Turning bad into good

There is a story about Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, who became wealthy from this invention. When his brother died, the leading newspaper in Stockholm made a mistake. They thought Alfred Nobel had died, and they printed his obituary. He was horrified to read it in the morning paper. It said that he was the  most destructive man in all of Europe. He had caused more people to die than any other man in Europe. Horrified by people’s view of him, Nobel turned his attention to doing good. He created the Nobel Prize for peace, and for medicine and other sciences–the prize for which he is now remembered. He had a chance to influence the world for good rather than harm. 

(told by John and Julie Gottman in Gottman Method Couple Therapy in Clinical Handbook of Couple Therapy by Alan Gurman, p 160)

1.  “You don’t pay back, you pay forward.”

  from an article written by Jerry Pournelle

 …I met Robert Heinlein years later, and through some kind of rare magic we became instant friends. We corresponded for a decade. In those days I was an engineering psychologist, operations research specialist, and systems engineer in aerospace. Most of my work was military aerospace, but I did get to work on Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo. We were helping to make the dream come true! 

 I went from there to a professorship, and then into political management and city government. Robert visited me when I was working for Mayor Sam Yorty. “You probably don’t know this,” he said, “but my political career ended when Yorty beat me for the Democratic nomination to the State Assembly.” When I finally decided to get out of politics, academia, and the aerospace industry and try my hand at writing, Mr. Heinlein was enormously helpful.

Years later, when I was an established writer, I asked him how I could pay him back. “You can’t,” he said. “You don’t pay back, you pay forward.”