Ben Stein How Not to Ruin Your Life

Yahoo! Finance User - Monday, December 17, 2007, 7:15PM ET  Report Abuse

• Overall: 1/5

I still wonder why Ben is writing articles for Yahoo Finance - articles that have little to do with Finance in any way. If I had a wealthy wife like his 'friend' I wouldn't work either. How is the US by far the largest economy in the world per capita? Because of our productivity, ingenuity, and our capitalist system! Not sure why he thinks Americans don't work hard - maybe he should visit some of our European counterparts where they take 2-3 months 'holiday' every year and only work 30-35 hr ave. weeks the rest of the year -- how hard can that work be? Ben, please enjoy your millions and stop writing your ridiculous ramblings that in most every instance put down your 'friends' in one way or another. ps - how do you have friends left after you've slammed them all in your column?

Yahoo! Finance User - Thursday, December 13, 2007, 1:39PM ET  Report Abuse

• Overall: 5/5

Good luck getting lazy parents to enroll their lazy children into work camp. AMERICA NEEDS TO GET TO WORK. We are quickly becoming the laughing stock of the working world. I own a small business and 75% of my employees spend more time evading work than just doing their damn job. An honest hard days work isn't in most of America's vocabulary anymore. It's more like how can I get a free ride or who can I con or scam today to get money. I am not a bible beater, but God gave us all a purpose and laying on the couch probably wasn't one on the list. Good luck folks, I hope you enjoy being my waiter or waitress when you are 65 and I am retired at 50. Nice piece Ben, now get some clear eyes for your dry, irritated, red eyes.

Yahoo! Finance User - Monday, December 10, 2007, 1:57AM ET  Report Abuse

• Overall: 4/5

Yes, there's something to be said for work. I'm 56 and retired early a little over a year ago. Traveled around the world for a year and now I'm back in the USA, at least temporarily. It's funny, but I feel as though I should be doing something more constructive every day than just fooling around. Doing what, I'm not sure, but doing nothing gets old after a while. Or maybe I just haven't mastered the art of laying around?

Charlie - Thursday, December 6, 2007, 7:29PM ET  Report Abuse

• Overall: 5/5

Ben, this article is awesome. The only thing that I didn't agree with specifically is joining the Marines, because some might be against what the military stands for and what they do in this day and age. It would have been better if you said, "the United States Marines or the Peace Corps." In fact, compulsory service such as AmeriCorps or something similar might be just want this country needs. Then again, you have to realize that you can't have people that are well-off without people that are poor.

Robert K - Tuesday, December 4, 2007, 8:42PM ET  Report Abuse

• Overall: 4/5

Ben is a very funny man, and his insights into the need for work are right on. But, my god, I don't think I'd want to be his friend after reading how he's ripped them.

Steve - Tuesday, December 4, 2007, 6:24PM ET  Report Abuse

• Overall: 5/5

Most comments here rip on the current generation but all of Ben's friends are from his generation and his age ~60s. This has nothing to do with 20 or 30 year olds. And Yes we have it much worse than out parents. They used most of the US natural resources before most of us hit our 20s. Oh well; what can you do. Just don't have any kids and work\enjoy life in balance.

Bruce - Friday, November 30, 2007, 6:09AM ET  Report Abuse

• Overall: 4/5

Good article, but I'm afraid they would just get a doctor's excuse for staying out of work camp.

Yahoo! Finance User - Thursday, November 29, 2007, 7:02PM ET  Report Abuse

• Overall: 4/5

I don't believe the point is people need to know how to do manual labor, but that they must know how to work hard. I think the author is correct in assuming many people today can finish college without also learning how to really contribute when they finish school

Yahoo! Finance User - Wednesday, November 28, 2007, 5:47PM ET  Report Abuse

• Overall: 3/5

Us in the younger generation have no choice but to work hard, seeing as the Boomers and the so-called "Greatest Generation" have devised so many whacko social programs to pay for with MY tax dollars and their completly reckless borrow and spend policies that have plagued government also take place in their personal lives. Need an example, look at the housing market. Prices that are high because of artificial increases in demand that jacked up prices. I'm going to make over $70k this year living in NJ (don't even get me started on that government), and I have to live with parents still because that only places that I can RESPONSIBLY afford to pruchase are in areas among low-life scum that live off the government.

Yahoo! Finance User - Wednesday, November 28, 2007, 4:15PM ET  Report Abuse

• Overall: 2/5

Since I read this at work he must have some sense of what people really do with their days.

