The line between legal and illegal isn't fixed, and can come out and grab you : I often hear the voice of my business ethics prof Dr. Windsor when I read about all the shenanigans at Enron, Worldcomm, Parmalat, etc. and did a post on his advice before. Although appropriate, Dr. Windsor never referred to me as "Young Grasshopper".
Never ask a man how much he makes or how many women he's made love to: I think Dad was trying to tell me that there are just some things that should always remain private.
Automatically put aside money from each paycheck into savings so you never see it in your account: Mom's a CPA. Enough said.
Don't go outside with a wet head!: My grandmother, rest her soul, was chock full of wisdom on how to avoid getting sick, what to do when you got sick, what to do when you were no longer sick and how to avoid getting sick again. She lived to 86.
Don't put your #$*% where you wouldn't put your tongue - Dr. Bessem was a gynecologist and my friend's father, and he would sometimes come into the gameroom where we were hanging out, scotch in hand, and dispense all sorts of interesting advice that was probably more appropriate to a hormone-raging 17 year old than grandma's advice.
Interested People are Interesting People - I spent 6 years at summer camp as camper and counselor and we always had a "thought of the day". Most were trite truisms we have all heard before. Sunday was always a Bible verse. But a few stuck in my head that were valuable as I grew up and entered the business world, like this one. This is similar to "People's favorite subject is themselves", and whether on a date or doing sales, this is good advice.
I have a bunch more, but a blogger friend of mine told me to always keep my posts short to keep them interesting.
Cigar Review: Ashton Classic Esquire
The post war boom of the 1950s saw unprecedented growth in purchases of both cars and leisure boats. Some marketing genius decided why not combine them into one?!? While the boatcar did make it easier to tow your leisure craft to the nearest lake or bay, the inability to throw out a good cast from a fishing rod relegated this to the collectors' market, where the few that still exist bring in high prices today.
After the fiasco of the carboat, the boys in marketing (they were all boys back then) went back to the drawing board and figured out their problem: they mixed the wrong product with the car. It should have been a plane instead of a boat! Alas, this attempt also resulted in failure, mainly due to the inability to find wide enough parking places at the new indoor malls that were starting to crop up by the end of the decade.
The 1970s saw new advances in science and the produce people figured they would get into the convergence game by combining two vegetables few liked into a single one everyone could hate. They succeeded by creating a vegetable that had the blandness of cauliflower with the rough texture of broccoli. While you can occasionally find broccoflower in the store, it has never been offered at any of the finer (or less fine) dining establishments of the U.S.
The 1980s found convergence success in the Multifunctional Printer (MFP) by combining four products that functioned poorly by themselves - fax machine, printer, copier and scanner - into a single product that functioned even worse. But people needed to reclaim desk space from all the gadgets that were taking over their office, and trying to get help from a single source when things went wrong was easier than trying to call four different help lines.
The 1990s saw politicos getting onto the convergence bandwagon with their introduction of Billary. Fortunately the initial product was rejected, although there is a reintroduction planned for 2008.