# 40 Beware The Dress-Suit Bribe *Week 8, Day 1 of [[00 The Wealthy Stoic Course]]* #source/course << [[39 Week 7 Tips and Tools|Back]] | [[41 The Red Thread|Next]] >> ⁠ ## Content The billionaire co-founder and CTO of HubSpot, Dharmesh Shah, was asked what advice he’d give to someone trying to make a career decision.  “The salary or compensation is just one vector of value you get from a company you join,” [Shah said](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/my-first-million/id1469759170?i=1000569647347). “There’s all these other vectors you get when you join a company. It’s common for people to over-index on the compensation or the current compensation and under-index on all the other things.”  There’s a theme in the works of Upton Sinclair called the “dress-suit bribe,” which he returns to over and over. It’s the the name of a play written by a character in _Dragon’s Teeth_, a throwaway line in his essay _Mammonart_, and called out as a corrupting force in his expose on the American university system. But it’s mostly clearly defined in a chapter of _The Brass Check_ on how good people get turned around. It goes something like this: You pay a shoeshine $5 to shine your shoes. But do you know what you got paid to have your shoes shined? You might buy a suit for $500, but do you know how much you get paid to be well-dressed? Or to drive a nice car, to shave and get your hair cut a certain way, to orient your life around an arbitrary schedule of this hour to this hour for this many days a year? The dress-suit bribe works because, as Shah put, people over-index on the money vector of work. The pressure to go to college, to drive a certain kind of car, to work in a certain industry, to start a company, to buy a house…these things all stem from us over-indexing on the money vector. What Sinclair meant to show us was that benign decisions can trigger commitments much more significant than we might imagine. Buying a house is a literal, contractual commitment but accepting a car or a gift can change your life just as much. A bribe is not a gift. It’s an exchange. Eventually the person on the other end of it gets what they wanted too—and usually the better end. - - - ## Activity **Dress-suit bribe** What are ways that you have been affected by the dress-suit bribe? What are ways that you have avoided it? **Week 8 Workshop** What ways do you think you conform to your workplace or people around you in general? Do you believe you are putting time, energy, and money into what you want? What are some things you do that don’t actually help you? Do those habits come from outside suggestions?