Читать книгу Don't Fall For It - Carlson Ben, Ben Carlson - Страница 12

It’s easy to look back now at how gullible people in the early twentieth century were when it came to the charms of quacks and snake oil salesmen. That is until you realize those same techniques still work today. Just think of all the scams available for those looking to lose weight, improve their finances, and hold on to their youth. The AMA spent years trying to discredit Brinkley, but he had the power of persuasion, a medium of communication to the masses, and a sales technique that would have allowed him to sell water to a whale.

Healthcare has improved by leaps and bounds since Brinkley began his reign of terror on the Midwest, but that doesn’t mean there will always be a unique procedure to solve all your ills. The same is true in all facets of life. The world is a complicated, dynamic place that doesn’t always lend itself to easy solutions. There’s no recipe for creating a hit movie. Scouts still don’t know what makes one quarterback better than another when selecting a top pick in the NFL draft. There’s no secret formula to earn vast riches overnight in the stock market. And there’s no blueprint entrepreneurs can follow to create the next Apple or Google.

There’s a New Yorker cartoon that shows a billboard planted in a field of sheep with a picture of a wolf that reads, “I am going to eat you.” One of the sheep says to another sheep, “He tells it like it is.” Brinkley was the wolf in this analogy while his patients were the sheep. At Brinkley’s funeral in 1942, an anonymous man in the crowd supposedly confessed, “I knowed [sic] he was bilking me, but…I liked him anyway.”^[29]

Miracles may in fact exist, but don’t expect someone to sell them to you.