I can't find an exact date, but I've been a member of LinkedIn for ten years or so, which, I think, makes me a reasonably early adopter. It's the only social networking site I belong to and I find it useful because of its focus on professional connections.
Once or twice a week I get an email from LinkedIn Pulse with links to featured stories posted on LinkedIn, they're generally a mix of career advice and critiques of various kinds of corporate strategies. I usually browse through a few of them. One that I looked at this past week began, "A jobless man applied for the position of 'office boy' at Microsoft."
He was offered the job, but the offer was withdrawn because he didn't have an email address. Rather than getting dejected over the extreme challenges of opening an email account, he went out and started selling tomatoes door-to-door, until he became a retail food magnate. The punch line comes when he applies for a life insurance policy and the broker discovers he doesn't have an email address:
The broker was dumbfounded. "You don't have an email, and yet have succeeded in building an empire. Can you imagine what you could have been if you had an email?," he exclaimed.
The man thought for a while, and replied, "an office boy at Microsoft!"
Many of you will recognize this as being a rather ham-handed adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham's The Verger. But even if you missed the literary antecedent, the preposterousness of every turn of the story is obvious and not worth belaboring.
The thinness of the material did not stand in the way of it making a huge impression on the membership. It was posted on October 19th. So far it has garnered 3,908 Likes and 864 comments. A few people expressed mild skepticism of the factual basis for the story. I pointed out the priority of Maugham's story as did a few others. But the vast majority of the comments treated it as a great moral of our times. Here's a sampling:
"Great story and a great life lesson!"
"impressive! am fully motivated. Everything happens for a reason and above all we should never give up on our dreams no matter the obstacles"
"You need to really believe in yourself to go far against the odds......believing in yourself and having the boldness to do something different and against routine is the key to greatness...good on him!"
Love it !!!! This just shows things always happen for the best according to God's plan. We just never know !
You get the idea. It's the American religion of self-reliance and a positive attitude-- good things as far as they go, but I get a little impatient when simple-minded platitudes are treated as
The Answer.