My parents always told me that if I dedicated myself to something and worked hard at it, eventually I might find success.
And I believed them. I put in 14, 16, even 20-hour days, trying to figure out new, better ways to help companies market themselves. After 20 years of effort, I’ve distinguished myself as a director, writer, photographer, and consultant. And have achieved the enviable position of not living in a car.
Others, however, have taken a different path.
A woman who has spent the last 20 years smoking has now been awarded $28 billion dollars. In spite of the fact that every single pack of cigarettes sold in this country over the past 37 years has told her that to do so would be to tempt death.
A man who has spent the last 20 years eating fast food is now salivating obscenely about the massive award he hopes to win because he is obese. This in spite of the fact that the term junk food is part of the common vernacular and is almost universally applied to the very food the man has subsisted on. (The man’s lawyer gleefully compares the possible jackpot to that which he helped engineer from the tobacco industry, which means that it must be in the hundreds of millions—if not billions—of dollars.)
You know what this tells me? It doesn’t pay to be smart. It pays to be stupid.
If you can read a pack of cigarettes and avoid smoking them, what do you get? Nothing. But if you’re so stupid that in spite of years of warning you still do it, jackpot. If you learn about nutrition from a McDonald’s billboard, instead of having listened to your mother, your teachers, the general public, and common sense, you deserve a reward.
No wonder business schools need to teach classes in ethics. It certainly isn’t clear what’s right and what’s wrong.
In fact, maybe somebody can explain the recent California legislature ruling that gunshot victims can sue gun manufacturers. You mean to tell me that I can be sued for making a product that actually works the way it’s supposed to?
I don’t get it. But then, maybe I’m stupid.
