Internet

Are We Entitled to be Entitled?

By MartinZwilling

11 months ago

Read more: Internet, business, startup, entitled

Where did this pervasive sense of entitlement in our culture come from? I hear top business executives proclaiming an entitlement to huge bonuses while failing, startups feeling entitled to venture funding without a good business plan, and regular people crying for their entitled home ownership, pension, and health care.

As a society, we seem to think we've evolved to the point where we can fashion a large portion of existence according to how we wish it to be. We notice what we like and what we dislike, so we work to make society match our dreams. Somehow, these dreams and wishes have morphed in many people’s mind to an entitlement.

Also, smart people are very good at rationalizing their entitlements, especially when the fantasy serves to make them money or give them power. Here are three rationales some Wall Street executives offered recently in the media when pressed on this:

"We made money. We deserve to be paid since it was the other function that failed." Sorry, fellow. That’s not the way capitalism works. Ask the guy who just lost his job installing seat belts in GM cars. He was really good at that, but since the sales guy failed, he’s out of a job. Being really good at what you do doesn’t matter if your firm is broke, and your firm is broke. It’s now on taxpayer supported life-support.
"We didn’t use taxpayer money to pay the bonuses." This is the most ridiculous idea ever. Money is fungible. If you use billions to pay bonuses and then need to ask the government for money to stay alive, you are using taxpayer money to fill in the hole you dug by paying the bonuses.
"We’ll lose all the greatest people if we don’t pay them." Oh really? Where will they go? Who, exactly, is going to hire them? Also: so what? That’s how capitalism works. Failing firms that cannot afford to pay for talent lose that talent to successful firms. That’s an important part of market discipline.

Entitlement beliefs that are left unchecked leads to selfish, even more entitled expectations. Most psychologists believe that entitlement comes from a deep inner belief that the world is not fair. In millennials, this feeling seems even more common, perhaps derived from a life where their parents gave them everything, and they now expect the world of business to do the same.

How much entitlement do you walk around with in your life? I can see a fair amount of it in mine. I feel those "I deserve" feelings more often than I want to admit. Even in small things, I can see the problem. When I hold the door open for someone, I feel he or she owes me a "thank you" and I get disappointed, even upset, when I don't get one.

The painful truth is that we are not entitled to anything on this planet. We are not even entitled to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," despite what the authors of the Declaration of Independence had to say. Nothing is our birthright!

The answer lies within us. We all know nothing is free and that tough decisions have to be made. It's well past the time to remind ourselves and our leaders of that undeniable truth. If we don't, the fault is ours. We are not entitled to be entitled. Get on with making your customers’ lives better, and we all win!

Marty Zwilling, Founder & CEO, Startup Professionals, Inc.

This was originally published here

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By shari11 months ago

"We didn’t use taxpayer money to pay the bonuses." The New York Times had an article March 14th 2009 that reported that AIG was trying to pay 165 million in bonuses from money they received for bailout. This makes me mad every time I hear or read about it. People getting bonuses don't need or deserve the money. If they cared at all about the company, it's people or this nation they would have cut back way before and realized it is going to take everyone to get out of this mess, not just us little people.

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