Quote:
Originally Posted by albionmoonlight
Russell also provides another example of how we measure success for athletes so differently than any other walk-of-life.
If your college roommate had invented some social networking program in his dorm room and got paid $20 million dollars by Google after graduating to come work for them and develop his product and then spent the next three years coasting until Google decided to let him go, you would consider him a success.
There might be some sense of lost potential there. But the story would generally go "Did you hear about that guy who invented SuperTwitter? He got, like, $20 million dollars for it from Google and now he just hangs out on the beach all day and drinks beer. That's awesome."
Not a new point, but athletics is one of the only areas where a guy can become a multi-millionaire doing what he loves and be considered a "failure."
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Let's say the SuperTwitter guy you are talking about created something like that for his university, but made no money on it while he was at college (we'll say the NCAA owned the rights for all the work he did). He then signs with the highest bidder (we'll call it IBM for the hell of it) to head their R&D department. In 3 years, he has two designs which are monumental flops. He retires designing technology at the age of 25 and walks away with his 50 million in signing bonuses.
Is he going to be considered a success or a failure? Lets say you own IBM stock? Success or failure?
On a personal level, good for him. He took a great idea in college, signed a big deal and can waste the rest of his life away on the beach. Nobody is saying that means he's a failure as a person. As a professional technology professional? He's an abject disaster who cost IBM millions of dollars in both money spent out and time lost from the design departments total failure for three years.
I said it above in the thread when Tigercat was talking about how good of a guy Russell was. I don't think Danny Wurfall, Heath Schuler or Akili Smith are failures in life. I think they are failures as professional football players. There is a big difference.