NO ONE Knew the Wright Brothers | Simon Sinek

Back in those days, back in the days of the Wright brothers, trying to figure out power controlled manned flight was all the rage. It was like the dot com of the day. So it's not like the Wright brothers are the only people doing it. Lots of people were doing it. And the lead contender was a guy named Samuel Pierpont Langley. Langley was well known, he was well respected.

He was funded. His efforts were funded by the War Department, the precursor to the DoD. So he was very, very well funded. We had cash. He hired literally the best engineers, the best mechanics, the best mathematicians that money could buy. He had the dream team. And the New York Times followed him around everywhere. And everyone was rooting for Langley.

The problem was Langley was envious of people like Edison and those like him. And Langley wanted to be rich and famous. He was very selfishly motivated. And he saw, or at least his selfish motivation was number one. And figuring this thing out was number two. And he saw this figuring this thing out as the mechanism to help him become rich and famous. Then way off in Dayton, Ohio.

Are the Orville and Wilbur Wright who own a bicycle shop. They have no money. They don't have a dream team, by the way. What's that? I used to live there, by the way. Dayton, Ohio. Oh, okay. So they got this bicycle shop. They don't have a dream team. They have whoever works in their shop.

They have no funding, and nobody knows who they are, that nobody even knows that they exist. The difference was they had a vision and they were compelled that they realized that if they could figure out this flying thing, it would have a profound and positive impact on the world. It would change the world. And it's what motivated them to come back day after day after day, failure after failure after failure. They weren't making money.

And lo and behold, when they figured it out, no one was even there. Like there was no New York Times there. You know, they recorded it themselves.

And further proof that Langley was motivated by the wrong thing, which was he could have said, amazing, I'm going to improve upon your tech. He didn't. As soon as the Wright brothers were celebrated as figuring it out, Langley quit.

He didn't have to, but he did.

So, you know, it's not money and dream team, it's teamwork. It's vision and teamwork and shared cause.

That makes for a great organization. It goes back to the very beginning of what we're talking about, you know, manipulation versus inspiration, which is if the people come together, inspired by common cause, and are willing to struggle and suffer together, it's more likely they're going to solve a problem and innovate. Whereas if they come together and they say, what's in it for me? And, you know, will I get? Will I get. I'm only doing this if I get a huge bonus. If I figure this out, you know, then what you end up having is you don't have amazing teamwork because people hoard information because they think that makes them more valuable, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So it's great teams that innovate. It's not necessarily great individuals.