A Wedding Night Injury From 1953 Affects Driving Today, A Secret Section Of A River Impacts Sports, And Airline Cocktail Napkins Were Key To An 'Overnight' Success: Why Asking 'What If' Is Imperative
The 3-Word Quote: Wondering Is Wise
1.
It was a night in 1953.
And it was the most incredible night in young Bob Kearns' life.
It was his wedding night, and he was surrounded by all his loved ones.
He and his new wife had just echoed their 'I dos’ and now it was time to celebrate.
The music started.
The cake was cut.
And the dancing had just begun.
Everyone was celebrating Mr. and Mrs. Kearns.
It was a fantastic night.
As the party continued, the champagne started flowing.
And it was at that moment when the accident occurred.
And Bob was injured on his wedding night.
It was not a life-threatening injury, but an injury nonetheless.
But Kearns’ injury did impact his life a great deal.
And his 1953 injury likely affects your life, too.
2.
Jim Bintliff is a liar.
But his lies are necessary to protect a secret.
You see, Bintliff deals with a particular substance- it's how he makes his living. He sells the substance.
It's a natural substance and can only be found in one state, in one location, along one river.
He's trying to keep the location a secret.
So, on occasion, when Bintliff is caught removing some of his substance from his secret location, he lies.
He's told people who stumble upon him that he works for the Environmental Protection Agency.
He doesn't.
He's told others he works for the Port Authority conducting testing along the riverbank.
He doesn't do this either.
His secret location has survived nearly 100 years.
And in that century, perhaps just a handful have known of this secret location and its mysterious substance.
The secret was handed down to him.
The location is so guarded he didn't show his wife where he gets his substance until five years into their marriage.
He keeps the secret so closely guarded because he is the only one in the world who sells this substance.
And most of his customers are billion-dollar organizations.
But what he sells - and how it started a century ago, is unusual.
3.
Jim Bintliff may be a liar.
But TJ Newman was a failure.
And she knew it.
She had graduated college but had 'an embarrassingly thin resume.'
She was a musical theater major, moved to New York, and landed zero jobs in her chosen profession.
So she handed out flyers on Times Square, briefly tried teaching, and worked as a docent in a history museum.
And she worked at a small bookstore.
But Newman finally left New York and moved back to Tempe, Arizona.
There, she moved back in with her parents, even sleeping in her old room on her twin mattress from high school.
She felt like a failure.
But she eventually trained to be a flight attendant and landed a job traveling.
She said I 'earned 35K a year while being yelled at and called names by passengers.'
A few years later, she was a millionaire.
But what happened in between? How did she go from being a flight attendant to a millionaire in a few short years?
The answer involves two things: a question and cocktail napkins.
The Takeaway:
So what do a wedding day mishap, a guy that sells a substance from a mystery location, and airline cocktail napkins have in common?
They are examples of victories and successes that originated with one simple common question.
The current popular question is 'Why?'
People are often asked, 'What is your why?'
Why did you select the field you are in?
Why do you want to pursue what you are studying?
'Find your why' is popular advice - especially for young professionals.
But sometimes people feel overwhelmed by these questions - they don't know what they want to do tomorrow, so asking them to explain their life's driving force or North Star seems too much to think about.
But if you still need to get into your dream career or want to create something, a better question than 'why' is "What if?'
Everybody asks 'What if' questions.
That question can quickly lead you to what you want or want to see in the world faster than thinking of your 'why.'
In a way, 'What if' questions are dreams or wishes in question form.
Most 'what if' questions start with a dissatisfaction with something.
What if there was an app that...?
What if the company would just do…?
What if there was a machine that could…?
What if I could just… ?
We all ask questions similar to these.
And for many people, that's all 'What if' questions are - just wishes or dreams - things they'd like to see in the world or things they want to do one day.
But a select few ask 'What if' questions and then proceed to figure out how to make their ideas a reality.
This is what inventors do.
And this brings us back to Bob Kearns and his wedding night accident in 1953.
Once the music started on his wedding night, the champagne arrived.
Corks started popping, and drinks began to flow.
And it was one of these corks from a champagne bottle that changed Kearns' life.
You see, someone popped a cork from one of the bottles.
And that cork flew across the room and struck Bob Kearns in the left eye.
Champagne corks can travel at speeds over 50 miles per hour.
Although the incident didn't blind Bob, his eye was damaged, and it bothered him for most of his life.
Nine years after his wedding day, Bob Kearns was driving in the rain, struggling to see from his car's windshield.
The light rain made driving difficult, and his left eye was bothering him. The eyelids would blink when needed, trying to provide comfort.
At the time of this rainy drive, car windshield wipers had two speeds - one for steady rain, and one fast speed for storms.
And that night, while driving in the storm, Bob asked himself a question.
'What if windshield wipers could act like an eyelid?
Eyelids don't blink at regular intervals. They open and close as needed.
He wondered what if the windshield wiper could blink - what if the wipers could stop and then move when needed again?
And it was in that car that night, Bob Kearns had the idea for intermittent wipers.
'What if…?'
But Bob was a mechanical engineer.
So when he asked that 'what if' question, he didn't let his question die.
He knew he was on to something. So he went to work on his idea.
He spent years developing the intermittent wiper, at one point buying an aquarium to use as a windshield and attaching motors to his wipers to test ideas.
After seeing the idea, several car manufacturers added these intermittent wipers to their vehicles - most infringing on Kearns's patent.
The wipers became the norm on all cars.
Ford had to pay Kearns millions in a lawsuit. Other car companies had to do the same.
