In a twisted way, I admire Bernard Madoff. Not, of course, because he (allegedly) cheated people out of $50 billion (including, according to news reports, his own family members and the Elie Weisel Foundation for Humanity). But because, if all the revelations prove true, Madoff followed the old card-sharp mantra, “Go big or stay home.” I’ve always respected chutzpah.
I’ve never understood why criminals go to all the trouble of counterfeiting U.S. currency only to churn out 10-dollar bills to spend at Taco Bell. Why not print hundreds, then jet off to Brazil for a steak? Or the guys who use a truck to steal a pop machine, getting a few hundred bucks in change and a week’s worth of diet sodas. Why not boost a freshly stocked ATM? Madoff may be a thief, but he’s sure not a petty one.
I’m not saying we should all embark on crime sprees. But I am saying that criminals, like people, often think too small. And in these challenging times, we can’t afford petty thinking. We need big thinkers—people like Madoff, only without the criminal wrongdoing.
The architect Daniel Burnham, one of the people charged with rebuilding an entire city after the Chicago Fire of 1871, said, “Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood.”
Who’s stirring your blood these days?
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I love the X prize foundation. Their mission is to “bring about radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity.” They do this by offering large cash prizes to teams that accomplish remarkable feats of engineering and design. It started with the Ansari X prize for the first privately-built vehicle to travel into space. Now there are three other X prizes pushing innovative people to design cars that can travel 100 miles on a gallon of gas, land a vehicle on the moon and cut the cost and time of sequencing a genome. These are bold plans that each have the potential to develop a myriad of advancements with a reach far beyond the intended prize.
I love this. Sometimes it’s hard to find the motivation to think big when it seems so many things are crumbling around us. Thanks for providing the spark I needed.
Thinking big, and what he did are two totally different things. He scammed a TON of people out of a TON of money. I hardly call that big thinking. He is nothing but a scam artists. He has done what many people throughout history have done. There is nothing new and innovative about what he did. He’s just a greedy man looking to get as much money as he can and see how long he can get away with it. He’s part of the problem that plagues American society. He’s a criminal, not a big thinker.