Yahoo! Finance User - Wednesday, November 28, 2007, 3:44PM ET  Report Abuse

• Overall: 3/5

It sounds to me like Ben's commenting on his generation - the baby boomers, the "me generation." I'm desperately seeking work now in the Rust Belt after finishing an MBA in Finance. I worked an incredibly crummy sales job, 50-60 hours plus, while going to grad school, and I've been unemployed for a year, despite spending hours and hours every day applying, interviewing, networking, etc. I'm very glad I saved my money!! My wife and kids would be pretty hungry and cold if I hadn't. I do have a number of interviews coming up for very high paying jobs - I hope to heck my interviewer is either in his or her 30's or well past 60!! What I do remember from my last job was how people in their 50's and 60's were hell on wheels to manage. Their education was nil, their jobs were very very basic, and they took terrible care of their appearance & health. But they seemed to feel they were entitled to an extra-special level of "respect" because they were "older." They were also dishonest, uncooperative, and of limited use - but the firm I worked at had such a rigid bureaucracy I was forced to go through them. Their utter nastiness was one of the reasons I left; none of them felt the need to work very hard, either. The younger staff and younger professionals did virtually all of the heavy lifting. I don't suspect this is an exception in much of corporate america. The younger generation seems to be forced to pay huge taxes and enormous insurance bills, pay huge student loans, usurious rents or mortgages, and astronomical food prices as a direct result of boomer selfishness. Labor and plantiff laws, confiscatory income and payroll taxes; utterly silly corporate trends like "diversity" (aka, "exclusion"), gender preferences, top-down useless bureaucracies, sinecures for middle managers, and the invention of the superfluous, expensive, and useless HR department can be traced, in large part, to baby boomer, leftist idiocy. Ben's right. They need to learn how to work - but by the time one hits 40, 50, and 60 years of age, that's a skill they're unlikely to acquire. In the meantime their kids and grandkids will have to support them in their dotage, although their own parenting and marital records were often beyond poor.

Farm - Wednesday, November 28, 2007, 2:48PM ET  Report Abuse

• Overall: 1/5

Please parents do not sign your children up for labor camp. In this part of the world , there is an inverse relationship between the difficulty of the work and the pay. The most money is made by those who do no work. Hard work is mainly done in this country by immigrants, many from South America and Mexico. I think the Author of this article has written it to amuse his upper strata friends with tongue in cheek. Oh how amusing! The relevance of this to the rest of us working stiffs is difficult to fathom.

Niha - Wednesday, November 28, 2007, 1:56PM ET  Report Abuse

• Overall: 4/5

Another great article, full of wisdom too. Gaurav, I don't understand your comment that Ben should get new friends. He did not write the article to complain about his friends' work ethics (or lack thereof). Ben's point is that young people today don't know the meaning of "hard work". The definition of hard work does not, and should not, change from one generation to the next.

FlameM - Wednesday, November 28, 2007, 1:55PM ET  Report Abuse

• Overall: 5/5

I really enjoyed reading this article, because in all honesty, it's very true. I'm 18 and most, if not all, of my friends don't have jobs, even those in college. Everyone is being babied by their parents who pay for their cars, their college tuition, almost everything. Where does that leave them when they get older, when they don't really have a mommy and daddy to rely on for money anymore? I've been working since I was 14 because my dad refused to baby me, a fact which pissed me off many times since all of my friends had everything handed to them on a silver platter, but after 4 years (and many more to come) I realized that in the longterm, I'm the one who's going to have the better end of the deal. I won't need dad to lean on, I already know the get up, eat, go to work process, and eventually, I'll take one of these routes: "I'll either work for the company, or own the company". Dad's quote, not mine. And I'm not saying everyone my age are lazy bums who are spoiled, because that definitely isn't true. I know a few people who have worked hard to buy their own cars and pay for college, among other things. Not to be dramatic or anything, but those are a dying breed. And in the end, it'll pay off and be worth the years of hard work you put in.

GT - Wednesday, November 28, 2007, 1:30PM ET  Report Abuse

• Overall: 1/5

Ben you need to get new friends. Most of my friends work really hard in their jobs. I think that the generation today has more pressures on them to perform well since the baby boomers did so well in their generation. All of my friends work really hard towards what they do. I work my full 40 hours a week, go to Grad school and at the same time studying for my CFA. There are lots of students who actually to this also becasue they want to perform well. so seriously, a day's of hard work....we are one of the most productive economies in the world today not to mention the fact that we do not even utilize our vacation days fully. I do not agree with what you have to say. Get new friends!!!

