When I was in grad school, I delivered pizzas nights and on weekends to make ends meet. I recall once a customer offered me a three dollar tip upon my arrival but I refused it. I arrived after the promised delivery time and thus I felt it was wrong for me to take the money. The customer insisted but I said no. I've always been a nice guy. Further, I was always the guy that turned the other cheek. I've never been in a real fistfight. I don't even like to hear people argue. In a word: non-confrontational.
As kids, we were always told to "play nice". Whenever we did anything less than saintly in school, the teacher said, "That wasn't nice!" "I just want a nice guy" is what I routinely hear from ladies. Our entire life, we are conditioned to just "play nice". At some point in life, however, we (hopefully) get a wake-up call: nice guys finish last. At some point we see that the biggest jerk in the company is also the highest paid. The girl who's the sweetest is also the most single (unless she's just absolutely fine, then it's typically a wash). The nicest guy is the one people take advantage of and women simply don't respect. At some point during the past three years I got that revelation. I decided to stop playing nice.
A good friend of mine from undergrad told me recently, "The more money you make, the more this jerk is coming out of you." To hear the word "jerk" applied to me so forcefully was shocking. On the other hand, it is true that I no longer strive to be the nicest guy in the room and I do make more money now than I did in the days when that was my objective. I simply (perhaps unconsciously) evaluated my life and how things were going for the nice folks, then compared that to the not so nice ones. No, jerks aren't very well liked but they are well paid, often. I've seen plenty of women end a relationship with a nice guy because he's too nice or doesn't have enough "edge" but I see plenty of women stick around with a jerk for years. I took notes.
I find it odd that, as a society, we claim to value certain things but indeed we reward and praise the opposite. We say we value honest, altruistic personalities in business yet worship figures like John Rockefeller, who built his oil empire by undercutting his competition with shady (illegal actually) deals. We have unending admiration for J.P. Morgan who, through U.S Steel subsidiaries, used black slave labor in the early 20th century to help build his fortune. In the face of all this, I'm still told to be nice. Poor people especially are told to sit back passively, go the extra mile to appear saintly, stay in line and it will all work out. The body of historical evidence is wildly contradictory.
I'm not nearly as nice and accommodating as I once was. I'm much more selfish, self-promoting and perhaps even willing to compromise on many things once sacred. I don't feel that bad about it frankly. I'm only responding to the reward system society has set up.