society does not condone busting a cheater. It might claim that it does, but the reality is that if you get a kid in trouble for cheating, you’re a rat. You’re done socially. You better just keep your mouth shut.
So that kid cheats and graduates with a better GPA than you, and when the time comes to get a job, he is chosen instead of you because of a superior transcript. The only time that people ever claim that grades don’t matter is when you’ve been unfairly scored and you’re trying to combat injustice. The rest of the time, your grades do matter.