Consequences May Vary: Past Obedience Is No Guarantee of Future Results

Today you will obey a few hundred rules. You will price almost none of them. This book is about the pricing.Its claim fits in one sentence, and it gets misheard every time it is said out loud: there are no rules, only consequences. That is not permission. If anything, it will make you harder to liberate. Every rule you have ever obeyed was standing in for something else, and the something else is the only real thing in the room: what happens next, to whom, at what cost. Some of what stands behind your rules is real and patient. Some of it expired decades ago and still collects. Some of it was counterfeit on the day it was printed, and you are still paying.Theofanis Pantelides heads a federally regulated brokerage in Manhattan, where pricing risk is the day job. Consequences May Vary takes the discipline home. It begins with a rescue dog who could never learn rules and learned consequences perfectly, and ends in the most regulated room in America. In between: a swimming rule that died twice, a statute from 1313 still standing guard, the two questions that sort every rule you obey, and the honest arithmetic of who paid for the life you are proudest of.No worksheets. No steps. Twenty-three chapters, five interludes, one warning label, and the instruments to audit the fine print of your own life. Past obedience is no guarantee of future results.