TM 241: Sacrosanct
What principles are sacrosanct in your opinion?
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. "Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone," he told me, "just remember that all people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."
There now. I've already got forty-seven pretty impressive words, and every one of them is plagiarized from The Great Gatsby.
So, obviously, intellectual property not entirely sacrosanct in my point of view. Theft of ideas is inevitable; it's how innovation happens. Though, in fairness, if I steal from you, I'll probably tell you about it as soon as I've already dazzled you with my verbal ingenuity.
But I did have more or less that exact conversation with my father. Kind of funny, because Howard Stark didn't exactly have a problem criticizing other people himself. He just meant that I wasn't supposed to do it. But the question didn't ask for public airing of Daddy issues. It asked about principles, and if there's one thing I learned from Dad, it's that Starks were born with advantages -- and that it wasn't acceptable to rest on them. You know the expression, "Some guys are born on third base and go through life thinking they hit a triple?" That was the man Howard Stark would never allow his son to be.
A lot of the people I know have special advantages. A lot of us have gifts. The only thing that would be a sin would be not to use them to the best of our abilities. It took me a lot of my life to get to this point, but it's become very clear to me, as I've gotten older: Dad was right.
I didn't count those forty-seven words.
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. "Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone," he told me, "just remember that all people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."
There now. I've already got forty-seven pretty impressive words, and every one of them is plagiarized from The Great Gatsby.
So, obviously, intellectual property not entirely sacrosanct in my point of view. Theft of ideas is inevitable; it's how innovation happens. Though, in fairness, if I steal from you, I'll probably tell you about it as soon as I've already dazzled you with my verbal ingenuity.
But I did have more or less that exact conversation with my father. Kind of funny, because Howard Stark didn't exactly have a problem criticizing other people himself. He just meant that I wasn't supposed to do it. But the question didn't ask for public airing of Daddy issues. It asked about principles, and if there's one thing I learned from Dad, it's that Starks were born with advantages -- and that it wasn't acceptable to rest on them. You know the expression, "Some guys are born on third base and go through life thinking they hit a triple?" That was the man Howard Stark would never allow his son to be.
A lot of the people I know have special advantages. A lot of us have gifts. The only thing that would be a sin would be not to use them to the best of our abilities. It took me a lot of my life to get to this point, but it's become very clear to me, as I've gotten older: Dad was right.
I didn't count those forty-seven words.