Want pressure?   Want to sweat?   OK, you've got it.   You're a major league baseball player.   You're hitting fourth.   It's the bottom of the ninth, last game of the season, bases are loaded, two outs, and your team is down by 2 runs.   If you get a hit, you're tied, a homerun and you win, you go to the playoffs, and everyone is happy ... temporarily.   Oh, the count is 0-2 and you're facing the toughest closer in the game.   Strike three.   Ball game over.   50,000 people you have never met are all booing in unison.   Your team is going home.   Now you have a sense of the type of pressure the typical CEO faces every waking moment of every blessed day.   But this is just a game.   Real life is far tougher.   Those 50,000 fans will forget this strike out.   When you're the CEO, your mistakes matter a whole lot more to a whole lot more folks.   Not much fun is it?

So what's up with the news headline, "CEOs earn 262 times pay of average worker?"   Would you do the job for 262 times your current pay?   Before you answer that, consider that you won't even get to know your kids.   When the "bat phone" rings, you've got to answer it.   Maybe it will be a friend telling you how your decision worked out just right or maybe it will be a call from an analyst you can't stand who wants to keep you on the phone for the next two hours answering his ridiculous questions.   I guess you can't read that Doctor Seuss story to your 6 year old after all.   Guess you can't watch TV with your wife who is contemplating divorcing you because you're "never there" for her and the kids.   You are going to that golf outing tomorrow.   That'll be fun, won't it.   Hopefully they won't pair you up with that other stupid analyst you can't stand like they've done for the last three years but then again, it is his company which sponsors this outing.

Life is so fun when you are the CEO, isn't it.   You're the boss.   You're in charge.   And when every decision you make results in the Board of Directors empaneling a special committee of expert consultants to criticize you, well that just goes with the territory.   Nobody cares that this is your third marriage.   Nobody cares that your 10 year old is in therapy because he has suicidal thoughts because dad's never around.   Nobody cares that your twelve year old is flunking math or science because you just don't have any time to help her with her homework.

Would you be a CEO for 262 times your current pay?   I wouldn't.   It's nice to fantasize about making large money but the job which goes with it is not something most of us could stand for more than a week.   It's always funny to hear the worker bees criticize the chief and shortly after that complain because the mid-level manager needs them to stay until 5:30 (instead of 5:00) to finish a project.   The CEO left at 5:00, didn't he?   Sure he did and at 5:15 he got a call demanding his attention until 11:00 pm.   Dinner was cold because his wife went to bed two hours ago knowing that he would be unavailable tonight.   He felt guilty but there really was nothing he could do.   He nodded off at 12 watching some cable news show but was startled awake at 12:15 with a dream about a ten year old committing suicide!   But, hey, life's tough.   Get on with it.

Where's the article exclaiming that movie stars make a million times what those paying to see their films make?   Where's the criticism of patent holders who make billions of times more than those who put their products together?   I suppose CEOs are just a for capitalism.   Attack the pay of CEOs just to show how capitalism is an evil system with an evil result.   But if you want to jump on the CEO's back, you've got to wait your turn.   Everybody else is engaged in picking on them.