Changing Books

After much thought, reflection and a leaving of time, I have decided on a course of action that is quite drastic. I will take a slight detour on the road of life.

I was brought up on the thought that knowledge was power. And I believe that it is up to a certain point. For a family who are sharecroppers, for example, a child graduating and becoming a professional is a milestone because it can mean the end of poverty. Stories like these are abundant in my motherland the Philippines.

However, in America, knowledge can only go so far. I have seen with my own eyes the smartest and brightest people go into academics and become professional academics. At the end of thirty years of research, the scientists retire and go off into the sunset. Meanwhile, some of the students of the scientists in turn became academics and the cycle started all over again.

But guess where the rich people were. They were not among the scientists. Chances were that the scientists had maybe 1% become millionares by starting their own companies. But even that number did not last because more often than not, those scientists who became business people did not know how to run a business. There were exceptions like the people who began Chiron and Genentech. But for the most part, many biotechs that started in the 1980's and 1990's have failed.

Credit most of those failure to the inability of the CEO's to run the company into the ground. One company had raised $8 million. Guess where the money went to. It went to office furniture instead of marketing and sales. That led to the company sinking into oblivion.

So, I cleared out two shelves of my bookcase that used to hold biochemistry, cell biology and math books from my undergraduate years. In place of those books, I placed on the bookshelf books about sales, advertising, strategies for making yourself rich, poetry books, and other books that I find interesting in the here and now.

I don't know how this will turn out. But, in the long run, I want to become a millionaire. I want to be able to write poetry without worrying about money. I want to be able to sell my photography without wondering where the mortgage money will come from. The road will probably be very bumpy. But then again, I have learned so much already about communication that perhaps, it will not be so bad.