‘Do you want to sell sugar water … or do you want to change the world?’

By David McElroy · November 14, 2011

In 1983, John Sculley was the president of Pepsi. He was the youngest president ever for the company when he got the job in 1977. As a marketing exec, he had been responsible for the Pepsi Challenge, a campaign so effective that Pepsi was catching up with long-term leader, Coke. He was very successful and very happy with his job. Then he met Steve Jobs.

In 1983, Jobs was looking for a new president for Apple. Even though he was a co-founder, he was considered too young and inexperienced for the job of running day-to-day operations, so he was recruiting someone successful who he thought he could work successfully with. He targeted Sculley. It was a crazy idea to try to get the head of one of the country’s most successful companies to come lead a small computer company, but Jobs went after what he wanted. Sculley later remembered how Jobs finished his pitch:

“And then he looked up at me and just stared at me with the stare that only Steve Jobs has and he said, ‘Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or do you want to come with me and change the world?’ And I just gulped, because I knew I would wonder for the rest of my life what I would have missed.”

Sculley took the job and spent the next 10 years at Apple, being one of the drivers behind some of Apple’s greatest growth in its early period. (The two men had a falling out that led to Jobs leaving Apple in 1985, but that’s another story.)

In our society, we’re raised to believe we’re supposed to be selling some form of sugar water. We live in a wealthy consumer society, so there’s nothing wrong with selling sugar water, whether your “sugar water” is cars or clothes or shoes or software. Somebody needs to buy all of those things. If somebody’s willing to pay you to do it, there’s a market for it. But for some of us, there’s a burning desire to do something that matters — to do something that has a chance to change the world.

If you’re happy with selling your sugar water, I’m not telling you that you should change what you’re doing. But if you’re unfulfilled with the place you’ve found in society — if you’ve found it empty and comfortable and boring — I’m going to ask you to consider that maybe you weren’t meant to live the modern American lifestyle in the plastic suburbs. Maybe you should be finding a way to change the world instead.

Most people are satisfied living their little plastic lives and watching television and spending time with people they don’t really like — while slowly dying inside. Iconoclastic musician Frank Zappa explained in a 1981 interview (video below) what he believed American schools were doing to create this kind of numbed-out drone:

“Schools train people to be ignorant with style. They give you the equipment that you need to be a functional ignoramus. American schools do not equip you to deal with things like logic. They don’t give you the criteria by which to judge between good and bad in any medium or form however. And they prepare you to be a usable victim for a military-industrial complex that needs manpower. As long as you’re just smart enough to do a job and just dumb enough to swallow what they feed you, you’re going to be alright. But if you go beyond that, you’re going to have these grave doubts that give you stomach problems, headaches — make you want to go out and do something else, so I believe that schools mechanically and very specifically try and breed out any hint of creative thought in the kids that are coming up.”

So if Zappa was right — and I believe he was — it means those of us who don’t swallow what we’ve been fed and end up asking too many questions are going to be unhappy — until we can find a way to do something else. Something that matters.

I believe we’re living in an exciting time of possibilities. The world is in horrible shape and the economic and social structures are showing great strain. There are problems all around us. But those problems mean opportunities for those who are willing to open their minds and hearts to new possibilities that go beyond what we were fed in school. Everybody else can keep selling the sugar water — right up until the day when things collapse and they wonder what happened.

There are opportunities to change the world right now. They won’t be easy, but there are problems to be solved. The answers to those problems will potentially build future empires and will make the world a better place for millions — possibly billions — of people. So with that in mind, I’ll ask you to take a look at your present life. Take a look at the people you’re around and the sugar water you’re selling — whatever that metaphor looks like in your life — and I’ll ask you the same question that Steve Jobs asked John Sculley in 1983:

“Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or do you want to come with me and change the world?”

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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