Only The Crazy Can Win This Game, There Is Proof!

This is a game that is so full of uncertainties that is virtually impossible for normal people to win. Crazy people win it simply because making the ordinary logical choice is most of the time the quickest way to lose any gains made. Time and time again, people who are in their right minds have tried to play it, and time and time again they have always come up short… every single time. It is a game with the largest wins, and as history and statistics show, only crazy people win big in this game – the game of life.

“It is impossible to sell animal stories in the USA.”

Somebody reasonable and sane told that to a guy who had written a story about animals. From cover to cover… animals which could actually speak. The guy didn’t listen to the “expert”. He was crazy enough not to put his manuscript in a dustbin. He persisted, and for his craziness, his book won big. The Animal Farm is celebrated as a piece of literary genius and George Orwell is known for writing it.

Against Ridicule, Rejection, War Planes And An Earthquake - He still expected to win!

Soichiro Honda’s only dream was to develop a piston which he could sell to Toyota Corporation. He therefore sold everything he had, including pawning his wife’s jewelry just to make his dream come true. After endless nights and days in his garage, he came up with what he considered a masterpiece and presented it to Toyota -  it was rejected.

Rather than giving up, he went back to work and to school. Whoever he tried to talk to about the design, either didn’t care, or ridiculed them. This included some of his instructors, but Honda never really gave up. He continued to perfect his design and when he presented it to the company, it was accepted. His dream had come true… or maybe not.

The government was gearing up for war, and while he had gotten the contract he wanted, there was really no concrete for him to use to build his factory. What had been a good success story suddenly hit a wall. He didn’t focus or protest about the unfairness of this situation, he simply looked for a way to make his own kind of concrete. He found it, and his factory was finally built.

And then the war started and the factory was bombed – twice. He didn’t give up, he simply instructed his workers to collect the gasoline cans the airplanes discarded and used them as raw materials. These he called “gifts from President Truman”.

His attitude seemed to have conquered all. And then nature intervened. An earthquake flattened the whole factory! He sold his piston operation to Toyota. But he wasn’t really done.

The gasoline shortage that resulted after the war crippled almost everyone’s life, including Honda’s. For the sake of economizing gasoline, he fixed a motor in his bicycle and soon enough everyone was asking for his “motorized bikes.”He had struck a goldmine! He decided to personally write a letter to all the 18,000 bicycle shop owners asking for an investment. Only a handful replied, and Soichiro Honda used the capital gained to reproduce his motor bike, but they never really sold as much as he had anticipated. People found them to be too big and too bulky.

Any normal human being by now would have given up, but not Honda. He decided to make various adjustments in his design and he finally came up with the “Super Cub”. Now these, were an instant hit. They not only earned Soichiro Honda an Emperor’s Award, but also served as the foundation of a billion-dollar company that has his name. He won big!

“For your own good, do not publish this book.”

This is what D.H. Lawrence was told when he tried to publish Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Well, needless to say, it became a hit and made its writer famous through time – a complete writer’s success story.

Morris E. Goodman(The Miracle Man): A Fight To Have It All Back

He crushed an airplane. He walked from it alive, but less of a human being. He was completely paralyzed, having broken his first and second cervical vertebrae. He couldn’t eat or drink. He also couldn’t breathe because his lungs were crushed. He couldn’t eat. In fact, the only thing that he could do was to blink.

And the doctors said that he was lucky enough to be a vegetable for the rest of his life. They were the experts, and that was what research, science and medical reasoning said. But not he. He said he would walk out of that hospital on his two feet. He did! His story is expertly told in The Secret  and it has served as an inspiration to many. Only because he was crazy enough to defy science and medical facts!

When A Millionaire Taps On Crazy, What Happens?

He becomes a billionaire. At least in the case of J. Paul Getty – the billionaire. While he is famous for saying that the secret to success is: “Rise early, work late, and strike oil” and also for installing a payphone in his mansion, people usually overlook the real secret to his success. And throughout his career, this one quality is what he owes his all success.

By 1949, Paul Getty was already a rich man, but this is the year that he did something that ended up establishing him as the richest man of his time. He simply paid $69.5 million for a barren piece of land. And the land was in foreign country. Well, he actually paid $9.5 million in cash, and then promised to pay $1 million every year after that, whether he struck oil or not. Now that, is not just risk taking, it is almost madness. This is so especially keeping in mind that no oil had ever been found, and that by then, there were more and more people who had already gambled their money away in the hope of striking oil.

The first year went by, and no oil. The second, nothing came of it. The third, still nothing. Keep in mind that he was still paying the million dollars plus footing all the expenditure of exploring for oil in Saudi Arabia: but he still kept on hoping. And that unrealistic hope paid him handsomely. That barren piece of land ended up producing over 16 million barrels of oil per year. He won big!

Determined to Sing Nearer My God To Thee

“We won't be signing off until the world ends. We'll be on, and we will cover the end of the world, live, and that will be our last event . . . we'll play 'Nearer, My God, to Thee' before we sign off.”

That is what Ted Turner said during the launch of CNN. It was the first 24 hour news channel in the United States, and it didn’t really make any sense to have such a channel. To make it worse, he and the original founders had “dumped” $25 million of their own money into the station. Skeptics were many and many more thought them mad… but nobody is doubting right now. And that venture that everybody thought was doomed made Ted Turner a billionaire - one who was rich enough to donate $1 billion dollars to the United Nations.

It’s A Recession, Are You Out of Your Mind?

When a recession hits, it is natural for people to shy away from taking risks. They are sensible and so, they make no investments, they start non new companies and probably sit around hoping for the better. That is what the masses do. But there are some who are crazy enough to start companies at the heart of a recession and what do they get for their craziness? Huge rewards!

Disney, CNN, MTV, Hyatt, Burger King, FedEx, Microsoft, Apple, Gillette, AT&T, Texas Instruments, 20th Century Fox, IBM, Merck, Hershey’s, IHOP, Eli Lilly, Coors, Bristol-Myers, Sun, Amgen, The Jim Henson Company, LexisNexis, Autodesk, Adobe, Symantec, Electronic Arts, Fortune, GE, and Hewlett-Packard; are just but some of the few iconic companies that were established during times of economic dark-spells. Had their founders not been crazy enough not to exploit the chaos during those periods… who knows?

LET’S MAKE A TOAST TO THE CRAZY ONES!!!