Hot off what may be the campaign gaffe of the season — telling inventors and entrepreneurs and business creators that they didn’t create what they created — Obama, without his teleprompter, has put his foot in his mouth, again.
In Texas, he no doubt thought he was giving himself an “aw, shucks” compliment when he told a crowd of supporters,
So I don’t know about you, I don’t know how you guys operate in your life, but my general rule is if I do something and it doesn’t work — (laughter) — I don’t go back to doing it. (Applause.) We don’t go backwards, we go forwards.
The crowd got one thing right: that comment deserved laughter, but of the derisive variety.
As Bryan Preston observes on Pajamas Media,
Inventors from Thomas Edison to Bill Gates to Steve Jobs would probably counter with “Well, that explains why you’ve never achieved anything….”
The fact is, it’s often the 100th try after 99 failures that produces the breakthrough. To put things into terms the president can relate to, in baseball, a good hitter can expect to hit his way to base about one third of the time. Home run king Babe Ruth was also the major league strikeout king. Soccer strikers can expect a goal maybe one out of every five or six shots on target….
I’m reminded of a comment by the only scientist I know well, daughter Jessie, last seen here and here receiving recognition as one of Forbes Magazine’s “30 Under 30” future leaders. From an interview with Jessie in a Caltech publication last January calling attention to her award:
Jessie Rosenberg (PhD ’10) came to Caltech when she was 17 years old-as a graduate student. Rosenberg learned how to read at age three and a half, learned about the Pythagorean theorem at age eight, and took physics at the University of Virginia in the eighth grade. She skipped high school and went to Bryn Mawr College before studying applied physics at Caltech, where she worked with Oskar Painter, professor of applied science, on devices called optical resonators, which are used to trap and manipulate light….
She’s now a researcher at IBM TJ Watson Research Center, developing faster ways for computers to communicate with one another….
Rosenberg credits Caltech for making her a better researcher. “I think everything I did there helped me get to where I am now,” she says. “My time there helped me to not be scared of pulling out the schematics for a complicated piece of cleanroom equipment and crawling under there with a screwdriver. I learned that even if something doesn’t work the first fifteen times, maybe it’ll work the sixteenth.”
Thank goodness Obama doesn’t keep trying when something doesn’t work. Our economy has barely survived all the things he’s tried once that don’t work; imagine the damage he could do if he kept trying them over and over. (Now, if only he had enough sense to know when things don’t work.)
