Point & Glick

There isn’t much of this. How­ever, this is where most of the finan­cial know-how and entre­pre­neur­ship comes from. That’s right, it’s genetic. As proof, allow me to use a well-known exam­ple from all of our child­hoods:
When you were a child there were the kids who were like me – lazy. I never tried to mow the lawn for money, I never tried to shovel the dri­ve­way for money, hell, I never even tried to sell lemonade.

Then there were the kids who did try to make some money by doing what we nor­mal peo­ple call chores. These kids can be split up into two, eas­ily iden­ti­fi­able groups. The first group is not very large and is mainly pop­u­lated by future accoun­tants and Bill Gates. These were the kids who would trawl the entire neigh­bor­hood, sub­tly insult­ing and sab­o­tag­ing all the other kids’ attempts at mak­ing money. You know what I’m talk­ing about. The lit­tle snot would walk up to the door of a big house that’s at least 12 blocks away from where he lived and when the well-to-do-but-elderly-and-infirm-silver-haired-lady opened the door, he would almost bow.
“Good morn­ing, Mrs. Liv­er­spleen! I see that your lawn/walk is cov­ered in grass/snow. Now, either, “he would con­tinue, half-sniggering in a way that would seem obscene and pos­si­bly ille­gal if he was any older, or Mrs. Liv­er­spleen any younger, “either you were kind enough to allow lit­tle Joel Hic­cup­schmit to mow/shovel your lawn/walk, or nobody has been kind enough to offer to do so. Please, allow me to take care of it for you.”

Of course, Mrs. Liv­er­spleen would let him and he would do a fab­u­lous job, since that’s the kind of job a kid like that does, and Mrs. Liv­er­spleen would never even think of let­ting a bright, tal­ented and dar­ling young man like that do such a fab­u­lous job with­out some sort of com­pen­sa­tion. You or I would get lemon­ade and speech about her child­hood, but this lit­tle snot ends up mak­ing $17.50 an hour. And a shot of whiskey.
Of course, should poor lit­tle Joel Hic­cup­schmit ever come knock­ing to try and do a few chores, he’ll be chased away (albeit, at a slow speed) with a broom.

How­ever, there is another group. This group is pop­u­lated by poor, lit­tle Joel Hic­cup­schmit, and by Rex Luzer, and many, many other kids. This is the group that sucks. They don’t mean to, but they do. It shouldn’t even reflect badly on them. They have won­der­ful inten­tions; they try their hard­est. They just end up half done and some­thing hor­ri­ble hap­pens. Like the elec­tric lawnmower’s cord gets unplugged and they think it’s out of gas so they try refill­ing it, and the owner of the house sees the loose cord and plugs it back in and the poor sod ends up send­ing curse words via smoke sig­nals that are vis­i­ble from outer space.
Or they do a superb job shov­el­ing the walk, and then the tree that over­hangs the walk spon­ta­neously com­busts and the melted ice lands on the walk which, being cold, imme­di­ately freezes the water. Of course the poor kid went inside to get the owner and when the owner comes out to view their freshly shov­eled walk, they end up going on a very short and single-manned luge into the street, just when the snow plow is dri­ving by in the government’s effort to insure that every dri­ve­way in the state is blocked.

Yes, I am refer­ring to you and me. (Okay, not me; since we already estab­lished that I was too lazy to even bother try­ing in the first place. But I didn’t want you to feel lonely.) The key here is that you’re try­ing. You may not be suc­ceed­ing, but you’re try­ing. And that is why you bought this book. (Unless you bought this book because you needed a last minute gift and you were about to get the Best of SNL: The Knock-Knock Jokes when the guy behind you who reminded you of the nerd in 7^th grade every­one beat up told you that it was his sec­ond favorite book, just after the Lord of the Sword of the Chron­i­cles of the Lion, the Ring and Flame series of 43 books and 12 appen­dixes. At that point you picked up the clos­est book at hand and bought that instead. Of course, since you gave it as a gift instead of read­ing it, I shouldn’t be blab­bing this all over town. Oops.)
Where were we… Oh yes, we were about to discuss…

Dis­cus­sion Questions

1. Do you think this first chap­ter is a load of crock? Explain and bring proofs. (10 pts.)
2. Do you think you will get graded on the dis­cus­sion ques­tions? (10 pts. if you answered “No”, –746 pts. if you answered “Yes”.)