Instant Millionaires by Max Gunther

Author:Max Gunther
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harriman House

9. A Simple Idea is Enough

We noted in the last chapter that you don’t need a highly developed talent to make a fortune quickly in show business. Now let’s go farther than that. Let’s go so far as to say that you don’t need any particular talent to achieve instant success.

All you need, really, is one good idea – and it can be a perfectly simple idea, at that. It can be the kind of idea that might have occurred to any alert man or woman, with or without talent, with or without training. The kind of idea that might leap into any bright, inquiring mind that ponders a certain situation and wonders, “Can it be improved? Why can’t it do done this way instead of that way? . . .”

The absorbing stories of two people who made fast fortunes with charmingly simple ideas follow. One of them, as you will see, is a woman. We’ve already studied two other female instant successes in this book: Margaret Mitchell and Jean Nidetch. The female of the species seems no different from the male, except that she is harder to find. There are at least ten male instant successes for every female one.

Why? The Women’s Liberation Movement would answer that women in our culture are denied the full economic opportunities enjoyed by men. That is undeniably true. It might well be that if Dan Renn, for example, had been a woman, that woman would have encountered severe problems in trying to promote a home fire alarm. Yet the standard complaint about sex discrimination isn’t a complete explanation of the paucity of female instant successes. Some ideas would have succeeded without regard to the originator’s sex. Monopoly, for instance, or Crunchy Granola, or the Frisbee. There are few sexist barriers, if any, against a sound idea. Why don’t women originate more ideas?

To solve this dilemma would require a separate book. Indeed, many books have already tried to solve it – without, it seems to me, notable success. If women appear to be less inventive than men, we must wonder whether that is an innate trait or merely the result of a million years of male domination. If women are more conservative, less willing to take risks, we must ask whether they are born that way or whether society molds them into that psychological shape.

I certainly don’t propose to poke at these explosive questions here. I raise the questions only to show that I’m aware of them. I don’t want to be accused of excessive male chauvinism for having produced a book with only three heroines among a couple of dozen heroes. I searched diligently for good stories of female rapid risers with which to entertain you, and the fact is there are very few such stories to be told. The reasons I leave to other thinkers, debaters and social reformers. The essential fact I can state unequivocally: Women don’t make fortunes as often or as fast as men.

But when an inventive female mind does go to work, it works as well as any male mind.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.