{"id":251,"date":"2014-07-19T02:38:32","date_gmt":"2014-07-19T02:38:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.keen.com\/newarticles\/uncategorized\/maintaining-your-image"},"modified":"2021-05-24T20:15:54","modified_gmt":"2021-05-24T20:15:54","slug":"maintaining-your-image","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.keen.com\/articles\/spiritual\/maintaining-your-image","title":{"rendered":"The Cost of Maintaining Your Image"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Imagine that you are on welfare. Every week you buy a lottery ticket for one dollar. Each week when you do your bookkeeping, you make entries indicating that for every ticket you bought, you won the lottery prize for that week.<\/p>\n

At the end of the year, your income, according to your balance sheet using this system, is about half a billion dollars. Now imagine that when you file your tax return, the IRS congratulates you instead of pointing out your error or insanity.<\/p>\n

Then imagine that tens of thousands of people pay you to buy lottery tickets for them because they think you have the golden touch. Sounds crazy?<\/p>\n

A version of this unlikely scenario happened in the real world, with Enron Corporation.<\/p>\n

You are probably wondering what you have in common with a large corporation that was the focus of a huge scandal. Read on, because as you will soon figure out, the same issues that lead to Enron’s demise can also plague and destroy our own lives.<\/p>\n

Enron, a company that bought and sold natural gas and invested in electricity had a CEO that used what’s called “mark to market accounting.” This basically means that projected future earnings are put on the books as actual cash assets the moment a deal is made. Using the lottery example above, once you buy your lottery ticket for a dollar, if the prize is 7.5 million dollars, you would record that 7.5 million as your cash asset before the lottery numbers are even called.<\/p>\n

Enron continued to use mark to market accounting and reported that it was making money, investing in winning projects and was poised to make more lucrative deals. It seemed to be doing great financially and attracted more investors.<\/p>\n

In actuality, it was all a mirage and Enron didn’t have any money. In fact, Enron was in debt billions of dollars and the projects they invested in were unsuccessful. However, even though Enron lost money, the company recorded massive earnings that didn’t exist, and they hid their debts by not listing them.<\/p>\n

Eventually, lies and deception were not enough to maintain the illusion of prosperity and the company collapsed. But not before the upper ranks cashed out their stock options while still defrauding investors and lying to the employees who lost their jobs and retirement pensions when the scandal was exposed.<\/p>\n

The CEO was sentenced to 24 years in prison for fraud. The founder died from a heart attack after being found guilty of fraud-related charges. Another top-ranking employee went to prison and another committed suicide.<\/p>\n

So what does this sad tale have to do with us?<\/p>\n

Maintaining an image of prosperity and success is not a driving force only for large corporations. Individuals also face mounting pressures to manipulate the truth and to mishandle their finances in order to project an image of success in a culture that places such a high value on wealth and physical appearance.<\/p>\n

Stop and ask yourself the following questions:<\/p>\n