How to Take Over the World
Top 10 Lessons from 100 Episodes of How to Take Over the World
Tue, 04 Feb 2025
Top lessons from 100 lessons of How to Take Over the World and more than 100 biographies on the great leaders of history. Wright's Law Great Leadership Always Wins Vision Demand Excellence Eat Light (Be Obsessed) Pain Is Where the Progress Is Charisma Is In The Eyes Halley's Law Set Simple Goals Two Weeks Can Change Your Life --- Sponsors: Speechify.com/Ben - Use code Ben for 15% off Speechify Premium HTTOTW Premium - For all endnotes, takeaways, and bonus episode, subscribe to How to Take Over the World Premium --- Stay in touch: Twitter/X: @BenWilsonTweets Instagram: @HTTOTW Email me: [email protected] --- Writing, research, and production by Ben Wilson.
Chapter 1: What are the top lessons learned from 100 episodes?
Thank you for all of you who have helped get me here. This has been an unbelievable journey. I wake up every day. I can't believe that I get to study and catalog the lessons that we can learn from the greatest leaders of all time. And by being listeners, you make that happen. This was going to be a subscriber only episode, but I'm actually just going to release this one for free.
And it's my goal this year to start releasing weekly or nearly weekly. I don't But nearly weekly subscriber-only episodes that are like this, that are on themes rather than just biographies. So if you want to get these going forward, if you want to get these sort of more lessons and theme-based episodes, go to takeoverpod.supercast.com.
Or if you're listening on Apple Podcasts, you can subscribe right there in the app. So without further ado, let's get into it. Here are, I won't say these are the top 10, right? There are a lot of lessons to learn, but these are 10 top lessons I have learned from 100 episodes of how to take over the world. Number one, this is just something I've been thinking a lot about recently.
I call it Wright's law. Okay. AKA the power of negative thinking. So I call it Wright's law because it's based on something I learned from the Wright brothers. So how did the Wright brothers, they're the first to fly, right? They kind of invented the airplane. Kind of. They did. They invented the airplane. So how did the Wright brothers beat everyone to the punch?
How were they the first to fly when a lot of other people were trying to develop airplanes at the same time? And the answer is basically this. Wilbur and Orville Wright are staring at some birds one day, they're working on the airplane, and they notice that birds are constantly adjusting their wings, constantly, right? Little micro adjustments every second.
And they realize that the most difficult thing about flying is controlling yourself while you're in the air. So you see there are two big problems, as they put it. One is equilibrium and the other is propulsion. And everyone is focused on propulsion. How do you get a big enough engine that is also light enough? How do you generate enough thrust to get into the air? All that.
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Chapter 2: What is Wright's Law and how does it apply to success?
But Wilbur realizes that that actually doesn't matter so much. Here's what he writes. Quote, I have my machine nearly finished. It does not have a motor and is not expected to fly in any true sense of the word. My idea is merely to experiment and practice with a view of solving the problem of equilibrium.
I have plans which I hope to find much in advance with the methods tried by previous experimenters. Once a machine is under proper control under all conditions, the motor problem will quickly be solved. A failure of a motor will then mean simply a slow descent and safe landing instead of a disastrous fall. And then he has another quote along the same lines. Okay. So what's the insight here?
The insight is that their breakthrough actually came not from what they focused on, but from what they didn't focus on, from what they ignored. OK, so Wright's law, this is my formulation, is breakthroughs are achieved more often by recognizing what to ignore than by knowing what to prioritize.
okay so basically wilbur wright and he's really kind of more of the thinker of the brothers says we're just going to ignore propulsion we're not going to study it at all for the first uh three years i think that they're working on it all they do they go to north carolina and at first uh the things don't fly they're just gliders and kites actually first it's kites then it's gliders and all they're working on is how do we control it and at the very end boom slap an engine on it and what do you know it flies
A second example of this is Steve Jobs at Next. It's kind of a negative example. So there's a great video online of him conducting a retreat with his leadership team at Next, which is, you know, he gets kicked out of Apple and he starts a new company called Next. Next ultimately fails.
And they're getting ready to launch their first computer under really tight constraints, tight deadline, dwindling cash, tough competitive landscape. And so Steve writes on the whiteboard four different priorities and asks the team to sort out which is most important. The four priorities are the machine is under $3,000. That's what the market has told them. It has to be under $3,000.
The second point is launch by spring of 87. He basically says we have to launch racing of 87. People catch up if we don't launch by then. Okay. Third is technology best. That's what he writes. So the best technology in the machine. And then fourth is budget seven dash XM, which basically has reference to they had they had $7 million in the business, so they need to produce it for under $7 million.
OK, so he's trying to, you know, he's talking to them, which of these is the most important. So everyone's making their case, which is the most important. And in the end, guess what he decides? He decides that they all matter. They're all the most important. So we have to do all four. All four are essential. And of course, the computer is a massive failure. It doesn't go anywhere.