But years before the working prototype and the numerous lawsuits, it was a perfect storm for an idea - an eye injury, a rainy night, a mechanical engineer, and a 'what if' question.
Followed by years of work - all leading to something you use every time you drive in the rain.
***
Jim Bintliff is incredibly secretive. He sells his product that can only come from one particular location in the world.
Why did he not even share the location with his wife until five years into their marriage?
And what does he sell?
Would you be surprised if you learned that Jim Bintliff sells mud?
That's correct. He sells mud.
And makes quite a bit of money doing it.
He is a mud dealer.
But it's a special kind of mud.
Often called 'magic mud.'
So what's so great about the mud found only along a secret one-mile stretch along the Delaware River?
If you're a sports fan, you might already know.
The mud is important because it has affected every Major League Baseball game played since the 1940s.
The mud and its sale began in 1938 with a problem and a question.
You see when baseballs are brand new, they are bright white and somewhat slick to the touch.
Because they're slick, baseball pitchers have always used various substances to make the ball tackier.
This slightly stickier feel of the ball allows the pitchers to grip it better.
The better grip allowed for better pitches.
But in the 1930s, pitchers used spit, tobacco juice, dirt - whatever they could find to rub on the baseballs to give them some slight stickiness.
The balls were often a mess, and each baseball was different from the other in terms of feel.
But one thing was certain: pitchers would never use a brand-new baseball.
So, in 1938, an umpire happened to complain to The Philadelphia A's third base coach about the softness and inconsistency of the baseballs.
The A's third base coach was a man named Lena Blackburne.
Lena Blackburne listened to the umpire's complaints about the baseballs.
Then Blackburne asked himself a question:
What if I could find some thin mud that could be wiped on all baseballs, leaving them slightly tacky and the ball mainly white?
'What if…" Blackburne wondered.
And then he took up the challenge.
And somewhere along a bank of the Delaware River in New Jersey, he found the perfect mud for rubbing on baseballs.
The mud had the perfect consistency, didn't dramatically discolor the baseballs, and left them just a touch sticky.
Other mud had been used on baseballs. But nothing worked as well.
There was just something special about the mud that Blackburne found in one unique spot along the river that couldn't be replicated.
Lena Blackburne had struck gold.
Well, he struck mud, actually.
But by the end of the 1950s, every baseball in every professional game was wiped down with a dime-sized amount of Lena Blackburn's special mud.
But how did Jim Blintliff come to own the secret location of the source of this mud?
Well, upon Blackburne's death, he handed over the secret to John Haas, a close friend.
Upon his deathbed, Haas passed the secret to Burns Bintliff, his son-in-law.
And Burns Bintliff handed the location down to Jim Bintliff. And Jim plans to pass the secret location down to his daughter.
Lena Blackburne's Rubbing Mud is still sold and used by nearly every baseball organization, from little leagues to the majors.
And now, some NFL teams have begun to use it on footballs.
The business and the story of baseball rubbing mud all started from a third base coach in 1938 because he decided to ask, 'What if…'
He then followed the question with perseverance and action.
***
T.J. Newman seemed to be failing.
Like many twenty-somethings, she was a bit lost, hopping from one job to the next.
Nothing seemed to be a fit for her.
She ended up becoming a flight attendant.
It wasn’t a particularly great job, and she didn't want to do it for the rest of her life.
It paid poorly, and it wasn't stimulating.
But the job changed her life.
And it happened on one particular flight. Newman described what happened on that flight later as 'a cold, quiet redeye to New York- I had thought.'
But her thought was actually a question.
The question she asked herself while working that redeye flight was:
'What if a pilot were told, mid-flight, that his family had been kidnapped and that if he didn't crash the plane, they would be killed?'
'What if…'
Those two words started her thinking - and later writing.
And like the inventor of the intermittent wiper and the creator of baseball rubbing mud, TJ Newman didn't let her 'What if' question die either.
She grabbed one of the cocktail napkins that flight attendants hand passengers with their drinks and started to write.
She began writing her novel on the small cocktail napkins.
The novel answered her 'what if' question. It was about what would happen if someone tried to blackmail a pilot into crashing a plane.
She called her book Falling.
Her book was promptly rejected by 41 literary agents.
But the 42nd agent sold it to Simon and Schuster. And it became their fastest-selling fiction hardcover since 2004.
Her newest book had multiple people bidding on the movie rights.
Steven Spielberg, Nicole Kidman, Jerry Bruckheimer, and M. Night Shyamalan, all heavy-hitters in the entertainment industry, all clamored to purchase the movie rights.
She sold the rights for over a million dollars.
She was a musical theater major.
She didn't become a stage star.
But she did hire one.
She hired a 5-time Tony award winner to read the audio version of her second novel, Drowning.
And one of the producers trying to work with her on Drowning? Newman remembers serving him a chicken dish in first class while she was still a flight attendant the year before.
She had come a long way in a year.
She worked hard, hustled, and wrote and edited - and she eventually became a success.
But it all started by asking, 'What if?'
It's a great question to ask.
Ask it when you're stuck.
Ask it when you're dreaming.
Ask it when pondering your next move.
But asking questions, no matter how great they are, doesn’t take much effort. They must be followed by action.
Because that's often what separates dreamers from doers.
3 things before you go:
3 songs that provided the power behind the writing this week:
Beautiful things by Benson Boone
Perfect Portrait of Young Love by The 502s
Ooh La La by The Faces
See you in 10 days. Cheers.
-Jeff