This is a article I found from Forbes.com entitled “NBA Draft: Is Being 7 Feet Tall The Fastest Way To Get Rich In America?” written by a Dan Diamond and posted in 6/27/2013.
Interpretation: This type of article that is posted for the website of one of the most foremost magazines on fortune, business, and the professional life does make me and the other people who come to this website take a step back from our endeavor to see just how even the extreme high end of height is good for you, even if there are inconveniences like increased likelihood of heading one’s head and airplane seats not having enough leg room.
The Issue Over Winning the Genetic Lottery…
Sometimes I get frustrated with people who feel somehow bad that they were so lucky to win the genetic lottery and feel like they don’t deserve what they have and did not work hard for. There are billions of people who would kill to be in the position they are in, however they were unlucky. The most famous speech ever made by a person is probably Cameron Rusell who got a disproportionately large applause to her rather weak speech on TED.tv.
In a rather famous YouTube video where the writer Neil Strauss tries to develop rapport with Jessica Alba in the Jimmy Kimmel Show (HERE) he states to the rather oblivious Jessica “In LA everyone’s beautiful. If you are beautiful you come to LA to try to make it, right? ….So you are beautiful, so what? so you got lucky in the gene pool, so what?…”
This technique is he doing is to make Alba start to qualify herself to him and reverses the values of each other’s roles. A rather classic pick up artist strategy where the NLP technique of reframing the situation is done.
I think Jessica misses the main point. If we remove the idea of of a omnipotent god who used intention and had a specific reason to create us, humans, and don’t believe in anything that is associated with the idea of intelligent design, then the factor that would be the biggest determinant in detemining the quality of the life of existence is randomness and PURE DUMB LUCK. The fact is that while Strauss may try to use words to negate the major factor, which is that Jessica Alba got lucky on the genetic lottery, if we look at the situation completely objectively we can see that being physically attractive is going to get most girls very far in life, even if they lack a substantial amount in the other areas of life like intelligence, personality, etc. If Alba was born as a girl in some remote tribe in the Amazon, she will not have the type of fame and money she has now. If Alba was born in some village in Bangladesh she probably would have been a mother at 15 and be forced into a life of being a farmer. If she was born with osteogenesis imperfecta she will never get the main role in a romantic comedy movie, no matter how great her personality was.
My main point is, the cold hard fact is that winning the genetic lottery is probably the only thing that matters in any of our lives. If you got lucky and won, then your life is set. If you are unlucky and go the short end of the straw, there is really very little you can do to change anything, even if you work your ass off. That is how life is. Life is very unfair.
Here is the article he wrote below…
Every year, I watch the NBA Draft and its parade of young men who appear to have won the genetic lottery, or at least a sweepstakes for overactive pituitaries. And every year, I come away with the same conclusion: Thanks to pro basketball, being 7 feet tall is the world’s shortest path to becoming a millionaire.
These newest, lankiest pro players have worked hard to develop elite basketball skills, of course. But they’ve also benefited from a years-long, worldwide search to identify and maximize talent unlike any other industry.
And as a result, a disproportionate number of the planet’s tallest men already work in the NBA, with players like Nerlens Noel, Alex Len, and Cody Zeller poised to join them tonight.
The extraordinary advantage of being 7 feet tall
Drawing on Centers for Disease Control data, Sports Illustrated‘s Pablo Torre estimated that no more than 70 American men are between the ages of 20 and 40 and at least 7 feet tall. “While the probability of, say, an American between 6’6″ and 6’8″ being an NBA player today stands at a mere 0.07%, it’s a staggering 17% for someone 7 feet or taller,” Torre writes.
(While that claim might seem like a tall tale, more than 42 U.S.-born players listed at 7 feet did debut in NBA games between 1993 and 2013. Even accounting for the typical 1-inch inflation in players’ listed heights would still mean that 15 “true” 7-footers made it to the NBA, out of Torre’s hypothetical pool of about 70 men.)
Many 7 footers also profit by getting into basketball relatively early. While scouts canvas the globe for super-sized warm bodies – “I’ll check up on anyone over 7 feet that’s breathing,” NBA scouting director Ryan Blake told Torre in 2011 – they usually haven’t slipped through the cracks. In a nation like China or Germany, a 10-year-old who shows extreme growth potential will be recruited into a national basketball academy; in the United States, clumsy young giants are often funneled into the sport thanks to some variation on the following conversation: “Do you play basketball? If not, you should.”
There’s a clear reason why extreme height is so prized in basketball: At worst, it’s still an unteachable asset. Even a relatively unskilled 7 footer can simply stand near a basket and alter an opponent’s shots just by his presence.
And given the market need for players who can protect the rim, there are extra rewards for this extra height. The league’s median player last season was 6 feet 7 inches tall, and paid about $2.5 million for his service. But consider the rarified air of the 7-footer-and-up club. The average salary of those 35 NBA players: $6.1 million.
(How much does one more inch matter? The 39 players listed at 6 feet 11 inches were paid an average of $4.9 million, or about 20% less than the 7 footers.)
And once a 7 footer has made it to the league, his height offers tremendous job security — the basketball equivalent of tenure. A tattered reputation didn’t stop Eddy Curry (more than $70 million in career earnings) or Jerome James ($44 million) from getting huge, multi-year contracts. A lack of skill didn’t stop Ryan Hollins ($10 million in career earnings) or Keith Closs ($6.2 million) from carving out a lucrative niche as backups.
Extreme height also induces teams to take flyers on marginal players who would otherwise never warrant a second look. Back in the 1990s, 7 foot 1 Matt Wenstrom, who averaged 1.6 points per game in his college career at North Carolina, somehow played two seasons in the NBA – which was two seasons more than Donald Williams, who was Wenstrom’s college teammate and the most outstanding player of the 1993 NCAA Final Four.
Even though NBA teams are starting to get a little smaller, with the rise of non-traditional lineups often used by the Miami Heat and Oklahoma City Thunder, the NBA Draft is paradoxically expected to grow a bit bigger this year. At least seven players who are listed at 7 feet or taller are projected as first round selections on Thursday night, which would break a five-year-old record.
Whether or not this draft is historically huge, the annual parade of young giants like Noel, Len, and Zeller will be a powerful visual reminder: While being incredibly skinny doesn’t make you a model, and being unusually short or fat doesn’t get you much at all, being tall – like, off-the-growth-charts tall – can make you very rich while very young.