Hang on.
Before you read this article, I’m going to need $35.
I understand you’ve expressed some mild interest in reading The Harbustoday—you’ve made the fair assumption that it’ll provide you with some passing entertainment, and you can maybe put it on your résumé to make it sort of look like you’d be a smarter, more worldly job candidate. For that, I’ll need $35.
In fact: if you’re planning on reading my next article, too, just go ahead and send me $55 instead. That’s quite a savings. You’re smart with your money, aren’t you? That’s like a 20% better NPV! Think about all you could do with that spare cash you get to keep to yourself instead of buying my second article separately. You can practically buy 1.5 drinks at any of the parties thrown by the Euro Club.
What, you’re still not convinced? Some kind of scrooge? Well, I’ll warn you: You’re certainly not getting any of my e-blasts anymore. And I put a lot of time into those! Have a look at a sample one: can’t you see how long, oddly-formatted, meandering, and confusing it is? And you’re telling me you don’t want a fresh 1,400-word monstrosity clogging up your inbox every week? Man, get your priorities straight!
There are other benefits, too: For the fifty or so people who do end up reading this article—and probably only because they’re friends of mine in my section (hi, wolFpack!)—I’m going to give out 470 different executive positions. 463 of them will be Co-Vice Presidents, too, so you’ll have plenty to brag about to your friends, and ample evidence to prove you’re not worthless to your parents, without actually having to do anything.
And did I mention I’m planning some kind of a crazy, overblown event for later in the year? You bet! It’s going to be great; we’ve done it with mild success at least once before! We’ve had plenty of big-time speakers in the past, so here’s a short list of people you definitely won’t be hearing from: Robert Kraft, Youngme Moon, Abraham Lincoln, William Randolph Hearst, Tomoharu Tanaka, Chuck Testa, Captain Danny Davies, Charles Falcon, Luca Pacioli (for not making it this year, by the way, Luca is furious),Dr. Emmitt Brown, and Mickey Mantle. How could you not be interested by such a diverse crowd?
By the way—and I mean, uh, this is totally irrelevant, but I suppose I should mention it anyway—I actually do still have to charge you to come to my big event. It’s okay, though. I’m only planning on charging you, my special friends, $85. But tickets usually cost $1,655! I’d never charge you that much. That rate is only for those other losers, who, as you know, have already been kicked off my e-mail list and thus won’t have any idea where and when the event is going to be, anyway. But that’s neither here nor there.
So what do you say? Are we all aboard? I promise, I’d never try to guilt you out of your hard-earned money for more or less no reason. This article has big, BIG plans for the upcoming academic season. In fact, here’s one of our top goals for this year: I say it’s time for this article to get with the Joneses, and start its own Facebook page and Twitter feed! Follow me for the one update I ever write, ever, at twitter.com/JoshHarbusSrsly.
And now that you’re finally all squared away, you can get on with reading the following article:
Author Biography
Josh Petersel is an RC in the Class of 2013 at Harvard Business School, and he totally doesn’t get how so many student groups get away with such rampant amounts of fluff, garbage, and hard selling. You can write to him, or if you’re brazen enough, actually send him $35 on PayPal, via his email address peterselj@gmail.com .
[Note: This article appeared in the Harbus at Harvard Business School the week of September 26th, 2011. You can find the online version here, while it lasts.]