<p>Assignment: What is your view of the claim that something unsuccessful can still have some value?</p>
<pre><code> Success is one of the most common words that people used to measure one’s value in today’s society. In persuading success, failure becomes almost unavoidable. Before Thomas Edison found the right material for the filament, he tried 6,000 different kinds of materials. His failure paved the way for his success. Thousand times of failure brought the light into every individual’s house. In my perspective, something unsuccessful can have some value. No better examples than the story of Billy Beane can demonstrate my opinion.
Billy Beane is the General Manager of the Oakland A’s or the Oakland Athletics in American Major League Baseball. As a former professional baseball player, Billy Beane gave up a full-scholarship from Stanford and signed a contract, which was worth of $125,000, with New York Mets. However, he failed to meet the expectations of the scouts who portrayed Billy as a superstar. After being traded to several different teams, Billy Beane ended up in Oakland A’s and became a front scout. Although the Oakland A’s had made to the World Series for a couple of times, the team ended up losing the final game. Billy called it “the unfair game” because the Oakland A’s was competing against the teams that were 10 times better funded than the Oakland A’s. Underfunded conditions asked Billy to figure out how to use little money to make up the best team.
Due to Billy’s own experience, he no loner believed into the evaluating system that scouts have used to select baseball players for the MLB. Soon he founded out a great truth-a lot of baseball players were undervalued because of the way that they were being evaluated. Thus Billy Beane employed the sabermetrics to undercover the real value of baseball players. The numbers eliminated all the bias that scouts had in selecting baseball players. His theory, known as “moneyball”, helped the Oakland A’s become the first team that created a record of 20 consecutive winnings throughout American baseball history in 2002. Billy Beane’s experience was not a story about success. In fact, he failed because his team didn’t win the final game in the World Series. In MLB, winning the World Series is almost everything. However, Billy Beane’s moneyball theory overthrew the official doctrine of the MLB: better funded teams can always win, and he became the game changer. After 2002 MLB season, Boston Red Sox, one of the most famous MLB teams, made Billy an offer worth $100,000,000 to become the General Manager of the Red Sox. He rejected the offer and remained in the Oakland A’s. Today, Billy Beane, the GM of the Oakland A’s is still trying to win the last game.
Greatness certainly is not determined by success. Something unsuccessful can be great. The story of Billy Beane is a great story and it inspires people to challenge and change the status quo. The paradox about this is that success is not always great but failure is not always disgraceful. There is always something to learn from an unsuccessful story.
</code></pre>