No one buys it because he forgets rights law. Breakthroughs are more often achieved by recognizing what to ignore. And he's not willing to ignore any of his priorities. Everything matters to him. And as a result, it has no differentiation. It doesn't succeed. Flash forward 15 years. and he's back with Apple, and he's launching the iPod. A thousand songs in your pocket.
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Chapter 3: Why is leadership the most important quality?
But now the communists are trying to take over. They're throwing major strikes all over the city and the Malaysians are trying to cut off access to your port for all of their goods. And for someone who isn't a great leader, the temptation is to forget about that sort of lofty vision and only focus on the problem at hand, especially when it's existential.
But it takes a great leader to deal with the problem, but frame it in the context of the greater vision and thereby keep that larger goal intact. OK, so that is the difficulty in being that leader.
It's when all the other stuff comes up, you still need to maintain the vision and still need to reiterate it and make sure that everyone is focused on it, even though there's a lot of junk coming up in the meantime. OK, that brings me to point number four. Insist on quality. I've got one more Steve Jobs quote for you. Quote, Be a yardstick of quality.
Some people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected. All right. So you've got this vision. And as a leader, it's your job to insist on it, to demand that people measure up. Walt Disney was famous for this. He was never happy with his cartoons and was always asking, and this was his famous line, can I see it just one other way?
One word that is always thrown around about Walt Disney in all these biographies is perfectionist. He's a total perfectionist. People call him a perfectionist over and over. And that's usually a pejorative. And even sometimes it's a pejorative when people are saying about Walt Disney. But I think great leaders need to be perfectionists in the right way.
Here is what the legendary basketball coach John Wooden says about it. He says, perfection is what you are striving for, but perfection is an impossibility. However, striving for perfection is not an impossibility. Do the best you can under the conditions that exist. That is what counts. Benjamin Franklin also recommends pursuing perfection.
He says, but on the whole, though I never arrived at the perfection I had been so ambitious of obtaining, but fell far short of it. Yet I was by the endeavor, a better and happier man than I otherwise should have been if I had not attempted it. Okay. So yeah, like John Wooden says, perfection is an impossibility, but striving for perfection is not.
Of course, there are ways in which perfectionism can be harmful. People can be crazy about it. You know, obviously, John Wooden says to recognize the constraints that exist.
So that is the balance of great leaders, recognizing when you are constrained and recognizing when those constraints need to be challenged, because great leaders almost never accept constraints without first really testing them. As a consequence, many things that people tell them are constraints are actually are not.
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Chapter 4: What role does vision play in effective leadership?
But I think it's more about obsession. A good test for whether you are obsessed enough with something to be great at it is do you find yourself skipping meals in order to keep doing this thing? If so, congratulations, you are obsessed. You're on the right track. And if not, I mean, that's okay. You know, maybe it's a job. Maybe you got to work. Maybe it's something you've got to do.
But in order to be truly great in life, you need to find those things that you are obsessed with. Those things that you're willing to skip meals. You can't sleep. You just want to keep doing every fiber of your being. Okay. And to me, that's the real message with light eating. That's why all these people are light eaters because they're super obsessed. Number six, pain is where the progress is.
Great quote from Arnold Schwarzenegger. Quote, pain isn't just an indicator of sacrifice. It's also a measure of growth potential. In the gym, if an exercise doesn't start to hurt, then I know I haven't done enough to unleash the growth potential of the muscles I'm targeting. Reps build strength, but pain builds size. That's why I wanted the pain.
That's why in pictures and video footage from the gym back in the 1970s, I was smiling all the time. I wasn't a masochist. It wasn't fun to squat 600 pounds until I couldn't breathe and I wanted to puke. I was smiling because I was feeling the pain of the work, which told me that growth was on the horizon.
The great Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami once wrote, I can bear any pain as long as it has meaning. I've learned over the years that this is true. Pain only needs to have meaning to you for it to be bearable. So as he said, pain is where the growth is. You also see this with John Wooden, who I already mentioned, the greatest college basketball coach of all time.
He would make his practices extremely intense, even if that meant making them shorter because work is not where the progress is. Pain is where the progress is. And until you cross that threshold, you're not really improving. So I've used two athletic examples for this one, but I think it applies in business and politics, in art and everything.
Okay.
So number six, pain is where the progress is. Number seven, charisma is in the eyes. I just went through and I searched through my notes. I searched the word gaze. And here's some of the ones that came up. Picasso, he had, in fact, a most luminous and striking eye, a singular penetrating gaze, always the first thing that people noticed. Caesar Augustus.
