1A false balance is an abomination to Yahweh, but accurate weights are his delight. 2When pride comes, then comes shame, but with humility comes wisdom. 3The integrity of the upright shall guide them, but the perverseness of the treacherous shall destroy them. 4Riches don’t profit in the day of wrath, but righteousness delivers from death. 5The righteousness of the blameless will direct his way, but the wicked shall fall by his own wickedness. 6The righteousness of the upright shall deliver them, but the unfaithful will be trapped by evil desires.
These verses point to the quiet value of fairness in ordinary transactions, the kind no one applauds. Pride tends to promise shortcuts, while integrity simply keeps a person on a straight road. The writer suggests that character works like a steady hand on a rudder, guiding choices long before a crisis arrives. Today might be a good day to notice the small places where being exact and truthful costs a little and protects a lot.
The cosmos, child, is a living being, with soul and with reason. One nature holds it together and governs it. The ancients saw this, and they spoke of its different powers under the names of gods. In that way the old stories could hand this understanding down to those who came after.
Translated for Dalton Daily
Cornutus was a Stoic from Leptis in Libya who taught in Rome under Nero. He was the teacher of the poets Persius and Lucan, and Nero banished him in the 60s AD. His Compendium is one of the few complete Stoic treatises to survive. It was written as a school text for young students and reads Greek myths as allegories of nature. It came down through medieval Greek manuscripts and was first printed in the Renaissance. Carl Lang's Teubner edition of 1881 is the standard text.
Cornutus tells a young reader that the world is one connected whole and not a heap of separate events. He treats the old stories as a first, rough way of saying so. We do something similar when we blame a bad day on one bad moment, forgetting how much of it fits together. This passage invites you to look for the larger pattern behind the day's small irritations. The point is to take your place in that pattern, not to resent it.
PracticePick one small thing today that annoys you, such as a delay, a slow queue or a cancelled plan. Before you react, ask what it is connected to: the people and causes behind it. Then act on what is in your power, as a part of the whole and not its enemy.
The most famous strategy in business, in which you give away the razor and sell the blades, is credited to the wrong man.
Business schools teach it as a fable. King Camp Gillette realized that a disposable blade would bring customers back for ever, so he sold the razor cheaply and made his money on the blades. The model is now used for printers and ink, coffee machines and pods, and game consoles and games.
The records tell a different story. Gillette's first razor set sold for $5. One account puts that at about half a working man's weekly pay. The company's start was tiny: in 1903 it sold 51 razors and 168 blades. The next year it sold 90,884 razors. Cheap handles weren't the cause. Gillette had a good product, automated manufacturing and heavy advertising. The economist Randal Picker has pointed out that Gillette held patents from 1904 that would have let it lock customers in. It could have given handles away, and it chose a high price instead. Cheaper rivals such as Ever-Ready and Gem Junior sold sets for about $1 and filled the low end of the market. Blades stayed at $1 a dozen from 1909 until 1924.
Something like the famous model appeared only after the key patent expired in 1921. Gillette brought out a new razor at the old premium price. It also repackaged its original razor as a $1 model to compete with the cheap brands. In the same period it sold sets to the US government during World War I. The number of razor handles in circulation jumped, and so did profits. In 1924 it cut the blades in a pack from twelve to ten and kept the $1 price.
The legend stuck because it explains a strategy that looks obvious in hindsight. Gillette's real history is messier. It was a premium brand that spent years defending a high price and then used cheap handles to defend its position.
RememberThe 'give away the razor' strategy is credited to Gillette, but for its first two decades Gillette sold an expensive razor, and cheaper rivals were the ones using the model.
Read nextRandal C. Picker, 'The Razors-and-Blades Myth(s)'