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• You Need To Earn Your Own Money

• Money is one of the most powerful tools in our society. People often control other people through money. Parents often control their children through money, handing it out, withholding it, in a way which will give them a greater say in what their children do.

  'You want money for a school excursion? OK.' You want money so you can go out with your friends? No way?'

  That's not to say that parents shouldn't control their children. Of course they should. It's one of the important functions of parenting, and parents who don't realise that - and many don't - make life extremely difficult for their children.

  But the control should lessen as the young person grows through adolescence, and the control should always be honest. The parent or parents should say openly: 'I don't want you to go out with your friends, for the following reasons...'

  To engage in indirect control by giving or withholding money not only takes away the son's right to make his own decisions, but seems sneaky. It's using money as a weapon. If the parent can't convince the son that the parent's arguments are valid, then could be that the parent doesn't have a valid argument. Under the second circumstance the withholding of money would be wrong.

  One of the last helpful things parents can do is to give their son large sums of money. If you have very wealthy parents they may leave all their money to you. What a terrible thing to do! You will go through life never knowing if you could have succeeded on your own. You have bee cruelly blocked from realising your potential as a man.

  Finding jobs where you can earn money while you're young, while you're still at school ore a tertiary college, has never been easy. There are the old stand-bys like paper rounds, car-washing, baby-sitting, supermarkets. You can advertise in local shops and newspapers, or in a school newsletter. But as with most things in life, the more imaginative you are, the more successful you are likely to be. Businesses that do well are those which identify a need and come up with a creative solution. Figure out what your parents are most irritated by, most in need of. The chances are other people will have the same feelings and will pay someone who can ease them.

  For example I'd happily pay someone who'd guarantee me same-day-service fixing minor computer glitches at a reasonable rate. Or someone who'd come round every three months and clean the leaves off my roof. Or someone who'd buy and deliver the regular groceries each week - the annoying stuff like milk and god food and OJ that I have to pick up every time I go into a supermarket.

  Is there something you can rent out maybe? It might be something you already own. Or something your parents own, and that you can do a deal with them over - a caravan, for instance. Or something you're prepared to buy and then rent to neighbors - a piece of computer equipment, or a shredder or mulcher or blower vac.

• Learn Which Rules It's OK To Break
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  A survey of successful people, a few years ago, came up with a big surprise. The author of the survey expected to find that successful people came from similar backgrounds, or had similar educations, or shared similar philosophies.

  Instead he found that they had only one thing in common. They all had what he described as a 'healthy disregard for the rules'.

  In other words, they knew which rules to break, and when to break them.

  One of the saddest sights I've ever seen was in Melbourne, about three o'clock one morning. A man stood at the corner of Finders and Swanton Streets. He was waiting to cross. There were no cars in any direction. Not one. Yet the man waited until the little re figure on the traffic light turned to green.

  He waited until it turned to green!

  This is a human tragedy.

  An immature person might react to all this by saying: 'Oh cool, he's telling us we can do whatever we want, break any rule we like.'

  It's not that simple. Bob Dylan was once quoted as saying: If you're going to live outside the law, you gotta be honest.'

  Laws are basically designed for the immature, but only a highly mature and moral (there's a tautology) person con ignore them. So, for example, the law says you're a murderer if you deliberately kill another human. But a doctor at a patients' deathbed, aware that the patient has only a couple of hours of agonised life left, might decide to give an infection which will end the patient's life.

  Is the doctor wrong? I don't know. Certainly many religious people, and many philosophers, would say he or she is. Others would disagree. I do know that the doctor must be very sure of his or her ground, must be sure that he or she has thought the issues through in a most careful way, eliminating personal bias or neurotic influence. And I also know that such a doctor is no murderer.

  A law says you mustn't steal. The law should be unnecessary, because we should be moral enough to know that stealing is wrong, but because many of us don't know that, the law is in place.

  And there are even circumstances where you might decide stealing is a valid act - for example, if your child's life can only be saved by an expensive medicine that you can't afford. Or if you're starving to death, and your neighbour has an abundance of food.

  One of the Spice Girls was quoted in October 1997 as saying, 'You can do anything you want, as long as you don't get caught.' If you believe in that approach, don't complain when a masked man smashes you in the face with a baseball bat, leaving you brain-damaged and blind. If the Spice Girl philosophy applies to you, then in fairness it has to apply to him too.

  The Spice Girl morality is the morality of the three-year-old.

  The truth is that you can do anything you want, as long as you accept the consequences. You can murder someone if you want - it's not difficult to find a weapon that'll kill someone - but among the consequences you'll have to accept are a lifelong torture of guilt and remorse, and probably many years in prison. You can cheat in a test, but the consequences might include having to live with your conscience, having to maintain that standard in future (you may have been promoted to high class as a result of your high mark), and the fact that you might have cut yourself off from getting the help with your work that you obviously need. If you are caught, there's the damage to your reputation, the loss of respect from others...

   

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