Gary North

The following information is available to anyone, yet it s known by almost nobody. Of those few who know, most of them ignore it. They pay retail for college. Never pay retail for college!

I suggest that you print out this report, get a yellow highlighter, and read it. You will find this information hard to believe. What I am about to tell you, I would not have figured out had I not been part of the higher education system as a professor. I discovered what I call the academic insiders' seven loopholes.

For years, I have researched ways that people can use to earn a bachelor's degree from an accredited university or college for a discount price of at least 75% off retail. Because of the Internet, you can now do this. So can your child or grandchild. But to do it, the student must be both self-motivated and self-disciplined. He must be able to work well without external nagging.

I have now published a 77-page manual on how to do this: College for $15,000 (or Less) You can buy it here:

So few people are emotionally equipped to do this that the colleges still continue to charge retail, and the vast majority of the students pay. Half of all college students today are self-funded; half are subsidized by their parents. The self-funded ones were the ones I always preferred to teach, back when I taught in college.

I believe that the number-one early test in life of whether person who is going to be a success is the degree to which he must rely on external nagging. The more he needs external nagging, the less likely that he will ever be successful in any endeavor.

I hear parents of high school students say, "I want small classes for my child." Why? The parent never admits the truth. "Because my child is not self-motivated, and needs full-time nagging from someone who monitors his poor performance constantly. I mean, this kid can't get up in the morning without my constant nagging."

Then, three months after high school graduation, the parent sends this emotionally unprepared victim of full- time nagging off to Behemoth State University, where he or she will be taught in mega-classes of 300 to 1,000 students, where low-paid teaching assistants do the grading and don't know one student from another, and could not care less, except to make a move on the really good looking ones (of either sex).

Over half of all students who enroll in college fail to graduate. That's because most of them were trained in one kind of academic environment and then tossed into a completely different one at age 18. They get tossed out of the academic nest by their parents without any preparation in what matters most: high performance in a world of adult indifference. They go from adult nagging to adult indifference in one leap.

I'll never forget the complaint of one poor-performing freshman student of mine 35 years ago. I had just shown her, at her request, why her mid-term exam was a D performance. She asked me, "Don't you care about us?" For her, my grading her in terms of her performance meant not caring. I figured it was time to introduce her to the new reality of life: adult indifference. I replied: "I get paid to teach. I don't get paid to care." Anyone who is familiar with a modern university knows how true this compensation principle is, and how widely it is honored.

If you want meet someone who really doesn't care about the hurt feelings or personal weaknesses of producers, ask a consumer. He cares about himself and his desires, and how well a product meets these criteria. He is supremely indifferent to the cares of the producer.

The sooner that our children learn this, the more likely they will be successful.

THE THREE RULES OF SUCCESS

Here are the three fundamental rules of success. I have covered this before, but it bears repetition. If you do these three things consistently, you almost cannot fail over a 30-year period. You will have such a competitive advantage over everyone else that success is close to being automatic. Here they are:

These are the Big Three. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to hire anyone who will consistently do all three? Do you understand why he is booked up he is through next winter?

We tell our children this from about age two, "Do what I say when I say to do it." They may, over years and years of threats, spankings, bagging, and no TV, catch on, but rarely do most of them honor this when dealing with others outside the family. If they did, we would not face that most fundamental reality of all human relationships: excuses. We've heard it all before. This has been going on since day one (actually day two).

And he said, Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat? And the man said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat. And the LORD God said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast done? And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat (Genesis 3:11- 13).

All human institutions can be described in terms of a picture of people standing in a circle, with 80% of them pointing to the person on his left. "It's his fault."

You want to hire the 20% who don't.

The only institutions that survive competition are those that build in a series of positive and negative sanctions that can substitute performance for excuses. Greed or fear are the main ones. I am convinced that fear is the greater motivator. More men fear public failure than desire applause. More men fear economic loss than desire economic success.

I used to think that holding out the prospect of money would motivate men to do what they say they will do, on time, at the agreed-upon price. I can think of no greater mistake in dealing with people than this one. This is at the top of my list of things not to assume.

If you want to adopt a positive sanction, offer praise rather than money. Hand out medals, not bonuses. Lavish praise on the person who shows up on time, spends the whole day on the job, and picks up after himself. I mean to tell you, there aren't many like this.

