The Wright Stuff
§Note: This was a bad write-up. It had no true insights on why the Wright brothers, being under-resourced, were able to achieve manned, powered flight with 1% of their rival's budget. I wrote up a new version here that I believe is the true insight into the brother's successes: The Wright Brothers - Creating your own expertise.
Others had more funding, more engineers, and entire countries backing them. The Wright brothers achieved manned, powered flight with 1% of the budget of their rivals.
Their playbook was relentlessness and a focus on first principles.
I read Walter Isaacson's biography of Elon Musk right after this book. There are so many similarities between how the Wright brothers and Elon Musk approached their respective challenges:
- Both set an audacious, almost impossible goals.
- Both assembled small, obsessed teams and pushed them to their limits.
- Both refused to outsource their thinking, running their own experiments and ignoring the "rules" set by supposed experts.
- Both were relentlessly resourceful , willing to build their own parts, like wind tunnels and needles, when off-the-shelf options failed or were too expensive.
- A focus on observing natural phenomena and adapting them to their needs, such as studying birds and insects for inspiration.
Many others who were chasing flight were either eccentrics or lacked the ingenuity of the brothers. The Wrights didn't have any funding compared to their competitors. This allowed them to have spartan accommodations, and focus on what they could control: observation, experimentation, and detail.
Three words define their method: focus, focus, and focus.
They were immune to external pressure. They checked every part before every flight. They trusted their own data. They let the goal dictate the timeline. External pressures amounted to nothing.
The Wright brothers didn't work in a vacuum. They had a great environment. Dayton, Ohio was an innovative city. That certainly helped in recruiting talent, finding people who could help them with their experiments, and encouraging them at a young age to pursue their own experiments and businesses.
This was a pretty good book. My biggest takeaways were:
- Isolation to protect your focus
- Run your own experiments, collect and trust your data
§Here are some quotes I liked:
- "The best dividends on the labor invested have invariably come from seeking more knowledge rather than more power"
- "Too many people were beginning to believe that all of the world's problems had been solved" --> imagine how much came after this quote in the early 1900s!
- "And yet it was so simple, Borglum wrote, that one wondered why in the world human beings had not built one long before"
- "In 1901, I said to my brother Orville that men would not fly for fifty years. Two years later, we ourselves were making flights" --> everybody is bad at predictions, even when you are the one creating change
- "Neither the impatience of waiting crowds, nor the sneers of rivals, nor the pressure of financial conditions not always easy, could induce him to hurry over any difficulty before he had done everything in his power to understand and overcome it" --> focus on the mission (flight), not on the crowd
- "Those who worked with him at the factory marveled at his meticulous craftsmanship, how he would make his own parts when needed, even a needle if necessary."
- "Carelessness and overconfidence are usually more dangerous than deliberately accepted risks"
- "Dayton ranked first in the country relative to population in the creation of new patents"
- "Make business first, pleasure afterward, and that guarded. All the money anyone needs is just enough to prevent one from being a burden on others."
- "Every mind should be true to itself—should think, investigate and conclude for itself"
- "After the accident, Wilbur remained a recluse, more or less homebound for fully 3 years, 3 years when he began reading as never before"