Julius Caesar was a tall man with piercing eyes. And if he, meaning Augustus, could not match his height, his great nephew liked to feel that his own gaze was equally powerful. Okay, so that's two for one. Both Caesars. Powerful gaze. Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton had a taste for courtroom theatrics. He had a melodious voice coupled with a hypnotic gaze. A hypnotic gaze.
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Chapter 5: How can insisting on quality drive success?
very direct accountability, although maybe not the easiest to measure. But he is the leader is in a place to, you know, ascertain their success or failure. And I think the point here is that there's no substitute for great leadership. If you've heard of Goodhart's law, it is when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. And that's always a problem, always in every domain.
It actually explains to me so much of what is wrong with our world right now, people optimizing for measures rather than actual outcomes. Because I think there was this feeling, especially in the mid 20th century, that everything could be turned into data and optimized. Right. But it doesn't work that way. It's not that easy because Goodhart's law comes into effect.
As soon as you start optimizing for a measure, it ceases to be good measure. So, yeah, you need to keep track of the numbers. Of course, these great leaders are overwhelmingly quantitatively minded. They like to know and have the data, but they keep their goals simple, easy to understand and not subject to manipulation or distortion by optimizing specifically for one particular measure.
Number 10, my last lesson, something I've been thinking a lot about recently. I call this lesson, two weeks can change your life. All right. I want you to think about a chart showing how hard someone works over time. So someone who is not successful, they're lazy, they never make it. It's a five the entire time, five out of 10.
Someone who is successful, it's a seven or eight all the time over time. someone who's very successful, quite successful, it's an eight or nine all the time. These are your top performers, really high level achievers. Now think about someone who is truly great. Does it just keep going up? Is it a 10 all the time?
And I think, no, I think what it actually looks like if you chart the effort of someone who is great is it looks basically the same as someone who is highly, highly, highly successful, but not great. They work about the same amount most of the time. The difference is in these short sprints of superhuman activity.
There's a bunch of examples of this from Lee Kuan Yew when he's, you know, first gaining independence for Malaysia and then for Singapore. This is a good quote. The sheer magnitude of Lee's self-appointed task within Malaysia and the haste with which he pursued it can only be characterized as extraordinary.
The events that led to separation arose either from his superhuman energy or from his opponent's reaction. There's certainty that he was bent on demonic purposes. Okay, so superhuman energy. Hamilton, when he was forming the US government, similarly has a few of these isolated sprints where he's just working night and day for weeks at a time. Isaac Newton, another famous example.
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Chapter 6: What can we learn from Steve Jobs about leadership?
You know, he's working hard for his whole life. He really accomplishes all of his most famous work in two sprints. One is the two years where he's completely isolated because of a plague pandemic. And during that time period, he's just sprinting for those two years, working his brains out and he invents calculus.
And then decades later, another sprint almost year long where he wrote the Principia, like the great work on physics, one of the greatest books of all time. But these are vital for breakthroughs. There's something special that happens when you are able to totally commit like this. I heard this story the other day of someone who started a new job.
And at first he wanted to show that he was a great employee. He wanted to excel. He wanted to rise through the ranks. And so he was working harder than everyone else, showing up before them, leaving after them. But ultimately, after a few months of this, he felt like his work wasn't rewarded. People weren't recognizing how hard he was working.
So he just settled back into being a normal employee like everyone else. And he was eventually let go. But I think he had it all wrong. It's really hard to discern which of your employees is working 10% or 20% harder than everyone else. It's just, it's tough to tell. However, someone who works roughly as hard as everyone else, but...
For two weeks, they sprint their guts out and accomplish the special project and they give it to you. Look what I did. Wow, that really stands out. That sets them apart. And that is how all the greats have done it. The Apple II wasn't developed over years as a side project. It was built in one great sprint.
Thomas Edison, you know, the phonograph was invented and discovered after midnight in one of these great sprints. Napoleon didn't slowly chip away at Italy. He devoured it in one of these great sprints through Italy.
So the business that you've been meaning to launch, that project you've been meaning to start, that thing that is going to break you through to the next level, it's going to happen all at once. When you go insane, you lose your mind for two weeks and dedicate every waking moment for one brief sprint to see it through to the end. I really believe that. Okay, that's it.
Obviously, there are many other lessons I have learned a lot, and I'll be going over more lessons in some more of these episodes. You won't hear them here on the main feed if you're not a paid subscriber. For those of you who do subscribe, takeoverpod.supercast.com. I'll be doing more of these theme-based episodes. Thank you very much for being with me on this journey. Thanks for listening.
Until next time, thanks for listening to How to Take Over the World. Before we wrap up, one plug for Speechify. All the greats are obsessed with learning as much as possible. They have this incredible thirst for knowledge. And Speechify is a tool that can help you learn more and learn faster. It turns any written content into a podcast, articles, books, textbooks, and even emails.
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