Author: Robert Schlaff

One of my favorite quotes if from Arron Sorkin’s “Sports Night”:

Dan: The distance is always 100 miles between first place and second place. You know, Jackie Robinson had a brother, and he ran the 200 meters. At the Olympics, he ran it faster than anyone had ever run it before, and he still came in second.

ABBY: I didn’t know Jackie Robinson had a brother.

DAN: That’s because it was the 1936 Olympics, and the guy who came in first was Jesse Owens.

Robinson’s exceptional performance, just a fraction of a second behind Jesse Owens, relegated him to a historical footnote. Because they get so much attention, we assume that the first-place finisher is fundamentally better than the second. This pattern isn’t limited to sports but is prevalent across our culture. Consider, for instance, that pinnacle of invention. The most brilliant inventor, Thomas Edison, and his most famous invention, the light bulb.

In the book The Work Ahead office workers save the world with their knowledge of optimization and 80’s trivia. The protagonist happens to be blind. His blindness is only mentioned once in the book. To sighted readers like me, he seems just like you and me. It’s written by my friend Sameer Doshi. Sameer is an executive at Microsoft. During his interview, he forgot to tell anyone that he was blind and no one picked up on that fact. This made me think, “If he could tell a story where the protagonist was secretly blind, and he could interview for a job and no one noticed that he was blind, where else are there ‘secret blind guys’?” Amy Schumer has a joke about this in her Netflix special Emergency Contact:

Before he died, Richard Feynman said, “By the time people die, a lot of what is good about them has rubbed off on other people. So although they are dead, they won’t be completely gone.” My Zaid died a decade ago on December 20, 2012. After I had an accident skiing, Zaid surprised me with a visit.