But isn't everyone expected to do this? Of course. Then why hand out public praise for just doing the job? Because almost nobody will do it. Because just doing the job is so extraordinary an ability that only a few people possess it.

Making excuses is a way of life for mankind. The distinguishing feature of a successful person is that he, like those blue jeans, offers no excuses. And as for the super-successful, they have one thing in common: they do the job, so they don't have to offer excuses.

A B.A. DEGREE IN SOCIOLOGY VS. JUST SHOWING UP

We send our children off to college -- 15 million of them. They come out with a liberal arts degree that hasn't much market demand. Some people spend $160,000 to provide their child with a B.A. in sociology from Harvard or Yale. Why, I cannot imagine.

The key to success is not a B.A. It's the ability to do the Big Three, year in and year out, rain or shine. Identify any area of life in which people just have to have a service, such as repairs, and a reliable person will make a good living.

The person who is most likely to get rich is the person who can figure out institutional sanctions that will motivate employees to perform predictably without much supervision. The problem is, there are so few of these people that they start their own businesses. It's hard to hire, train, and keep good help -- there is so little of it.

Women are an exception, generally. I employed full- time people for years. I no longer do. This is a great relief. On the whole, the best employees I have had have been women. They show up, do the job, and don't make excuses. They also don't start rival businesses.

Years ago, Otto Scott wrote a book-long history of a major corporation. He interviewed the founder, who had retired. The old man let him in on a secret that the company had discovered early, and probably many others did, too. It is never discussed in public. The man told Scott that the reason why the firm hired had women as secretaries is because women would not steal corporate secrets. Men would. Senior executives could not trust male secretaries. Male secretaries would pass along the secrets or start rival firms. They had no sense of loyalty. They had their own career agendas. The women didn't. They were loyal.

The problem that a reliable business owner has is not his own lack of employment opportunities. It is his employees. He assumes that they think the way he does. They don't. He assumes that they are inner-driven. They aren't, at least not in the area of work. If they could live without working, they would. They work to live. A founder-promoter-entrepreneur lives to work. Writers and artists are representatives of this mental attitude. There aren't many of them.

This brings me back to my main theme: skill is important, but ethics is far more important. The work ethic is far more important than the skill set. Skill sets can be learned. The work ethic, once a person is 18, is rarely learned short of a disaster, a religious conversion, or a marriage. More than anything else, it is marriage that forces men to become more reliable. (This may have to do with a man's response to responsibility, or it may have to do with a replacement nagger.)

A radical change in environment is why some men shape up in the military. They are forced to change their ways. They learn the basics in boot camp, but more important, they learn that excuses don't work. The system of discipline hammers people who make excuses.

GOOD EMPLOYEES

If you want to be successful, start a small business. This is the road to wealth for most people who attain it. The best-selling book, THE MILLIONAIRE NEXT DOOR, makes this point.

But unless you are a genius salesman of a high- commission of your own creation, you will have to decentralize at some point. Not many people are. My friend Bill Myers, a programmer-salesman, is now independent. He has been able to make the transition to complete self-employment by selling a program that allows grunts like me to put up and run a professional Web site. He sells the program for thousands of dollars. But when you install it, you don't have to hire a programmer. You can do it yourself. You can learn it in three days. You can save in three months enough money in wages for a Webmaster to pay for the software. Myers and his wife work alone. He sells the product to people who have given up on finding a reliable Webmaster for anything like an affordable wage. The program overcomes the main limits of the division of labor in Web site creation and management.

Few businesses are one-man bands. They require employees; hence, a chain of command. This requires nagging. If you don't like to nag for a living, don't start a business. Running a business requires either nagging full-time or finding some institutional system of rewards and punishments to cut back on the quantity of nagging required to keep your operation going. Most people will perform consistently only to nagging. They expect it, want it, and refuse to perform without it. There is a war in life between procrastination and nagging. Procrastination usually has the edge.

This is why most people spend their lives as employees. For every dollar they are paid, they generate twice or three times this for their employers. After all, their employers deserve something for being the chief naggers. Without systematic nagging from superiors, society would collapse.

Anyone who responds well to nagging should not even think about becoming a businessman. If you respond well to nagging, you are paying someone -- rewarding him -- to nag you. Here is an economic law: "Where there is increased demand -- more payment for services rendered -- there will be increased supply." He who responds well only to nagging is a purchaser of nagging. There are specialists who, for a price, will supply it. They are called bosses.

