How the Dumbest Comment I Ever Heard Became the Smartest

In the summer of 1982, I was producing a documentary on missing children, one of the first network programs produced on this subject. We were examining three types of missing children cases; stranger abductions, in which a child is taken by someone that the child and child's family doesn't know, parental abductions, in which a child is abducted by one of the parents, most often in a custody battle, and runaways.

The parental abduction case which we were following involved a 13-year-old girl who had been abducted, allegedly, by her father - at least, she had not been returned to her mother after a weekend visit with the father. The child and her father had been missing for almost a year.

One day a call came into the television station where I was producing the documentary, stating that the detective who was handling the parental abduction case was avilable for an interview. I was out with the director on another shoot, so the host of the show grabbed a cameraman from the newsroom and went out and did the interview. When she got back, she left the interview tape on my desk to view with the director of the show when we got back from our shoot.

When my colleague and I put the tape into the playback machine, the first thing we heard was the host asking the detective a very logical question: "Why is it so hard to find missing people?"

What she meant, and what we had all been wondering was, "How can a father and his teenage daughter avoid being caught for almost a year?" -that was what we all wanted to know.

But the detective said "Well, it's always hard to find missing people, until you locate them, and then it's easier to find them."

The director and I heard this and began to roar. I cannot ever remember laughing harder. Yes, detective, it would be a lot easier to find missing people once you've located them, since they are then no longer missing.

I always considered the detective's answer one of the dumbest comments I had ever heard in my life. (What he meant, of course, was that until you know where the missing person is located - i.e. in what city -you really have no idea where to begin searching.)

Until, I started a small business.

Until, I followed the advice of lawyers, accountants and business consultants and thought I did everything right.

Until things went very wrong, and all of the people who had told me that I was doing everything right started telling me how I had done everything wrong.

It's always hard to know if a business is going to succeed until you try it - then, if it doesn't work, it's a lot easier to say that it isn't going to work.

Just like the dumb detective said.

Guess he wasn't so dumb after all.