In an interview with The Record (3/13/08, p. 20), rabbi and author Shmuley Boteach warned readers that there’s much more to life than the pursuit of professional success — something that many entrepreneurs are obsessed with.

“The broken American male’s only criteria for success is professional success, how much money he makes, how many things he acquires, how far up the ladder he climbs. He is trained to be a lifelong competitor.”

Aside from being perhaps a tad materialistic, what’s wrong with that, you may ask?

Plenty, says Rabbi Boteach, because there is always someone higher up the ladder than you … and in comparison, you will always feel like a failure.

Our culture, he says, is not a circle where everyone is treated as equal, but a pyramid, where only men like Donald Trump and Bill Gates are at the top.

The broken American male “compares himself to them and he feels like a failure” … because in our society, money and power — not personal commitments — are the locus of our self-esteem.

Certainly, many of the “make money online” promoters play on the consumer’s inferiority complex.

Their online ads brag about their latest million-dollar home or $100,000 sports car — saying, in effect, “Gee, look how great I am; don’t you wish you could be me?”

I have found myself growing tired as of late of all the online bragging and boasting … and wishing these promoters didn’t have to build themselves up at others’ expense.

Do you measure your own self-worth mainly by money and achievement — and if so, do you ever beat yourself up for falling short?

Or do you enjoy a balanced sense of self, in which the kind of person you are is just as important as what you own or how much you make?

A few weeks ago during a tele-seminar, the interviewer asked me, “Bob, why did you become a freelance copywriter?”

I answered with the first thing that came into my head: “The thing I love most about being a freelance writer is not having to wear a suit and tie.”

He laughed. But I wasn’t kidding.

Yes, the freelance life has a large number of pros … and probably an equal number of cons.

Some of the perks are big things: the ability to work at home (which I don’t), spend more time with family, throw away your alarm clock, work your own hours, choose the work you do, and be your own boss.

But sometimes, it’s the little things that make a big difference.

The little thing I hated most about my stint in corporate America was having to put on a suit and tie every day.

As a freelancer, I can throw on a pair of jeans with a rip in the knee and an old flannel shirt in seconds, and I am ready to start the day.

Beard stubble? Shave later … or tomorrow. Need a haircut? I’ll worry about it next week.

Next to not dressing up, the second best thing about freelancing is not fighting rush hour traffic.

Most freelancers work at home and brag about the 60-second commute from their bedroom to their attic office.

My rented office is only 8 miles from my house — a pleasant 15-minute drive through local streets that totally avoids rush hour traffic.

I know all this may sound a bit petty … but as I said, it’s often the LITTLE things that make the biggest difference.

Are you a freelancer in your field? If so, what’s your favorite thing about the freelance lifestyle?

If you’re not a freelancer — but are thinking of making the transition from corporate employment to self employment — what tempts you most about the freelance business?
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My late friend, the accomplished Michigan ad man James Alexander, once told me: “I can work with a client who is ignorant. I can work with a client who is arrogant. But I cannot work with one who is both.”

A client who is ignorant but not arrogant doesn’t know anything about advertising, cheerfully admits it, and defers to your superior knowledge and expertise.

A client who is arrogant but not ignorant is one who knows at least as much about advertising as you do, and more than you do about their product and market. The best relationship with this client is collaborative in nature.

A client who is both arrogant and ignorant is the one who cheerfully admits she knows nothing about advertising, and then proceeds to tell the copywriter or ad agency how to do their job. If there is a disagreement, she seldom listens to advice, and trusts her own admittedly minimal instincts and experience instead.

The client who is arrogent and ignorant should be avoided. You may tell her there should be only one cook in the kitchen (you), or that if she hired you as the chauffer she should let you drive, but it is usually to no avail. It is nearly impossible to do good work for the simultaenously ignorant and arrogent client.

Which kinds of clients do you serve? Ignorant? Arrogant? Neither? Both? And what is your reaction when they make changes that in your opinion will make the marketing less effective?

You are a freelance copywriter. A client comes to you with an interesting project — nice fee, your type of work (lsales letter, magalog, whatever your specialty).

