MAYBE YOU CAN, TOO
JANICE JOHNSON WAS THINKING COMPUTER SOFTWARE when she woke up last Wednesday morning, and when Bob and the kids came down to the kitchen she had scribbled three or four things on an envelope and was thinking some more. “I don’t know what came over me!” she cried. “It’s like a dream or something!” And two hours later she cashed in an insurance policy and started Janico. They make computer skirts. Cotton skirts with an elastic band to fit any console. “I saw computers in this dream,” Janice explained, “and they seemed sort of stark. So I thought of dressing them up a little bit.” A little bit! Janico was worth $2.3 million at noon today, and now she’s bringing in a top management team from San Francisco “to handle the bills and checking account and all that stuff.” They’re due to arrive in fifteen minutes.
That’s how fast things are moving nowadays—in computers, communications, quality control, the incentives field, all the hot spots in the economy. Friends of yours may be on their way to incredible first-quarter earnings—old chums you saw last night! You went out together to a little Australian restaurant for creamed onions and baked emu and sat around talking idle talk, and suddenly this morning, while you drank orange juice and read the funny pages, she was saying to him, “Earl, I had an idea about transceivers. Why not turn that little U-shaped gizmo around and put the little red things in from the other end?”
Why not, indeed! Tomorrow they’ll be sitting pretty, their pictures in the financial section—a hundred thousand shares of ChumCo snapped up by hungry investors at $17.375—and you’ll be wondering, “Why not me? Why didn’t I think of that? Francine doesn’t know beans about transceivers, she’s in women’s shoes, for heaven’s sake! And yet here she’s flipped the whole industry over on its ear! What’s going on here?”
I know that feeling; it’s exactly how I felt until ten days ago. I was in the slide business, cranking out those packets of color slides you see in souvenir shops—Yosemite, the Everglades, Homes of the Stars, Scenic Indiana—and going nowhere, while Bam! Bam! Bam! other people were hitting pay dirt. One day they were like anyone else and the next I knew they were off in another world. My racquetball partner, Bobby Lee, canceled a Friday match saying his head hurt, and the next Monday he was into soybean microchips and formed BLeeCo, and Tuesday he spun off two subsidiaries, BLInc and BLAmCo, to get into mood publishing and to shelter some of his earnings in forests. I had never even heard of mood publishing! On Wednesday, it was the old guy who lives across the alley from me and raises tomatoes and keeps about thirty-seven cats—one day a sad old duffer and the next thing he’s chairman of the board of Down Home Video, and suddenly next to Ms. PacMan and Donkey Kong you see Ringalario and Kick the Can and Starlight Moonlight and Mumblety-Peg and Video Whist, and the old geezer is raking in the loot, sitting around with a noseful of quarters.
After a while, you get tired of being gracious and saying, “Gee! That’s wonderful! I’m really happy for you!” You want to hide in Bobby Lee’s bushes and wait for him to come out the door whistling. You want to jump on Bobby Lee and get his leg in a toehold and make him roll around in the dirt while you yell, “Tell me, Bobby Lee! Tell me fast! Tell me two or three good tips right now this minute or I’ll bust your foot!”
That’s what I did eleven days ago last night. He told me, too. The next day I was in business as MeCo. We make a little ultrasonic thing that attaches to your dashboard and turns red lights to green in every state but Nebraska. Right now I’ve got more money than I know what to do with. You know what that’s like? It’s like breathing a different air. Like the law of gravity doesn’t apply to you. Colors are brighter, food tastes better. You tell jokes and people laugh their heads off.
I’d like to share my secrets with you. Actually, one secret. It’s so simple you’ll wonder why you didn’t think of it years ago. I’d like to blurt it out right now—at no charge whatsoever. You won’t owe me so much as a thank-you.
“Why?” you’re probably wondering. “Why would a rich guy be giving away his secret to people like us? There must be some hitch, some string attached. A guy like him isn’t going to share secrets just like that! A guy like him isn’t about to hand out the secret inside information that has earned him incredible sums these past ten days! Who is he trying to kid? Whom does he take us for? We weren’t born yesterday!”
Okay, forget it.
That negative attitude wasn’t the one Janice Johnson took when I told her a couple of things, but, then, she isn’t suspicious and small-minded like a lot of people. She’s Methodist, like me. Our church is well known for having a generous nature. Sunday morning, Janice slipped a hundred thousand dollars into the collection plate. Now, that’s stewardship! We’re like that. We’re not stingy and mean. We don’t hold with the idea that America is slipping and the economy is drying up and everyone will have less and hold on to it tighter and tighter. We think the opposite. Fabulous possibilities are all around us! Wealth abounds, if only we open ourselves up to new ways of thinking!
That’s why Janice, Bobby Lee, and myself formed the Birds of the Air, Beasts of the Field Foundation over the weekend. BOTABOTFF believes that animals have much to tell us, that they can communicate with people and do—on a daily basis!—and that these important messages are lost simply because we are not receptive to them. BOTABOTFF will be spending more than six million dollars in the next few weeks on research aimed at training people to hear messages, verbal or telepathic, from the animal world.
“What sort of messages?” you’re probably wondering. “Might they include business advice or investment tips?”
Sure, they might. It all depends. Depends on the animal, too.
Janice is very high on cats right now, which she sleeps with two of and claims they speak to her in dreams, sitting around a long dark walnut conference table. Me, I don’t trust cats, and if a cat walked up to me this minute and said, “Mutual fund,” I’d pay no attention. If I heard it from my dog, Buster, I’d listen, but not from a cat and not from snakes. Bobby Lee swears by snakes. He keeps three of them under his bed.
We all agree on one thing, though. Whales are the smartest creatures on earth, smarter than dolphins. A dolphin’s ideas are ideas that whales had months ago. Humpbacks communicate halfway around the world, emitting a vast range of sounds, most of which concern food and sex, but some are about marketing and development. Of course, most people can’t profit from interspecies exchange because they’re too dumb. They don’t have the sense that God gave geese, to use an extreme example.
Let’s take a purely hypothetical case. Let’s say that your dog, Buster, had an ear infection, so you put him in the car and drove to the vet’s. Let’s say Buster was agitated and stood on the front seat with his forepaws up on the dashboard and made this strange whining sound. Let’s say that you drove 6.5 miles through busy streets and never had to stop for a single red light. In addition, a pain in your left elbow went away and your car radio started picking up ship-to-shore from off the coast of Portugal. Let’s say you happened to have a cassette recorder in the car with you. Would you press Record and capture Buster’s vocal secrets while sailing through intersections where long lines of cars on the cross streets wait for you to pass? Or would you pull over to the curb, stifle the mutt, and wait for the lights to turn red?
Let’s say you do the first thing and a week and a half later you become a multimillionaire. You decide to tell someone else about it. Now let’s say you’re that other person. Someone tells you he got rich and offers to share the secret for free and you don’t believe him, but then he tells you more and suddenly you sort of do but now he is asking $239.50 for the secret, postpaid.
How long do you think that offer will stand? Is it too late already? Is that your dog? Is that a smile on his face?