The Viable Alternative

Kevin O’Leary caught a lot of flack in this video from Amanda Lang, during an episode of the Canadian Broadcast Company’s “The Lang and O’Leary Exchange” and also from the people who watched the video. Words like “douchebag” and “insensitive” were thrown around.

You know what though? I don’t think the man said anything wrong.

First off, people are all bent out of shape because O’Leary said that the fact that 85 of the world’s richest people are richer than 3.5 billion of the world’s poorest people was “fantastic news.” The fact that people are pissed off for saying this is “fantastic news” says a lot more about them than it does about him.

People are so obsessed with looking at things from a negative angle that when someone comes around and decides to interpret it from a positive angle, they’re ready to crucify the person. It is shown that life is 90% attitude, and that your attitude in life determines your altitude in life i.e. the quality of life you live. Many people who live happy lives have trained themselves to see the bright side of seemingly negative situations which in turn enables them to bounce back quicker. When a situation comes up that has the potential to piss them off, or make them disappointed, sad or depressed, they consciously train themselves to ask, “What’s good about this?” so they can look for the bright side of things rather than react emotionally and spiral down in a vicious cycle that does more harm than good.

O’Leary was merely looking at the bright side of things. As an entrepreneur who doesn’t get a salary and is initially faced with a lot of rejection and failure, you have to train yourself early to cultivate an attitude that makes you look at the bright side of things. An attitude like that will take you a lot further than looking at something the way that almost everybody else is inclined to look at it.

Is O’Leary’s choosing to look at the bright side, something that most people can’t or are unwilling to do be one indicator of why he’s more successful than “most” people? Hmmmm……

Second, people were upset because O’Leary said that 3.5 Billion people have people to look up to in order to motivate them to improve their lives. Again, what was wrong with that? If anything, the woman who was interviewing was much more out of line than Kevin O’Leary.

To begin, what in the hell does it cost a person to cream or be inspired by something? It is said that “Without a vision a people would perish.” ANYONE who has done anything great, including lifting themselves out of dire poverty started with some type of goal or dream. The inspiration from that dream was the impetus that fueled them to overcome their obstacles they faced.

Dreams give you hope and help get your through seemingly impossible situations. Viktor Frankel, Jewish holocaust survivor, in his book “Man’s Search for Meaning” said that what helped him survive the Nazi concentration camp was not losing hope. He would visualize himself after the war teaching in classrooms and that vision kept him alive. He said that the other holocaust inmates who lost hope were the ones most likely to succumb to the miserable conditions of the camps.

Lang suggesting the world’s poorest were too poor to dream was an insult to the poor. Sure, with some of the horrible things that a lot of these people go through that I couldn’t even imagine, it is quite easy to lose hope for something better. I’m not even saying that if I were in their situation that I wouldn’t lose hope either, I probably would, though losing hope would be a big mistake on my part.

Either way, throughout the unspeakable things people have experienced throughout human history, hope is one of the main ingredients that enabled them to persevere and survive. So, coming to a poor person and patting them on the head saying “Oh you poor poor person, you’re too poor to dream, you don’t even have socks to even pull yourself up by,” doesn’t help the poor in any way. It’s condescending and patronizing.

Kevin O’Leary never disputed giving a helping hand to those in need and those looking for opportunity,after all, he helps fund small businesses. There is no one on this planet who’s made it without a helping hand whether through being given a loan, a job, a piece of sage advice, mentorship, a couch to crash on, a business contract, etc. because no man is an island unto himself. It is by having a dream or aspiration that enables one to be able to take advantage of any opportunity when it presents itself. We all know of people who’ve squandered opportunity because they lacked the vision and were only concerned with immediate gratification.

This is why the idea that wealth should be redistributed is overly simplistic and nonsensical. Because wealth tends to be a mindset, if you were to redistribute wealth, in a few years the financial condition will eventually revert back to the way things were before the wealth was redistributed, with some people actually becoming worse off (think Lottery winners).

I agree that a lot of the poor people who suffer in Third World countries lack opportunity. They’re under corrupt, inept governments who rather than invest their money in building a dynamic economy that’ll enable its citizens to thrive, they use the money to line their pockets and fluff their Swiss Bank accounts.

Corrupt, despotic leaders have been around since the dawn of human history, and unfortunately, that’s unlikely to change anytime soon. Despite this, NOTHING in human history, whether it be slavery, persecution, disability, poverty, or inept Third World governments has proved capable of stopping a person FULLY determined to achieve a dream. The dream, WHATEVER it may have been, was the starting point.

I believe people also suffer due to the lack of examples of people in their lives that are living better than them. Because everyone around them is living basically at the same level, they think that this is all there is. When they get a glimpse of or get around people who are more successful than they are, some will get jealous, some will be at disbelief and think this is magic, but SOME will get inspired by how these people live. The latter group of people will see their lives as possible for them, appoint themselves the right to have the same thing, and make an effort to learn what they did to live like that so they can do the same thing.

There are many stories out there, call them “anecdotal” if you want, of people who credit their being able to rise out of poverty by having their horizons broadened by seeing people who lived “better” than they did. This made them expect more out of life and strive for something better which culminated in their escaping their situation.

People have an amazing ability to find opportunity or even create it when they’re inspired.

Some may call aspiring to be like the world’s richest as “unrealistic,” but shut up, you don’t know the person and you don’t know what a person is capable of no matter what their condition. “Statistically” it may prove to you impossible, but even if that person doesn’t make it, with a dream that inspires hope, he’s more likely to make it to a better place than the person who has no hope within him/herself at all.

If you talk to people who were able to get out of abject, Third World poverty, they’d tell you that they were able to use their poverty as a motivator to aspire for something better not a crutch that this woman, Lang, is trying to give them. Their motivation enabled them to eventually discover the opportunities that enabled them to rise above their circumstances.

This is The Viable Alternative.

Hope this helps.

Ike Love