This story appears in the June 14, 2015 issue of Forbes. Subscribe
WORDS MATTER. Take the phrase "If we can't ask from society's winners to make [an] investment. ... " It's a familiar plea from preachers and fundraisers, a particularly American approach. The U.S., happily, is a country that mints many winners who then traditionally give lots of money to charities, churches, schools and nonprofits.
Now change this plea by the addition of a single word: "If we can't ask from society's lottery winners to make [an] investment. ..." Hmm--it has an altogether different ring to it, no? That one word, "lottery," changes the entire meaning. A good-hearted plea to society's successful to heed their better angels and give something back becomes, by inserting "lottery," sarcastic and cutting.
Winning a lottery doesn't make a person worthy of respect. A lottery winner wins despite engaging in an impulsive act. A lottery winner wins only because others lose. A lottery winner who won't give back, therefore, is a lucky bastard.
A winner, on the other hand, is worthy of respect. He or she studied a discipline, risked time and capital, met market needs, learned from mistakes and likely worked very hard to achieve success.
This little example of how "lottery" changes an entire sentence's meaning would be trivial but for one fact: President Obama said it--"lottery" and all--while speaking on a poverty panel last month.
What to make of this? Was it an unintentional slip to call successful Americans "lottery winners," or was it a window into the President's worldview on wealth, poverty and injustice? If it's the latter, we're in new territory. I don't recall another American President who had such a sarcastic view of success. President Franklin Roosevelt thought and said that big business and bankers opposing his New Deal were "malefactors of great wealth," but he stopped short of making snarky comments about successful people being lucky. Woodrow Wilson thought entrepreneurs were a passing fad to be replaced by scientific consortiums of big business and big government. But he didn't call Thomas
LUCK OR HARD WORK?
Intended or not, President Obama's use of the words "lottery winners" instead of "winners" was in really poor taste. Bill Gates and Paul Allen were surely lucky to be endowed with the 99.99th percentile IQs they didn't choose. But they each devoted tens of thousands of hours in applying their smarts to learning about software. Gates forfeited great opportunities by dropping out of an elite college. Both risked potentially lucrative careers to start
Larry Page was the grandson of a Michigan autoworker and the son of a professor of computer science and an instructor of computer programming. His business partner, Sergey Brin, was born into a Jewish family in the anti-Semitic Soviet Union. Both were "lucky" to be endowed with native intelligence and to grow up in families that loved learning. But millions of children around the world are similarly endowed and don't start Google-like companies.
WhatsApp's Jan Koum grew up in a single-parent California household that often relied on welfare. Netscape cofounder Jim Clark grew up in Texas panhandle poverty and dropped out of high school at age 16. His cofounder, Marc Andreessen, grew up in a rural Wisconsin family unfamiliar with higher mathematics, computer science or software--or even much logical reasoning.
Wilbur and Orville Wright's father, according to David McCullough's fascinating new book, The Wright Brothers (Simon & Schuster), encouraged reading and independent thinking. But the Dayton, Ohio brothers acquired an interest in bicycles and kites on their own. In 1899 Wilbur asked the Smithsonian Institution for papers on mechanical and human flight, adding that he wasn't a "crank." The brothers existed on little but eggs and suffered apocalyptic mosquito attacks while doing their wing-warp experiments in the North Carolina sand dunes. In 1905 they were able to fly circles for 30 minutes and more. By 1908 they could stay aloft for 90 minutes and do figure eights. Orville almost died when the propeller broke off a plane he was flying, which then crashed, killing his passenger, Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge.
Between the time Wilbur received his papers from the Smithsonian and the French and U.S. militaries finally believed the Wright Brothers had mastered controllable flight, nine years of bad food, bug bites, crashes and sneering press coverage had passed. President Theodore Roosevelt had the good grace not to call the Wright Brothers "lottery winners."
