As the woman pulled the Christmas ham out of the oven, her son saw an odd feature:
Both ends were cut off.
When he asked his mother why she’d cut off the ends of the ham, she said that’s what HER mother had always done. She’d never thought to ask why.
They got grandma on the phone.
Turns out, grandma cut the ends off HER Christmas ham because that’s what HER mother had always done.
So they phoned up great grandma to get to the bottom of it.
After realizing she’d unwittingly started a multi-generational ham-trimming tradition, great grandma gave a long cackle into the phone: as it turns out, the one pan she’d owned back then was EXCEEDINGLY SMALL… so small, in fact, that she had to cut the ends off the ham every Christmas just to make it fit.
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Sometimes the conventions we take to be timeless and universal are in fact borne of specific, finite circumstances.
Take, for example, “good work ethic.”
In a relatively free nation, where each man owned the fruits of his labor, a “good work ethic” served him well.
But that is not our world.
In our system of increasing slavery, where that ownership is not automatic but must be fought tooth and nail for… good work ethic is no longer sufficient.
In a system that depends on a ready supply of worker drones, “good work ethic” leads our children straight into the slaver’s noose.
So don’t teach your children “good work ethic.”
Teach them RESULTS ETHIC.
Show them, by word, and by example, the new dispensation:
That they must hold each expenditure of sweat and heart and capital accountable to RESULTS.
That work for work’s sake is folly.
That they must own as much of their work’s ecosystem as possible, lest they be the unwitting cog in someone else’s machine.
So please: next time you open your mouth to ape the old convention and teach your children the value of a “good work ethic”… give them a better gift:
Show them the spoils that await the results-obsessed.
Teach them to aspire not to work that will merely keep them fed, but to the work that will set them free.
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Related: How Your Soul Dies
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