Donx - Wednesday, November 28, 2007, 1:15PM ET  Report Abuse

• Overall: 1/5

I thought that being successful was acheiving the kind of leisure Ben seems to disdain. Life can be much more satisfying with more reasonable, healthy and even spiritual goals. A very "successful" school mate of mine, a district attorney, just died at 48 while watching TV after a long day of work. He worked very hard for long hours toward a future for himself. I, on the other hand, have worked as little as possible, minimized my stress, minimized my material needs, and made sure I enjoyed the hell out of myself every single day I could. I am still alive. Who is (was) more successful? I have a degree in philosophy and decided to work jobs where I have very little responsibility, mostly because I don't want to participate in the pervasive predatory aspects of capitalism. Why are people like Ben, who are so rich and successful, so angry and nasty to everyone else? What a toad! What good is "success" if you go around sneering at, judging and resenting everyone else, and rising your blood pressure about what you think others deserve or not? Go count your shekels and shut up! The rest of us have interests and lives to live outside of work.

qaa - Wednesday, November 28, 2007, 12:37PM ET  Report Abuse

• Overall: 4/5

He may have actually pegged the current generation coming out into the workforce. I'd pay to send my new hires to that camp.

Regina - Wednesday, November 28, 2007, 12:14PM ET  Report Abuse

• Overall: 2/5

Seriously, maybe you should find a new set of friends. Most of my college friends have full-time jobs. I personally have been working 35 hours a week since my high school days. Think a lot of it comes down to how a person is raised.

John S - Wednesday, November 28, 2007, 12:03PM ET  Report Abuse

• Overall: 5/5

Some great ideas as usual.

myob - Wednesday, November 28, 2007, 11:52AM ET  Report Abuse

• Overall: 1/5

Baloney. Everyone I know works their ass off. Ben Stein may hang out with a comfortable crowd, but that's not representative of what's going on in general.

William - Wednesday, November 28, 2007, 11:44AM ET  Report Abuse

• Overall: 3/5

I know how to work. I'm good at my job, I'm good with other people and my employee evaluations have reflected this (25 reviews in 12 years - all either exceeds expectations or outstanding). The problem, which the article ignores, is that many employers have forgotten that hard work is to be rewarded. In my group we have people who share the same job titles and general responsibilities, but not the same workload. If carry a higher workload, handle the more complicated projects and deliver better results with less supervision than the next guy, then our salaries should differ by a lot more than 5-10%. For the past 5 years raises for high performs and average performers have differed by one quarter to one half a percentage point. That's a joke. After 10 years the salaries of a consistent high performer would differ from that of an average employee by 5% or less. After working like a dog in 2005 and 2006, getting "outstanding" ratings and seeing my pay/bonus actually DECREASE, it finally dawned on me that pay was not connected to performance and that I was being a sucker. So I slacked off. I still got my work done, but I took 90 minute lunches almost every day and hardly ever stayed late or worked from home. End result at evaluation time was another above average rating and a 3% raise. I expect to be promoted next month, too. Not because my lack of hard work is being rewarded, but because it's time for me to be promoted. It's an automatic process that doesn't seem to be affected by how well or how poorly I do my job. This is a multi-billion dollar company that makes a billion in net profits annually and has never lost money in the 12 years I've been here. They can afford to pay the performers. I don't expect to be showered with riches for showing up, but I do expect the pay for a high performer to increase faster than inflation (past 5 years inflation: 16.40%, my pay increased: 17.25% - whee! I can buy gum). If the company won't pay for hard work, then I won't work hard.

mike g - Wednesday, November 28, 2007, 11:28AM ET  Report Abuse

• Overall: 5/5

Nice article Ben Stein. Good to see you return to form, esp after that brief and inexplicable dalliance with defending Big Oil.

