FORTUNE FAVOURS THE BOLD

 Fortune Favours The Bold

Fortune favours the bold, so you don’t discourage them. Today’s article is more of an angry rant and a threat for everyone to change their behaviours. I have been noticing this since childhood and I have always hated it. But what am I talking about?

Often times, I have seen the more ‘experienced’ people give ‘advice’ to the non-experienced. People absolutely LOVE telling other people how to do their job. Or, they love to discourage someone when someone is trying something new and unheard of. This world is filled with negative people who try to impose their ideologies on you. And that is the problem with this world. Everyone has a set of beliefs that they expect the world to revolve around. No one tries to accept that 2 different people can have 2 very different opinions about a thing.

And that is where the problem starts. So many times, there have been incidences wherein the ‘higher-ups’ have completely rejected the idea of a brilliant person who means well. Generally this was a recurring trope in ancient times with scientists and brilliant inventors. For example, in the mid 1800s, Ignaz Semmelweis was a doctor in Vienna who suggested that doctors should wash their hands before touching patients. This idea of his was ridiculed to such an extent that he was committed to a MENTAL INSTITUTION where he DIED! Today, 1 in every 3 person is a clean freak.

Let me give you another example. In 1930, a 19-year-old Indian student was traveling by ship to England. During the voyage, he did the math and realized that if a star was heavy enough, it would eventually collapse into something infinitely dense. His name was Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (after whom the Chandrasekhar limit is named). Sir Arthur Eddington, the most famous astronomer of the time, publicly mocked him at the Royal Astronomical Society even going so far as calling the idea a "stellar buffoonery".

This is what I am talking about. The higher-ups who think they have far more knowledge than the less experienced have always had a dismissive ability of rejecting ideas that are unheard of.

What gets me through this frustration are success stories of people who get back at the world for ridiculing them.

In October 1903, the New York Times published an editorial discussing the failure of Samuel Langley, a well-funded scientist who had just crashed his own flying machine into the Potomac River.

They concluded that building a flying machine was a waste of time, stating:

"The flying machine which will really fly might be evolved by the combined and continuous efforts of mathematicians and mechanicians in from one million to ten million years."

And guess what my dear readers… Just 2 months later the Wright brothers invented the aeroplane. Not even years, not even decades, 2 months! That was all it took to prove the world wrong.

Let me tell you another story.

In the early 1980s, it was believed that ulcers were caused by stress and spicy food. But Barry Marshall and his colleague Robin Warren argued that ulcers were actually caused by a bacterium called H. pylori.

When the medical community ridiculed them, Barry Marshall, like me, was extremely stubborn and frustrated by everyone. He wanted to prove that his theory was right all along. So that son of a gun, literally drank a beaker of the bacteria, developed a massive ulcer, and then cured himself with antibiotics.

These people are the real heroes. Not the upper management, not the higher-ups, not the directors, not the C-suite, not ‘Corporate’. It is the unbreakable will of a disgraced scientist that believes wholeheartedly that the world is wrong.

And this theory does not stop at just scientists. There may have been hundreds of thousands of people who may have been ridiculed or rejected for something brilliant, just because ‘upper management’ thinks it is not worth it.

So my message is to all those people out there – Fortune Favours The Bold. Don’t give up. You are not wrong. You are not weak. You are not useless. You are a human being and you are infinite. Don’t let anyone fool you into thinking that your ideas and dreams are not worth it. It’s not over until you win.