
Apple's Tim Cook: If You Work Only for Money, You Will Never Be Happy – Fortune - rbanffy
http://fortune.com/2017/02/10/apple-ceo-tim-cook-career-advice-job-money/?xid=soc_socialflow_twitter_FORTUNE&utm_campaign=fortunemagazine&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=social
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LeoJiWoo
It shows a deep lack of understanding or empathy when one the wealthiest
people of the world says something like that.

Especially when a large portion of americans don't even have enough money to
be healthy ...

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__blockcipher__
I might be violating the rules of discourse here but I feel like your comment
really didn't contribute to the discussion. Tim Cook is a skilled leader who
is quite down-to-earth and, IMO, understand the struggles that normal
Americans go through. His point was simply that if your utility function
optimizes only for income, you're making a mistake. He believes (partially as
a result of his time at Apple) that working _only for money_ is a mistake.
He's not saying "you shouldn't worry about money ever".

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mbfg
By what basis are you making these claims?

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vtange
Maslow's Hierarchy in action - Tim Cook is at a higher section of the pyramid
than most Americans. He's probably at a stage where he's looking to achieve
things he cannot achieve purely with money. Hence the "money isn't everything"
argument.

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saurik
Yeah... I was once in the middle of an argument between two people I know: the
first person has in a way managed to make money "meaningless" but only by
moving to the middle of nowhere and living on the moral equivalent of peanuts
that he has been able to make with a business he has scraped together, but has
recently gotten involved in a new company (as an "employee" of the second
person) where he was being paid less than all the other people (who had come
in to the company earlier, FWIW) and his opportunity cost is "I might be stuck
not making much money forever on a product I don't even have much control
over", and a second person (a "co-founder" in this new company) for whom money
is also "meaningless" as he has so many millions of dollars that he got from
trading cryptocurrencies that his opportunity cost from working on projects
instead of actively managing investments is supposedly itself millions of
dollars... money he is happy to go without because he believes so much in the
team and the vision for the product. The person who lived on peanuts wanted to
be making as much money as everyone else, and the person whom I will claim
literally couldn't understand why anyone would ever care about money was
extremely upset that the first person wasn't sufficiently devoted to the
vision of the product (which again, the first person only even had limited
control over from his position... this is despite having designed a good
amount of the technology). It was a brutal argument. The first person quit. A
couple weeks later, in the aftermath of what happened and after some time to
process what was going on there, I quit (as one of the "co-founders").

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jseliger
I expect to see many negative comments here, but I'll add that one of the most
profound books I've read is _Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience_ by
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi ([https://www.amazon.com/Flow-Psychology-Experience-
Perennial-...](https://www.amazon.com/Flow-Psychology-Experience-Perennial-
Classics/dp/0061339202?ie=UTF8&tag=thstsst-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957)).
In it, he observes that it's also possible to create positive flow-like states
even in tedious jobs; it's also helpful to try and re-conceptualize even
mundane jobs as being part of and important to a greater whole.

I don't think he'd argue that doing such things is always possible, all the
time, but I think he might argue that we should try to move in those
directions, even when our lives and feelings sometimes feel like something out
of Dilbert or Houellebecq's _Whatever_.

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legacynl
What does he work for then?

IF he really gave a damn about people he should e.g. make sure working
conditions improve at their plants.

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a3n
If there is nothing about you and the current iteration of the economy that is
mutually attractive, then you will have to work for money, and you will be
unhappy, possibly worse so from lack of sufficient money.

It's good to be Tim Cook.

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rbanffy
This is one interesting point about universal basic income: when the lack of
sufficient money is no longer a possibility, what will you work for?

