When I think of winning, more than one option comes to mind. Earning money, winning against your opponent in a competition where the element of competition is prominent, winning what you deserve after a struggle on equal terms, achieving success on the way to your predetermined goal are just a few of them.
But what about the struggle to win back what was stolen from you! Imagine, something that already belongs to you is stolen from you and you have to fight for years to get it back, risking mental and physical wear and tear and losing your family!
The subject of this week's contest organized by @cinetv; Cine TV Contest #41 - Movie That Represents Winning
The more difficult the struggle, the more meaning and value it gains when it is won. That's why I would like to participate in the competition with a movie that I think is based on a true story.
Made in 2008, Flash of Genius is a successful production that shows how a simple inventor can change his life both positively and negatively.
At the dinner with the family members consisting of mother, father and 6 children, talking about future dreams; the analogy of the Kearns Company Board Meeting was enough to explain how big the dreams were.
I always thought that the easiest and fastest way to get rich was to invent something that would be useful to millions of people, or to make a quick and easy profit through illegal means. It was interesting for me to watch both ways in the same movie.
Robert Kearns (played by Greg Kinnear) is inspired by the eyelids he opens and closes on his manually operated automobile erasers on a rainy day to make a timed automatic eraser. He wants to market his invention to the automotive giants, and the moments of first loss and then gain begin.
Watching the moments when Robert Kearns' invented and patented product was taken away from him in various ways was quite frustrating, even in a movie frame.
The most enjoyable moments of the movie were Robert's seeing his invention in automobiles without his permission as belonging to others and then continuing his struggle until he won.
For example, at the beginning of his struggle, the automotive giant offers him 200 thousand dollars. His lawyer tells him to accept the money or else he won't stand much of a chance in a lawsuit against a world giant.
Then the offer goes up to 1 million dollars. By the time the trial started, the offer was 30 million dollars. If Robert had accepted any of these offers, he would have only made money...
...but it wasn't just money he wanted. He wanted the automotive giant to admit the theft. He took the case all the way to the end, losing his mental health, his wife and his family over the course of 12 years!
What makes a person successful and triggers a sense of winning? I think it is this whole process. The sacrifices made, the values lost, could not get in the way of being right. Robert was right and he wanted the world to know it.
When he won, nothing was the same! It was proven that the automotive giant was using someone else's patented product as its own (theft).
It was ordered to pay 10 million 100 thousand dollars in damages. At that moment, when I remembered that the previous offer was 30 million dollars, I smiled because the minus difference was the cost of the world knowing whether the automotive giant was a thief or not.
After all the time lost and all the value, I think the most important thing Robert gained was not money. It wasn't that he proved to the world that the automotive giant was a thief. The most important thing he gained was the badge of inventorship that the court decision gave him.
If he had accepted the initial offers, no one would have even known he existed, no one would have known about the patent theft by the car company, and most importantly, he would not have been an inventor.
