I can only speak from experience. I’ll admit that my life, currently, is far from successful, but I have to qualify that with some history. I was more than moderately wealthy at one time in my life. I was debt free and had a home where two cars sat in the driveway. A flood, and the collapse of the ‘oil field’ economy changed all that. Given that I am currently unemployed, I shouldn’t be talking about the success of Nerds, but it is too obvious to deny.
There are only so many slots where athletes can make money. The number of ‘successful’ athletes is only a tiny fraction of all the people who try for these few and precious slots. Nerds, on the other hand, compete for a plethora of positions which are lucrative and can lead to a happy, debt-free life. For every professional athlete, there are probably several hundred programmers, network designers, scientists, systems analysts and a host of others. It’s been said that computer geeks don’t make that much, but that is a short-term view. My son-in-law makes 90k a year, and he’s not that unusual in the field. When I was programming robots for remote system control, I made 60K per annum, and that was years ago, when 60K was big money. At the time, the average starter home was around twenty thousand dollars. That meant I could buy a forty thousand dollar home and pay for it in a few years. So I did.
We have evolved as a Nation in the United States. When I was a child, you had to be white and male if you wanted to be rich. Now you just have to be lucky and intelligent. Even the Jocks who make the big money have to be smart. The News is full of accounts concerning celebrities who either have lost everything, or are losing it. Just making money isn’t enough, I know. You have to be able to establish yourself so that you will have a retirement income and so that you can provide for those you love. If you lack wisdom, you will die poor. There is a proverb, “My son, above all things get wisdom, and after that knowledge.”. The answer to the debate lies here, for if we are intelligent and wise we will succeed, and if we lack either of these things, success will come much harder.
I find it difficult to consider a person, having so much metal in him that he can’t enter an airport, to be successful. He, or she, has lost health and lives with constant pain. Their lives are certainly going to be shorter and less active, not to mention all the things that they cannot do, because of the physical limitations imposed by past injuries. Success is such a personal thing, each of us has their own definition. In 1923, at the Edgewater Beach Hotel in Chicago, a popular story recounts that nine of the richest men in the world were present. Without telling the actual story, it is worthwhile to note that all of them were ‘Nerds’ of their day. No athletes and no one from the entertainment industry. It is true that all of them either went insane, committed suicide, were imprisoned or simply lost all their money, but it remains that they were Nerds. When one considers the wealthiest persons in the world, seldom does one include those who are not nerds.
Insofar as successful entertainers are concerned, we should take an example. Lets use Oprah Winfrey, arguably the most successful woman in the world. At the age of 19, she was the youngest person and the first African-American woman to anchor the news at Nashville’s WTVF-TV. In April 2000, Oprah and Hearst Magazines introduced O, The Oprah Magazine. Harpo Films has produced projects based on classic and contemporary literature garnering some of the highest industry honors for quality acting and production. That’s her company, by the way. Oprah made her acting debut as “Sofia” in Steven Spielberg’s The Color Purple, for which she received both Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations. She has her own Website, her own TV show, she tours the world playing to sold out audiences as a lecturer and she even has her own Foundation. The Oprah Winfrey Foundation has awarded hundreds of grants to organizations that support the education and empowerment of women, children and families in the United States and around the world. Sounds like a Nerd to me.
When we consider our world and the people who live in it, we begin to realize that education and intelligence are far more important in the battle to achieve success than physical prowess or talent. Lasting success, however, seems to rely on wisdom more than any other single factor. It would appear that the wise nerd will succeed more often than the wise jock, however.