Possibility, Your Choices, McDonalds, and Your Responsibility . . . (and too many “Your Mom” Jokes)

“And in Paris, you can buy a beer at McDonald’s.  And you know what they call a Quarter-Pounder with Cheese in Paris?” – Pulp Fiction

This is a picture of the McDonald®’s shoe car, circa George W. Bush’s presidency.  Notice the French fries dangling from the rear view mirror.  Must be some sort of talisman that makes him attract your mom.

There is a brief moment at your birth, when every single possibility of who you will be, and what you can achieve is open to you.  If your genetics support it, you can do it.  You will never have more possibilities open to you than at that moment.  And, over time – slowly at first – those possibilities narrow.  Your life is a funnel, and the wide open end is the possibilities that you have on day one.  Eventually, that funnel narrows.  You make decisions that cut off possibilities – you decide to dedicate yourself to a single sport rather than trying to letter in three.  Possibilities disappear.  You decide to go to college rather than open a business.  Possibilities disappear.

Possibilities never reappear.  They were always there.  You can’t conjure them out of nothing, but you can fulfill them.

Your life consists of two things:  the choices you make (which determine the possibilities that you have) and time.  And your choices even determine how much time you have.  Choose wrong?  You lose a few options.  Want to shoot up heroin?  Chances are poor that you’ll live very long, unless you’re Keith Richards – honestly, I imagine that if you could isolate how to kill him you could make cockroaches AND mosquitos extinct with a single drop of that stuff.

But your life consists of your choices.

Some good choices, some bad choices . . .

Ray Kroc was the guy who got involved with a little restaurant in 1952.  He helped franchise it.  Kroc built it into a brand we all know today – his vision drove the entire process.  Ray Kroc is the single person most responsible for McDonalds™.  He created, single-handedly, the concept of a clean hamburger place where you could get a decent meal inexpensively and wouldn’t be afraid that bikers or rowdy teenagers would cause a scene in front of your family.  Sure, a dollar burger isn’t five star French cooking, but it’s a dollar burger in a clean restaurant with a clean parking lot.

What Ray was doing at the time he got involved with McDonalds® was selling milkshake mixers to the McDonald brothers (who owned the restaurant).  He looked at the hamburger shop and saw it had great possibilities.  He went to work with the McDonald brothers (named Ronald, Bono, and Sting), and eventually bought the brothers out.  Oh, and in 1954 when Kroc started with them?  Yeah.  He was 52.

He was a FIFTY TWO year old milkshake machine salesman, and let’s be real – nobody puts that as their career ambition under their senior picture in the annual.  And Kroc was trying to sell a dying brand of milkshake machines.  Like your mother, his machines weren’t very popular, and unlike your mother, they were expensive.

He didn’t create a single new possibility when he made the jump from being a travelling salesman – that possibility was always within him.

Ray made the choice.  He was going to do more, and be more than a washed-up 52 year old milkshake salesman waiting to collect social security.  Why didn’t he do it before?  Don’t know.  Maybe in 1954 he just got up feeling like he had nothing left to lose – at 52 you know you’ve got more weeks behind you than in front of you, and maybe he sensed he had to make something go.

I know that many people like to put the cause of their situation in life and give up.  And it’s easy to blame everyone around you.  It’s easy to blame society, or your mother (let’s face it, we all blame your mother) or genetics.

Sure, it’s pretty unlikely that Ray could have been competition for Elvis in 1952 – Ray was too old.  Likewise, his shot at pitching for the Yankees® was finished.  He was past his prime – he would have had to start much earlier, rather than, you know, fight in World War I.

Those possibilities were closed down for him – but the reservoir of possibility was still open for him to lead a restaurant franchise system that’s served billions of meals and created an entire industry – without McDonalds® there wouldn’t be a Burger King™ or a Wendy’s©.  And if he hadn’t created that industry, there’d be no place for your mom to work.

Kroc eventually bought the San Diego Padres®, so there’s an argument that not all of his ideas were great, although he bought that team (when he was 70) for $12 million dollars, roughly as much as a current Major League® ballboy makes per inning.  As of today, that team is probably worth about a billion dollars.

So, I guess even that was a good deal.  True story:  when he told his wife he bought the San Diego Padres™ she asked, “What, is that a monastery?”

Friday is the day for health posts, so why am I posting about choices and Ray Kroc?

You are where you are today, almost entirely due to the choices you’ve made in your life.  If you feel that your situation is beyond your control, and blame everything else besides you, you’re done.  And those are a horrible people to hang around with – always whining and complaining about how the world is out to get them and the deck is stacked so they cannot win.

People who believe that the world outside controls them and their ability for success have what’s called by nerdy psychologists an “external locus of control” – and that’s not a good thing.  People who feel that way are stressed out all the time, and it shows in the results:  people who an internal locus of control believe the ball is in their hands.  The have better jobs that pay more.

Perhaps, oh, just perhaps, people who think that their output matter – work harder, and get better results.

So, short version?  Get your big boy pants on (or big girl panties on) and understand that your life is what you make of it.  The crappy time that you’re having at work isn’t because people are out to get you.  Unless your last name is Kennedy.  Then?  Yeah, maybe.