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Thirteen Observations made by Lemony Snicket while watching Occupy Wall Street from a Discreet Distance

1. If you work hard, and become successful, it does not necessarily mean you are successful because you worked hard, just as if you are tall with long hair it doesn’t mean you would be a midget if you were bald.

2. “Fortune” is a word for having a lot of money and for having a lot of luck, but that does not mean the word has two definitions.

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When two British lawyers, Faith Zaman and Thomas Derbyshire, signed on in 2004 to manage the affairs of Prince Jefri Bolkiah, notorious playboy brother of the Sultan of Brunei, they entered a world of orgiastic wealth: 250 companies, 2,000 cars, luxury hotels, planeloads of women and polo ponies, colossal diamonds.

The only way to make sense of Dubai is to never forget that it is not real. It is a fable, a fairy tale. More correctly, it is a cautionary tale. Dubai is the story of the three wishes, where, as every kid knows, with the third wish you demand three more wishes. And as every genie knows, more wishes lead to more greed, more misery, more bad credit, and much, much, much more bad taste.

Dubai is Las Vegas without the showgirls, the gambling, or Elvis. Dubai is a financial Disneyland without the fun. The first thing you see when you arrive is the airport, with its echoing marble halls. It is big enough to be the hub of a continent. Dubai suffers from gigantism -- a national inferiority complex that has to make everything bigger and biggest. This includes their financial crisis.

I drove up [to Wise County]. It was 50 miles. And I got to the fairgrounds. The parking lot was jam-packed. It was a rainy day. I couldn't see any activity outside the fairground gates. Once I went inside, it was such a stark contrast to what was on the outside. People were lined up by the hundreds, standing or sitting in long lines, many of them without shelter, in the rain, getting soaking wet, waiting for hours to get care that was being provided in animal stalls, in many cases, and in barns and under tents that had been set up, like MASH units at a wartorn site. And it was just so startling for me to see that.

I realized, when I saw those folks, that many of them could have been people I grew up with. My relatives could have been there. And they were people who, I learned later, most of them have jobs. They just don’t have jobs that offer insurance benefits. And a lot of them do have insurance, but they’re in these new kinds of plans that insurance companies are pushing more of us into, that have such high deductibles or limited benefits that we can’t get the care we need, even if we’re sending our premium dollars in. When I saw that, it was almost as if I was supposed to be seeing something like that to jolt me out of the complacency that I had been in for all these many years.

A trip I took on a corporate jet just a couple of weeks after that experience, flying from Philadelphia, where CIGNA is based, to its healthcare operations in Connecticut. And we were served -- the CEO and I -- lunch on gold-rimmed china, and we were given gold-plated flatware to eat it with. And we were sitting in a very luxurious leather chair, flying in a corporate jet that cost $5,000 an hour to operate, or just the jet fuel alone was $5,000. And for the first time, I was paying attention to what I was doing. And I realized that the people in Wise County and elsewhere in this country were in the predicaments they were so that I could fly around in such luxury to get from one place to another.

Money really can buy you happiness -- or at least one form of it, according to the biggest study to examine the relationship between income and well-being around the world. Pulling in the big bucks makes people more likely to say they are happy with their lives overall -- whether they are young or old, male or female, or living in cities or remote villages. The survey, dubbed the "first representative sample of planet Earth," was conducted by Gallup and involved detailed questioning in 2005 and 2006 of 136,839 residents age 15 and older in 132 countries throughout the world. The samples in each country were designed to be nationally representative and represent about 96 percent of the world's population.

"Yes, money makes you happy; the effect of income on life satisfaction is very strong and virtually ubiquitous and universal around the world," said Ed Diener, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Illinois who led the study. "But it makes you more satisfied than it makes you feel good. Positive feelings are less affected by money and more affected by the things people are doing day to day." Previous studies had suggested that money was associated with happiness, but the relationship appeared weak. Earlier work tended to focus on individual countries and global evaluations of life without parsing out the effects on specific positive and negative emotions or examining differences across nations.

The new survey -- the first large international study to differentiate between overall life satisfaction and day-to-day emotions -- makes that crucial distinction, allowing researchers to explore the elusive concept of happiness in much greater nuance. "When people evaluate their life, they compare themselves to a standard of what a successful life is, and it turns out that standard tends to be universal: People in Togo and Denmark have the same idea of what a good life is, and a lot of that has to do with money and material prosperity," said Daniel Kahneman, a professor emeritus of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University. "That was unexpected."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/01/AR2010070100039.html

http://holykaw.alltop.com/the-art-of-motivating-employees