Zero to One_ Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future ( PDFDrive )

Hughes was obsessed with flying higher than everyone else. He liked to
remind people that he was a mere mortal, not a Greek god—something that
mortals say only when they want to invite comparisons to gods. Hughes was “a
man to whom you cannot apply the same standards as you can to you and me,”
his lawyer once argued in federal court. Hughes paid the lawyer to say that, but
according to the New York Times there was “no dispute on this point from judge
or jury.” When Hughes was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 1939 for
his achievements in aviation, he didn’t even show up to claim it—years later
President Truman found it in the White House and mailed it to him.
The beginning of Hughes’s end came in 1946, when he suffered his third and
worst plane crash. Had he died then, he would have been remembered forever as
one of the most dashing and successful Americans of all time. But he survived—
barely. He became obsessive-compulsive, addicted to painkillers, and withdrew
from the public to spend the last 30 years of his life in self-imposed solitary
confinement. Hughes had always acted a little crazy, on the theory that fewer
people would want to bother a crazy person. But when his crazy act turned into a
crazy life, he became an object of pity as much as awe.
More recently, Bill Gates has shown how highly visible success can attract
highly focused attacks. Gates embodied the founder archetype: he was
simultaneously an awkward and nerdy college-dropout outsider and the world’s
wealthiest insider. Did he choose his geeky eyeglasses strategically, to build up a