Trash Nets, and Tommie Edison Jr.

Thank you.

I might take too little opportunities to say just that.

Thank you.

Thank you to those who give me their time and let me fill it with nonsense.

You have my gratitude and my affection.

Thomas Edison had a son who he nick named “Dash” Because ole tommie boy loved Morris code so much. Also this prodigal son was named after his father’s namesake. Thomas Edison Jr. Thomas Alva Edison Sr. would bemoan naming his son that throughout each other’s lives.

The point of this is to illustrate the value of creative capitalistic people, and to give an example of past is not prologue.

Junior was no doubt proud of his father and all the lives he had touched. Pride can fuel envy which can cloud judgement. Junior wanted to be admired just like his father. Yet, he wouldn’t put in the work to foster that admiration naturally. Instead he capitalized upon his name sake and conned a few investors to fund numerous failed business projects and ideas. It was concerning Senior Edison so much that he even offered a sizeable weekly allowance to Junior of $35. Or if you adjust that to inflation for today it would be around $1000 in 2020. So he was being paid $48,000 dollars per year not to mention his name when starting business projects he was to go by the name Thomas Willard. He would eventually increase his allowance to $50 per week and give Junior a Mushroom Farm to subside on.

Well Senior died in 1931 and Junior died in 1935.

Thomas Edison Senior had over a thousand patents to his name, half of which he would go onto produce. Some say he was a tyrannical boss who stole a lot of intellectual property from others. Regardless history wouldn’t be the same without the name Edison.

I caught a highlight reel of a survivor show where a bunch of men were marooned on an island for six weeks and told to survive. It was interesting to see how relationships formed and a social hierarchy was created. When surviving off of limited calories wasting energy frivolously is counterintuitive to staying alive. So naturally they foraged and hunted for their food. Of the ten people the best fisherman was done with a spear. He could on his best day catch 4 fish to feed ten people, and that was not typical. Another aspect to this show was they were allowed to use trash that floated upon this island. Sad state of the world but I digress. One of these pieces of rubbish was a discarded fishing net. A single gentleman found this net and toiled away at it. For weeks he failed and failed. So much so that the best fisherman in the group told him to stop wasting everyone’s time and energy and animosity grew between the two men.

Till, he wasn’t crazy anymore. Could have been artificial reality tv show drama, but near the end of the show they revealed the success of the net. Remember how I said that the best fisherman on his best day caught four fish? Well this delayed satisfaction method caught 21 fish in one day, an 85% productivity increase for less calories expended.

Yet he had to fail multiple times to reach that level of success. He had to keep going even though everyone around him was filled with doubt. Life is a complex chaotic battle of coincidental occurrences that from the outside has no order or meaning. Yet the same storm that destroys a harbor, pulls up nutrients from the deep to feed the entire ecosystem.

Through those moments of failure and discouragement, you can persevere, and say this is not where my story ends. Or you could give in and live off of four fish a on the best days. You just got to put the work in where it counts otherwise your dad might get so discouraged about your ambitions he would rather pay you to forget your name.

After numerous failures Edison Jr. dived deep into the bottle and bouts of depression. This is said to be contributing factor to his early grave four years after his father.

So the moral of the story, be the man with the trash fishing net. Stay determined and soon you could increase your productivity by 85%. Just don’t be afraid to ask “There has to be a better way to do this.”

The last part is the hardest, but the most crucial.

So these are my thoughts for today.

Again thank you for reading,

and happy new year!