Comment Re:Specialization is for insects (Score 1) 737
1. Ginny might have a different opinion.
2. What about exposing the remarks by L. Ron Hubbard that prove Scientology is a scam? Surely a little credit for that is due?
3. He made it through the Naval Academy, graduating academic 5th in class. Yeah, he got sick later and was discharged after he caught tuberculosis. So your definition of failure there is what? Didn't make Admiral?
4. Despite being unable to re-enlist for WW2 because of his health record, he worked at the Naval Air Experimental Station near Philadelphia, as a civilian engineer. We have Isaac Asimov's word that he was successful as part of multiple classified projects there. (With Asimov working there as a chemist on some of the same projects). It's easy to take a cheap shot at this claim however, as some of these activities are buried deep in the records of the war department, and still aren't well documented publicly.
5. Being #1 in that field he was successful in, and at one point raking in at least 50 times the income his fellow practitioners predicted was the max. possible, is not just a modest success vrs a host of failures, it's rebuilding the whole field in your own image.Writing the first story in April of 39 and having the mortgage and his electioneering debts paid off by the middle of 1940 is not a "non-failure", it's a spectacular skyrocket of a success. He wrote what is often considered the first serious modern SF film (Destination Moon), which was nominated for three Oscars and won one), Most of us would not count screen play writer and print author as just one carreer. Tell me, do you criticise Beethoven for not having done anything really OK except the sonatas?
6. At least one of several houses he designed still stands. (Bonny Doon) The hidden saferoom mechanism still works, Heinlein personally moved multi-ton boulders with block and tackle to landscape and build the pool area. The house is modernist design that takes great advantage of technology to make maintenance affordable and is generally considered a polished, professional design. That sounds like a successful architect to me, if full time professional architects themselves consider him one..
7. Heinlein built a working model of a waterbed and didn't just describe one in print, all on record before the first attempts by others to patent such a device. Inventing something which has been sold in the hundreds of millions, only counts as a failure if your only standard of success is monitization. I'm afraid you're revealing more about yourself than you want there.