Then the client sends you the product. You review it several times. But your conclusion is always the same: it’s a weak product that is highly unlikely to sell in the mail. In fact, you think it will almost surely fail.

The client is excited about it. But nothing he says convinces you that his enthusiasm is justified. You are certain it’s a dog.

So what do you do? Your choices are:

A. Tell the client it won’t work and politely turn down the job.
B. Keep your mouth shut, take the client’s money, write the copy for him, and hope you are wrong and it actually does well in the mail.
C. Tell the client you think it will fail, but say you’ll be happy to take a crack at writing it for your usual fee.
D. Other (please specify).

Which of the above would you choose — and why?

Lord Kelvin, inventor of the Kelvin temperature scale, once said, “When you can measure something in numbers, then you know something about it.”

No where does his lesson have more meaning than in advertising.

A case in point: a recent column in DM News noted that the Sales Genie ad in the 2007 Superbowl was a success, generating 25,000 visits to the company’s Web site.

Well, assuming the company spent $1 million on the spot, that comes to $40 per visit.

That compares poorly to the cost per click of Google Adwords and other common methods of generating traffic.

When you apply metrics to the presidential campaign, the results are even more embarrassing for NYC’s former mayor.

According to an article in Newsweek, Rudy Giuliani spent $60 million on his failed run for the White House, collecting only a single delegate in the process.

That’s a marketing cost of $60 million per delegate — perhaps a record.

Many members of the new generation of online marketers — bloggers, SEO specialists, social networkers, viral video producers — loudly and frequently proclaim that old-fashioned advertising … derisively referred to as “disruption marketing” … is dead.

Writing in DM News (2/4/08, p. 10), copywriter Dean Rieck disagrees, noting: “The disruption moniker is a pejorative way of referring to selling, and the idea of actively and ethusiastically selling is thousands of years old.”

Among Dean’s observations and conclusions:

* People love and respond to advertising far more than they’ll ever admit.
* The disruption model may be tinkered with, but it will never die.
* Selling means pushing products, and if you aren’t selling, you are out of business.

Do you think Dean has called out all the new media hypsters as the trendy phonies they are?

Or is he a relic of a bygone era, reading to sink, like a dinosaur, into the tar pits of marketing history?

In an article in the Daily News (1/31/08) about the presidential race, Robert Dallek writes: “Obama’s lack of experience shouldn’t be a liability … judgment trumps experience, almost every time.”

But wait a minute. When you vote for a political candidate … or hire a new employee … or select a vendor to provide printing, Web design, or other services … don’t you look for someone with long experience in her field?

I know I do. I mean, if you needed brain surgery, who would you prefer — the doctor who had performed 1,000 successful operations or the resident doing his very first brain operation ever?

Today, the world seems not to value experience to the degree it did in the late 1970s, when I started out in the business world.

Back then, gray hairs were respected and viewed as having superior knowledge accumulated during decades of experience in the industry. Young managers like me in our 20’s were viewed as green behind the ears and fairly useless until we got a year or two of experience under our belts.

Today, now that I have gray haired, experience and age are NOT valued; youth is. Older workers are routinely discriminated against in the hiring process. Youth is worshipped in a tech society where a 20-something became a billionaire by inventing Facebook, something many people in my generation have never even seen, let alone comprehend.

In my experience, experience doesn’t count the way it once did. But that’s my opinion. What’s your experience?

A survey conducted by Rutgers Business School found that nearly half of college students said they were guilty of plagarism: using content in their papers that wasn’t theirs, without permission or attribution.

Of those, nearly 8 out of 10 said they committed plagarism either solely or mainly when using online research materials.

Reason: it’s so quick and easy to cut and paste the text from the Web site into their document.

Printed source material is plagarized less frequently — presumably because it’s too much work to rekey the material into their laptops.

Among high school students, who were also surveyed, 6 out of 10 plagarize, and 3 out of 4 cheat on tests.

Students felt little guilt about plagarism and cheating. They cited lack of time and the need to have high grades to get into a good school or job as ample justification for their dishonesty.

Another reason cited was peer pressure: the students felt that, with so many of their peers cheating, those who don’t cheat are at an unfair disadvantage.

What a world!