Wikipedia has no assignment desk. Articles exist because someone started one. Any reader can click edit and write.
The English Wikipedia was launched in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. It now holds more than seven million articles. Its rules state that anyone can use, edit, and distribute the content.
The work is done by volunteers. More than 268,000 editors have made a change in the past month.
The top rank in American scouting is Eagle Scout. The final requirement is not a test. The scout must plan, develop, and lead a service project.
The projects are real work. Scouts build trails, restore cemeteries, and run food drives. More than 2.8 million youth have earned the rank. Their projects represent more than 100 million service hours.
Bill Gates left Harvard. Steve Jobs left Reed College. Mark Zuckerberg left Harvard. In American business culture these are not scandals. They are origin stories.
The culture formalized the choice. In 2011 Peter Thiel’s fellowship began paying young people to skip college and build companies. The first class had 24 fellows. Each received 100,000 dollars.
Americans praise the self-reliant with an impossible image. It is “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps.”
The phrase began as a joke about the impossible. It appears in an 1834 newspaper. In 1860 a writer compared the mind analyzing itself to a man lifting himself by his own bootstraps.
The joke faded. By 1922 the phrase meant improving yourself by your own efforts. Today it is said without irony as a plan for success.
In 1943 Vesta Stoudt packed ammunition boxes at an ordnance plant in Illinois. The boxes were sealed with paper tape. The tape tore badly. A soldier under fire had seconds to open a box.
Stoudt proposed a strong cloth tape with a pull tab. Her supervisors would not change anything. On February 10, 1943, she wrote directly to President Roosevelt, with diagrams.
The War Production Board forwarded her idea. Johnson & Johnson made the tape. Soldiers called it “duck tape” and “hundred-mile-an-hour tape.” Stoudt never patented it.
American English treats initiative as a thing you can take. People “take the initiative.” They also “show initiative” and “take it upon themselves.”
The phrase is old. Etymonline records “take the initiative” by 1815. Initiative as a “disposition to take the lead” dates from 1793. The praise is in the grammar. Acting first is an achievement, not a breach of order.
In 1873 a ten-year-old Dutch immigrant sold iced water for a penny on a Brooklyn street. His name was Edward Bok. Soon he sold lemonade for three cents.
Bok became a famous magazine editor. His memoir, The Americanization of Edward Bok, told the story of the stand. Parents read it as a model of what a child could do. Norman Rockwell drew the scene.
The stand became an American childhood ritual. Some states now pass laws so that children’s stands need no permit.
Grace Hopper was a Navy rear admiral and a pioneer of computing. She repeated one rule in her speeches. “It’s easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission.”
Hopper did not invent the sentence. It appears in print as early as 1846. Her talks in the 1980s made it an American business rule.
The misattribution is part of the evidence. The rule was so useful that Americans attached it to their favorite admiral.
In 1876 Thomas Edison built a laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey. He promised “a minor invention every ten days and a big thing every six months or so.”
The promise was not about inspiration. The lab had machinists, experimenters, and a stock of materials. Trial was organized as routine. More than 400 patents came out of the lab in six years.
In 1988 the advertising agency Wieden+Kennedy gave Nike three words. They were “just do it.”
The first commercial showed no superstar. It showed Walt Stack, an 80-year-old runner, jogging across the Golden Gate Bridge. He joked that he kept his teeth in his locker so they would not chatter in the winter. Nike’s founder, Phil Knight, first said, “We don’t need that.”
From 1988 to 1998, Nike’s share of the North American sports-shoe business rose from 18 percent to 43 percent.