About saving the world

Nobody gets credit for the crises they averted.

If you saved your company because you decided to start doing the books clean, you’re not going to be the hero. You’re going to be the unrecognized, silent person chugging along and doing the right thing.

It’s different than if your company sees disaster, almost ends up in bankruptcy, and you save it at the last minute. Now there’s a hero.

It’s like the Army. You get a medal for getting injured, but you don’t get one for moving your whole platoon out of enemy fire. The disaster that you prevented doesn’t generally get recognized by the history books. So it’ll be the same with Obama.

We won’t see hellfire, we won’t see our oceans boil and our people starve, so no matter how awesome his climate change plan is, it just isn’t going to be as great as saving humanity in that Armageddon type way.

That’s why Jerry Bruckheimer makes his movie heroes save everything, but only at the last possible moment. That’s when it’s exciting to save stuff. Otherwise it’s just “well, I made the right decision early on,” and that’s it. Right?

It’s the silent resentment of those who do right by their people. Only those who save people in an exciting way ever get credit. The rest? Get back to work.