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When Motivated by WHY, Success Just Happens
It was a turn-of-the-century version of the dot-com boom. The promise of a
revolutionary new technology was changing the way people imagined the future.
And there was a race to see who could do it first. It was the end of the nineteenth
century and the new technology was the airplane. One of the best-known men in
the field was Samuel Pierpont Langley. Like many other inventors of his day, he
was attempting to build the world’s first heavier-than-air flying machine. The
goal was to be the first to achieve machine-powered, controlled, manned flight.
The good news was Langley had all the right ingredients for the enormous task;
he had, what most would define as, the recipe for success.
Langley had achieved some renown within the academic community as an
astronomer, which earned him high-ranking and prestigious positions. He was
secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. He had been an assistant in the Harvard
College Observatory and professor of mathematics at the United States Naval
Academy. Langley was very well connected. His friends included some of the
most powerful men in government and business, including Andrew Carnegie and
Alexander Graham Bell. He was also extremely well funded. The War
Department, the precursor the Department of Defense, had given him $50,000
for the project, a lot of money in those days. Money was no object.
Langley assembled some of the best and brightest minds of the day. His dream
team included test pilot Charles Manly, a brilliant Cornell-trained mechanical
engineer, and Stephan Balzer, the developer of the first car in New York.
Langley and his team used the finest materials. The market conditions were
perfect and his PR was great. The
New York Times
followed him around
everywhere. Everyone knew Langley and was rooting for his success.
But there was a problem.
Langley had a bold goal, but he didn’t have a clear sense of WHY. His
purpose for wanting to build the plane was defined in terms of WHAT he was
doing and WHAT he could get. He had had a passion for aeronautics since a
very young age, but he did not have a cause to champion. More than anything
else, Langley wanted to be first. He wanted to be rich and he wanted to be
famous. That was his driving motivation.
Although already well regarded in his own field, he craved the kind of fame of
a Thomas Edison or Alexander Graham Bell, the kind that comes only with
inventing something big. Langley saw the airplane as his ticket to fame and
fortune. He was smart and motivated. He had what we still assume is the recipe
for success: plenty of cash, the best people and ideal market conditions. But few
of us have ever heard of Samuel Pierpont Langley.
A few hundred miles away in Dayton, Ohio, Orville and Wilbur Wright were
also building a flying machine. Unlike Langley, the Wright brothers did not have
the recipe for success. Worse, they seemed to have the recipe for failure. There
was no funding for their venture. No government grants. No high-level
connections. The Wright brothers funded their dream with the proceeds from
their bicycle shop. Not a single person working on the team, including Orville
and Wilbur, had a college education; some did not even finish high school. What
the Wright brothers were doing wasn’t any different from Langley or all the
others trying to build a flying machine. But the Wright brothers did have
something very special. They had a dream. They knew WHY it was important to
build this thing. They believed that if they could figure out this flying machine, it
would change the world. They imagined the benefits to everyone else if they
were successful.
“Wilbur and Orville were true scientists, deeply and genuinely concerned
about the physical problem they were trying to solve—the problem of balance
and flight,” said James Tobin, the Wright brothers’ biographer. Langley, on the
other hand, was consumed with acquiring the level of prestige of his associates
like Alexander Graham Bell, fame that he knew would come only with a major
scientific breakthrough. Langley, Tobin said, “did not have the Wrights’ passion
for flight, but rather was looking for achievement.”
Orville and Wilbur preached what they believed and inspired others in the
community to join them in their cause. The proof of their commitment was self-
evident. With failure after failure, most would have given up, but not the Wright
brothers’ team. The team was so inspired that no matter how many setbacks they
suffered they would show up for more. Every time the Wright brothers went out
to make a test flight, so the stories go, they would take five sets of parts with
them, because they knew that’s how many times they were likely to fail before
deciding to come home for the day.
Then it happened. On December 17, 1903, on a field in Kitty Hawk, North
Carolina, the Wright brothers took to the sky. A fifty-nine-second flight at an
altitude of 120 feet at the speed of a jog was all it took to usher in a new
technology that would change the world.
Remarkable as the achievement was, it went relatively unnoticed. The
New
York Times
was not there to cover the story. Driven by something bigger than
fame and glory, the Wright brothers were content to wait to tell the world. They
understood its true significance to the world.
What Langley and the Wright brothers were trying to create was exactly the
same; both were building the same product. Both the Wright brothers and
Langley were highly motivated. Both had a strong work ethic. Both had keen
scientific minds. What the Wright brothers’ team had that Langley did wasn’t
luck. It was inspiration. One was motivated by the prospect of fame and wealth,
the other by a belief. The Wright brothers excited the human spirit of those
around them. Langley paid for talent to help him get rich and famous. The
Wright brothers started with WHY. Further proof Langley was motivated by
WHAT, a few days after Orville and Wilbur took flight, Langley quit. He got out
of the business. He could have said, “That’s amazing, now I’m going to improve
upon their technology.” But he didn’t. He found the defeat humiliating—his own
test flight had landed in the Potomac River, and the newspapers all made fun of
him. He cared so much about what others thought of him, he was so preoccupied
with becoming famous. He wasn’t first, so he simply quit.
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