Finding Out What Hard Work Really Is

From Vile's autob :

People have often asked me what I did with all the money that came into my possession. A little impromptu party we gave offers a good example of how the cash melted away. We often entertained on a lavish scale.

(In that case, the 2 day long party blew up about $25k in the roaring twenties)

[ But, considering the meticulous planning that went into some of his schemes - you really wonder why he failed with the hotel business. At one point, Vile decided to put his savings into a legitimate business (to his wife's delight). ]

Perhaps I should have known then that my hotel venture was jinxed. I did change the name again, this time to the Hotel Martinique. One of my early projects was a landscaped roof garden. I had big plans, but perhaps I didn't know enough about the hotel business.

The hoodlums often staged parties and became noisy. The permanent guests, who paid their bills on time, eyed them distastefully and began to move out. As these people vacated rooms, more criminals moved in; thugs of various descriptions, safe-crackers, and robbers. Some I knew by sight and many I did not know at all.

Before I realized what was happening the underworld was regarding the Martinique as a hide-out. I soon learned I was expected to cover up for criminals whose only relation to me was that we had both operated outside the law.

( He even got victimized by simple bad-cheques. I can't help feeling for the man. But, considering his genius - as he puts it - his grasp of foreign affairs, domestic troubles and human nature - why couldn't he succeed at something so relatively simple? Here's my answer - which I first heard in "The Science of Wealth" - there is no task from which people shirk as much as sustained purposeful thought. You have to think things through in your mind. A thought - literally any thought - becomes an animal in your mind - it lives in a bunch of neurons and tries to gain your attention. But, in the course of your life, you have trained your mind with all the thoughts you have entertained thus far - so, this new thought - legitimate or otherwise, will have severe competition - unless it is a matter of life and death. So, you can see how it was with Vile - there was no hope from the beginning since his mind would tire easily from honest labour. Pity. The second or third time a man tries to go straight and fails. Atleast he lived to be a 100)