Everyone's Making It Up
"That’s the hard thing about hard things—there is no formula for dealing with them.”
The Splendid and the Vile is one of the best books I’ve ever read. It’s about Churchill and his leadership of Britain during World War 2.
The British knew Germany possessed the ability to bomb England to the point where it might have no other option but to surrender. Germany’s bombing of Rotterdam had seemed to validate such thinking. The day after the Luftwaffe’s attack, the Dutch surrendered, out of fear that other cities would be destroyed. England’s ability to defend itself from this kind of campaign depended entirely on the nation’s aircraft industries’ capacity to produce fighter aircraft—Hurricanes and Spitfires—at a rate high enough not just to compensate for the fast-mounting losses but also to increase the overall number of planes available for combat.
But despite knowing the importance of producing aircraft and producing them fast, fighter production lagged. Shortages of parts and materials disrupted production. Damaged aircraft accumulated as they awaited repair. Many nearly completed planes lacked engines and instruments. Vital parts were stored in far-flung locations, jealously guarded by feudal officials reserving them for their own future needs.
With all this in mind, Churchill, on his first day as prime minister, created an entirely new ministry devoted solely to the production of fighters and bombers, the Ministry of Aircraft Production. In Churchill’s view, this new ministry was the only thing that could save Britain from defeat, and he was confident he knew just the man to run it: his longtime friend Max Aitken - commonly known as Lord Beaverbrook.
Churchill offered him the job that night, but Beaverbrook hesitated. He had made his fortune in newspapers and knew nothing about running factories that manufactured products as complex as fighters and bombers. Beaverbrook’s secretaries were still composing draft letters of refusal when, apparently on impulse, he accepted the post. Two days later, he became minister of aircraft production.
Beaverbrook was remarkably efficient at ramping up aircraft production. At one point, Adolf Galland - a German pilot who led the Luftwaffe (German Airforce) and was a top-scoring ace - was summoned to the hunting lodge of Hermann Göring, chief of the Luftwaffe, for Göring to air his complaints:
“That afternoon, reports came in about a big raid on London, one of the last conducted in daylight, in which the Luftwaffe suffered major losses. “Göring was shattered,” Galland wrote. “He simply could not explain how the increasingly painful losses of bombers came about.” To Galland, the answer was obvious. What he and fellow pilots had been trying to get their superiors to understand was that the RAF was just as strong as ever, fighting with undiminished spirit in a seemingly endless supply of new aircraft.”
A seemingly endless supply of new aircraft. The stakes were high; the fate of England depended on the production of those aircraft. Beaverbrook had been successful in the newspaper industry, but aircraft production was outside his wheelhouse. It didn’t matter, because Beaverbrook executed flawlessly.
It’s easy to place limitations on yourself by thinking that you don't know enough, or that you don't have the correct qualifications, or that you’ll simply be out of your depth. And perhaps that's true. But what this story shows is that it doesn't matter.
The more I learn about great founders and leaders, the more I realise that most of my idols had no idea what they were doing at multiple points in their careers. They were punching above their weight and figuring it out along the way.
Fu#k Around and Find Out
I often come across books, blogs and YouTube videos explaining how successful people did what they did. Whether it’s starting a company or running an ultramarathon, they usually create the impression that every successful person knew what they were doing each step of the way. That they knew how the next 12 steps would play out. I don’t think that’s true. Ben Horowitz gets to the heart of it:
“The problem with these books is that they attempt to provide a recipe for challenges that have no recipes. There’s no recipe for really complicated, dynamic situations. There’s no recipe for building a high-tech company; there’s no recipe for leading a group of people out of trouble; there’s no recipe for making a series of hit songs; there’s no recipe for playing NFL quarterback; there’s no recipe for running for president; and there’s no recipe for motivating teams when your business has turned to crap. That’s the hard thing about hard things—there is no formula for dealing with them.”
Something I like about good biographies is that they show how the subject got to where they did. They don’t hide the hard parts. Early lives leap out the most. Leonardo da Vinci was a studio apprentice to Verrocchio at 14. Walt Disney took on a number of jobs, chiefly delivering papers, from 11 years old. Andrew Carnegie finished schooling at 12 and was 13 when he began his second job as a telegraph office boy, where he convinced his superiors to teach him the telegraph machine itself. By 16 he was the family’s mainstay of income.
Biographies reveal failure, too. Dyson built 5,127 prototypes before he eventually created the world's first bagless vacuum cleaner. Jobs was fired from the company he started, saying “What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.”
The early lives - and the failures along the way - contain something revealing. They reveal that even history’s most wildly successful people didn’t know how the journey ended when they were walking it. They were often out of their depth and simply trying to take the best next step. They were figuring it out along the way.
Richard Hamming, the great Bell Labs engineer, says that “in science, if you know what you’re doing, you shouldn’t be doing it.” A less subtle way of putting it: Fuck around and find out1. Everything starts as fucking around and everyone at the frontier is almost always doing that.
I’ve come to realise that if I want to do anything significant, I’m going to question my ability and I’m going to doubt myself. That’s okay. I’m not the first and I’m not the last, but I must push on. The time for concern is when I stop feeling these things.
If you’ve made it all the way down here, consider scrolling back up to like the essay. It helps others find it. And it makes me happy.
What I’m Reading:
I’ve been in Budapest for 2 weeks now. I’ve spent a good chunk of time exploring the city, mainly on foot.
By walking a city, you meet the people who live there, and engage with them and their culture, on their terms in their environment. It gives you a small window into how they live. How they think about and experience the world. Consequently, it can change how you see the world.
Over the past year or so, I’ve become increasingly interested in urbanism and how to build cities that breed innovation and progress. When you think about what Ancient Greece did for philosophy, the Middle East’s contribution to mathematics, or how the artists of Renaissance Florence enriched the heritage of all humankind, it’s clear that there’s something special about cities. The thread below provides a lot to think about.
My grandparents read this - sorry!