If you want your children to become successful, responsible adults, reduce the nagging quotient as early as possible. The sooner that they decide to become self- starters, the sooner they will be ready for success.

If parents are predictable in their discipline, the message may get through. Sometimes. But an employee whose parents did not get through is almost psychologically incapable of learning self-discipline as an adult.

Avoid this phrase: "Do as I say, not as I do." Of all the useless statements in life, this one is right up there close to the top. It is an admission of defeat. It is a testimony to power as the product of no discipline. This is the wrong message to send.

The businessman is caught between a buyer to whom he has made assurances and employees who make excuses. The difference between success and failure is the ability to convert their excuses into performance.

THE DIVISION OF LABOR

In a storm when the electricity goes off, we are reminded about how dependent we are. We are thankful for work crews who show up and fix the broken power lines. But these crews are rarely deployed. Society does not have many of these crews. Those few that it has are usually able to perform like this only during emergencies.

When you delegate, you become dependent. Up and down any chain of command is delegated authority. It is a system of rules and sanctions, positive and negative.

When you buy a share of stock, you are investing in a chain of command. You are investing in a management team to command performance. What keeps America's economy strong is not corporate America, with its complex systems of command. Corporate America has farmed out most of the work to third-party suppliers. It's called outsourcing, and it's spreading into many areas.

The institutional key to America's success is two- fold: (1) the ease of creating new companies; (2) the ease of going bankrupt. The free market transfers power to consumers to reward or punish profit-seeking companies. The relentless consumer rewards or punishes, and the survivors are able to expand their area of service.

The carnage of busted companies is a thing of beauty for consumers, though not the investors in those now-busted companies. Consumers are not interested in excuses. They will not long tolerate in their suppliers what they have come to expect from elected officials. Excuses. Lies. Begging.

In a free market, the chain of command keeps shifting because so many well-intentioned men who need to be nagged get run out of business by consumers who are uninterested either in nagging or hearing excuses. Customers do not nag for long. They just go away. A nagging customer is about to become a non-customer, unlike a nagging boss, who gets paid to nag by his employees. Consumers indirectly fire employees who need to be nagged. They do this by bankrupting the bosses of constantly nagged workers.

Entrepreneurs, unlike most people, are deeply optimistic. It takes systemic losses to remove those entrepreneurs whose performance does not match their optimism. The market imposes these losses.

The division of labor is maintained by a steady inflow of new, optimistic entrepreneurs and a steady outflow of entrepreneurs who are better off living as employees. They can return to being nagged rather than nagging.

For most people, their own skills and work ethic are the main source of their wealth. For a time, it looked as though Americans could get rich by investing in stocks, where bright people would share the wealth with them. Well, bright people who get rich don't share much wealth. They create it, and they share it only in the sense that they hire people and pay investors as little as they can get away with. That's OK, as long as they keep their businesses producing. They are trying to add value to a world in which most employees would rather make an excuse than meet a deadline. Anyone who can make people even begin to meet the requirements of the Big Three has performed a service of such great value to society that personal wealth only begins to reveal his contribution to society.

If a man is a good forecaster, he can create wealth for himself by speculation. But if he can design a business that reduces nagging by substituting fear, greed, and medals, he can create wealth for all the rest of us.

CONCLUSION

I encourage you in your efforts to improve your skills. But the power of the Day Timer and the Palm Pilot to increase Americans' productivity tells us that it is not our skill sets that are our personal key to success; it is our ability to meet deadlines without letting things fall through the cracks.

This is why a college education really does pay off. College removes external nagging, which still exists in high school. College leaves the student on his own. If he survives this last test -- deadlines without nagging -- he is ready for adulthood.

Businesses hire college graduates, not because of their skill sets, but because of their ability to survive an inefficient bureaucratic system that imparts little formal knowledge that is as important as the ability to meet deadlines without being nagged. College is the first nagging-free environment for about one-third of Americans. Half of them don't graduate.

You don't have to go to Harvard or Yale to learn how to be a producer in a nagging-free setting. Neither does your child or grandchild. It needn't cost $160,000 to find out how to survive in a world of adult indifference.

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