Morgan Housel

He doesn't think like you and I do.

Of course he has very strange views about what we should do politically.

But go on down the list, whether it's Zuckerberg or Bill Gates, like Jeff Bezos, all of them, the reason they're so successful is because their brains don't work like us.

And a lot of them, I think, have harnessed their demons for productivity.

And there's another saying from Paul Graham, the investor, who he says, half of the traits of the eminent are actually disadvantages and they succeeded in spite of those things.

And so it gets dangerous when people try to mimic those traits of like, oh, Steve Jobs was successful and he was kind of a jerk to his employees.

So maybe I should try to do that too.

Like, no, he succeeded in spite of being a jerk to his employees.

And so I think there's a lot of that.

But in terms of the thin line between bold and reckless is always very difficult to understand in hindsight.

One example of this is Cornelius Vanderbilt, who was the richest man in the world during his day.

By any account, by even the most optimistic account, the most charitable account of what he did,

the huge portion of his wealth came from breaking laws, just completely flouting the laws.

And he admitted that he had no qualms about that whatsoever.

It was an era where he could get away with it.

He could pay off judges.

He did pay off judges.

And we remember him today by and large as being wealthy entrepreneur, maybe like a maverick.

It's so easy to imagine an alternative history in which eventually caught up with him and they threw him in prison.

And we remembered him as like the old school Bernie Madoff.