BrandonG - Wednesday, November 28, 2007, 9:35AM ET  Report Abuse

• Overall: 5/5

Losers don't work at all. Sheep work hard. And those with a sense of manifest destiny work smart, but only hard enough as is required to achieve the goal. I bet that Ben Stein wrote this article in the comforts of one his many vacation homes. What does that tell us? It tells us that Ben is a member of the latter class of those who live their lives on their own terms and who don't view work as WORK because it is what they want to do, and they do it how and when they want to do it. Sadly, this distinction was not made lest he insult his audience by making clear he was talking to really only two groups of people: The first is the group of losers who can't hold a job and who get fired for cohorting on the phone with their friends all day. The second, and the likely plurality of readers, is those who just show up for work and who think that this means they deserve to get rich. Think again! Getting rich is about MORE than hard work. It's about a willingness to take risk, thinking originally and with conviction, and yes - putting in the hours to make something out of nothing. This is very different from showing up at Acme Systems Inc. each day to churn out the PTR Report. I loathe to think that Ben honestly intends for everyone to work the absolute most number of hours that is humanely possible in a day. More likely, he is alluding his own life - a life full of work that he's loved, which has made him rich, and which he's done on his own terms.

Yahoo! Finance User - Wednesday, November 28, 2007, 1:53AM ET  Report Abuse

• Overall: 4/5

Poor class are taught to live from the Government, middle class are taught to get an education, a 9 to5 job and a house, high class are taught to be entrepreneurs.

dfeft - Tuesday, November 27, 2007, 11:17PM ET  Report Abuse

• Overall: 3/5

Generally.....usually good advise. Except in my case, I started working at 13 and I'm now 46. After making just a couple of huge mistakes, 2 layoffs (unfortunatley, I choose computer programming in 1990), but never filing bankruptcy mind you, I pretty much have nothing now. Not looking for pity, just commenting that hard work all your life should probably be, but might not be the answer to all.

Rob H - Tuesday, November 27, 2007, 9:30PM ET  Report Abuse

• Overall: 1/5

work is for suckers- earned income, that is the govt just steals your money and you have to earn $150 to buy something that costs $100. I would rather live as a minimalist than be a slave to the taxman and the bank

Yahoo! Finance User - Tuesday, November 27, 2007, 8:40PM ET  Report Abuse

• Overall: 5/5

I love my work so much that I holiday with my laptop. However, I don't touch it during weekends since that's for family and friends. African guy in Kenya.

Allen K - Tuesday, November 27, 2007, 7:50PM ET  Report Abuse

• Overall: 2/5

The only thing anyone can ever earn by working hard is a hunched back! I agree there are some people who stay the course, work hard and achieve all they desire. However there are others that don't lift a finger, get more than they desire handed down to them on a silver platter and never have to deal with real problems. Worse yet, others work harder than anyone could believe is humanly possible and suffer miserably. I have been on all three sides. When I was in law school I would get As in courses that I barely studied or even cared about, while getting Cs in classes that I was genuinely passionate about. The trick to life and the trick to having money is to work smart, always be prepared for opportunities to come your way and never be afraid to seize those opportunities. I respect Ben Stein but I think the advice he gives in this piece is something you tell the poor so they don't give up on hope and something you tell middle-management employees so they don't quit their jobs and pursue their passions. Imagine how life would be if we all pursued our passion instead of the almighty (and presently worthless) dollar? Sure, more people wouldn't be driving luxury cars or living in sprawling mansions but fewer people would be cooped up in cubicles kowtowing to a jerk boss.

Yahoo! Finance User - Tuesday, November 27, 2007, 7:13PM ET  Report Abuse

• Overall: 4/5

I agree. But boy am I getting tired of hard work. Deadlines every day, long commute, trying to balance the needs of kids and my employer. You sock and sock money away to one day do something you love or retire altogether, only to have everything evaporate in a volatile market. All of this makes me especially irritable at the slackers who lived for today all their lives and now seem to think all of their essentials should be covered by hard workers aka taxpayers. More and more people I think are just getting burned out and they are seeing that hard work doesn't pay. Meanwhile folks who live off of others push for politicians to redistribute wealth so they won't be hungry, homeless or sick. In the end, you come out about the same as the slackers once the system is through with you. Where is our incentive to work hard?

cixelsyd - Tuesday, November 27, 2007, 6:29PM ET  Report Abuse

• Overall: 1/5

Go to a summer camp to learn to work hard? You must be clueless as to the realities of life. I worked a McDonald's before going to collage and then interned during two summers and worked as an RA two years. And the school work was harder then any of that. Here is my advice TALK to people who are not wealthy, and go to school for a REAL major not a LIBERAL ARTS degree in taking BONG HITS. And as for not being able to use the phone, email, of surf the web... I literally would be unable to do my current job without using those services. Maybe I should not bother reading the ramblings of an old man who would rather complain about a few idiots from his generation and expand that into a commentary on mine. No one who has ever had to work for a living could take the idea of work 'summer camps' seriously.