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Comment by ecommercematt | Hacker News Reader

Do you have any links or even just names of source material? I'm curious.

I wish I could answer this because I know I've run across it many times. Unfortunately, it's all blended into a vague impression. The "power of thought" authors of whom Napoleon Hill is the most famous certainly wrote about this, but so did more conventional writers. Anyway, the only specific thing that comes to mind is this useless, but hilarious example of an old IBM company song:

  OUR I. B. M. SALESMEN
  Tune: "Jingle Bells"

  I. B. M., Happy men, smiling all the way.
  Oh what fun it is to sell our products night and day.
  I. B. M., Watson men, partners of T. J.
  In his service to mankind-that’s why we are so gay.

It happened to be fresh in my memory because I submitted a link about it the other day. Lots of jaw-dropping stuff from a bygone era: http://www.digibarn.com/collections/songs/ibm-songs/index.ht...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations

:-\

Could you, for example, grow a successful startup out of curing an unfashionable but deadly disease like malaria?

Is it just me, or are pg's many draft-readers (and presumably fact-checkers) sleeping on the job here? I mean, c'mon,

http://biz.yahoo.com/ic/510.html

or, specifically, the company that more-or-less cured malaria (indirectly), until the efforts were quashed by goody-two-shoeses,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geigy_Pharmaceutical

He did not argue that self-interest is always good; he merely argued against the view that self-interest is necessarily bad

I think the essay covers different ground than Mr. Smith by explicity stating it is in your self-interest to be good.

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