Jealousy and Anger

I was listening to NPR the other day like I sometimes do and I heard this story: NPR: Young Entrepreneur... and I have heard stories like it before and every time I hear one I become very demotivated and almost morbidly depressed. Being 100% honest, which is what I do best, it is because I am very jealous and become angry that the success they are talking about is not my own. Mostly because these types of stories always portray that what the young entrepreneur is doing was so damn simple and gosh any moron could do it. I do have to agree that sometimes the ideas are indeed so fucking simple I should have thought of them. What does make me upset though is that a lot of these stories don't explain the amount of resources available and advantageous environments available to these people.

What pissed me off the most about this article/story was this "Young 22 Year Old Entrepreneur" does not carry a degree in engineering, yet she managed to make this contraption. I have two degrees in engineering and I haven't had a chance to use them yet. So I am jealous that someone younger than me, who does not have an engineering degree, simply looked up articles on the net and fabricated the device she fabricated. I would like to know how and why that was so easy for her to do. Which is why I was saying that she must have had resources available to her and her environment allowed her to do this pretty easily it seems. It takes a lot of effort to make a physical device of any kind because it is usually expensive, requires equipment which is costly and if you want to patent your idea it takes a shit-ton of effort and money. Minimum $3000 dollars for a provisional patent and if you want to make sure you get it done right you have to hire a patent layer. Don't believe me look it up on the USPTO website. So someone gave this 22 year old her funding. I can't afford to do anything like this (even though I really want to) and I am out of college and I have a fucking job that pays just under okay. The other side of this is that the contraption she developed isn't terribly complicated, but the instrumentation required for this requires at least 3 pieces of equipment:

1. Signal Generator (30 dollars min for a low functioning analog unit - up to $4000+ http://www.jameco.com/)
2. DC Power Supply (150 dollars min for a 30VDC@5A PSU single polarity unit - up to $4000+ http://www.mpja.com/)
3. Oscilloscope (~300 dollars min for a low end unit check out http://www.saelig.com/ - up to $4000+)

Each one of those pieces of equipment are pretty expensive no matter how you spin it. She mentioned ultrasound as the medium used to stimulate quartz crystals, I would imagine this would require equipment that can handle at least 2 Mega Hertz (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrasound), that being said it raises the cost of all of the equipment that needs to be used. Not so simple anymore huh? There is a part of this story that doesn't make much sense to me. Environmental advantages, resources and other help had to have been had here. I also don't like how she was running experiments at NASA... as if that is a daily occurrence for Female 22 year olds...

Perry seems to have always gone through life on fast forward. She was just in Houston running a zero-gravity experiment for NASA, where she was a student ambassador. She flew in a plane that went up and then down at very high velocity. 

What the fuck? No seriously what the fuck? Like how does that happen unless you know somebody? You need to have connections for this kind of stuff. In South Florida, these kinds of opportunities are taken away from everyone because unless you live in the white North Florida you are destined to be a loser with all of the wondrous corruption down here and lack of funding. All of our funding which is GENERATED IN THE SOUTH is given away to the white North.

So I am upset because they make it sound so fucking easy, like this is rather normal and any moron with a computer who looks up some articles on ultrasound can do this. I beg to differ. Goddamn it, I will commit suicide if I don't make it. I want success so bad I can taste it and no one will help me get there or hand me jack shit on a platter. I may not be a 22 year old girl with plenty of resources, but I do have a lot of good ideas and the know how - I just need the money and the time. So when I figure out a way to get a patent lawyer to help me out, I will make a move.

I made a lot of assumptions, but I don't care because that is what I took away from the story. Good for her I suppose...