What are your incentives to work hard?

When I received my first block of stock options I discovered the AMT, alternative minimum tax, which I would have to pay. My strategy was to sell about 1/3 of the shares immediately to pay the tax and save the rest to qualify for long term capital gains.

After calculating my AMT, I figured I paid for the cruise missile Bill Clinton used to blow up the aspirin factory in Sudan. Well worth it, IMHO.

 

Those people exist in Science too. There are seriously professors who like to explain things to their students in the most complicated way, because they think it makes them look like an authority. if at all, it makes one wonder if they actually understood the topic themselves. My attitude has always been that if I can't explain a topic to my students, I don't really understand it myself.

 

I have relative financial independence as well. It doesnt make me like working any more or less.

 

One of the drawbacks of my job is that it is sedentary in nature. The good thing, however, is that I have a 15 minute walk to lecture hall. So, whenever there are classes, I don't have a problem to get to my 10,000 steps per day goal. Most of my colleagues, however, drive to class....

That means I have to get my exercise in other ways, so I bike a lot in the summer.

 

I actually have 2-3 months a year where I sit in trucks, tractors, and combines a lot. It doesn’t take long to get out of shape. The older I get the more it affects me.

I try to move as much as possible even sitting. With the advent of gps guidance I’ve even taken weights in the tractor to keep the upper body active.

Your colleagues will regret not moving more if they don’t already.

 

Wasted? Keep drilling that dry hole.

 

What a coincidence. I did exactly the same thing. Of course I was counselled to do that by the company to eliminate potential tax problems.

I recall one of my early career mentors telling me how happy he was to send a check for $300K to RevCan. In utter shock I asked "WTF?", to which he responded, "when I signed that check I was happy that a) I made enough to own that much and b) I had it in the bank with lots to spare". From that day forward, I never complained about the amount of taxes I had to pay - but I did use every damn trick in the book to minimize them.

Just a small shift in perspective and angst over income taxes disappeared for the rest of my working life. Now I'm on a fixed income so taxes are just an annual after thought.

 

my incentive to work is I can’t buy malted barley, hops, and yeast with food stamps.

 

Buy honey and yeast and make mead.

 

https://www.cagw.org/reporting/pig-book

Enjoy, if you're brave enough to actually look.

 

I see what you are saying. Trump and the republicans have thrown away the "fiscal conservative" approach they championed for the preceding 8 years and have started running amok with earmarks again.

well, I guess when the shoe is on the other foot and all.

And to suggest that your tax dollars are merely being wasted by the government is frankly ridiculous. But, I grant you, it is entirely consistent with trumpian republican inconsistency.

 

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I found no incentive to work hard. As Edward Abbey said: "I have found through trial and error that I work best under duress. In fact I work only under duress."

At the age of 40 I did like Thoreau and "went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."

 

"What are your incentives to work hard?"

That's easy. For me to work "hard" ..... highly effective ..... all I need is to understand what is expected of me and then > > > > > > > to be left alone to do it. If I have a problem or a question I'll tell you about it and if there is a specific complaint about the results of my work let me know, otherwise, keep your mouth shut and let me do it my way.

 

If you need funding to continue work, it sounds like money was always a major incentive for you to work.

I'd also suggest it may influence science in undesirable ways.

I love science, I love teaching, but truth be told I could teach science to people in mud huts, and they'd get it.

Maybe not entirely, but the point is I know how to be lean and mean.

 

Time for some of us to come out into the private sector jungle and play.

 

Funny how right now Trumps mean GDP growth for his time as President is almost 3%, Obama's for all 8 years was a mean 1.8%. One's a success and the other's an 8 year failure.

 

Wife and two kids, I was an orphan and it sucked. My wife and I decided that she would remain home and I would work. For 25 years I had jobs that had overtime and I avg 55 hours a week. The last 20 I was in sales/eng and averaged about the same. Both my boys grew up to be well behaved and successful. I worked for them and not me. I was making over 80,000 grand and driving a 15 year old car.

 

I work hard because I generally love what I do and you can't get by taking the easy way out in the creative field. I work hard(SMART) to support myself and my family, have nice things and live comfortably without horrible stress. I could certainly work harder and make even more money shifting to different creative fields or markets, but as I've discovered, what do you value? I value relaxing at the end of the day. NOT necessarily creating constantly. I like being entertained as well and not always creating to entertain others. Others in my field, might work a lot more and with higher profile recognition, but they don't have families or their family life stinks. Or, they look 10 yrs older than they are. That's not a worthy trade off=)

 

Failure for 92 consecutive months of economic growth. Yep you sure do have a handle on failure.

 

A sense of accomplishment is something that all humans seem to need and want and enjoy. We see it in toddlers - the pride they feel when they have completed something. I think that's one of the reasons I work hard at anything...I want to accomplish something. A hamster wheel is not something that any of us wishes to be on...

 

My story is that I worked on office machines at IBM, everything from electric typewriters to small mainframe computers and all the machines in between for 47 years. Within the first year I learned to clean and repair so the machine was just like the book said. I worked on each machine in turn until I knew I would not have a call back. Of course it helped a great deal that we had the best machines on the market. My incentive was to have the fewest service calls in the office, and I did. I probably was OCD about having the cleanest best running machines in the office. My over all incentive, and satisfaction was to run the machines, not have them running me. Life was much easier that way.

 

At Obama's growth rate your kids would be in a rest home by the time the economy returned to normal.

 

"returned to normal"? Interesting choice of words considering the totally abnormal administration currently in power.

 

Quite the change from the Obamanomics stagnant malaise.

 

Yeah, I mean 84 odd months of continuous economic growth is serious stagnation.
Gotta luv your preception of reality, Sure looks like a legitimate "malaise" to me.