Thankfully, the OP isn't one of those long New Yorker pieces that go on and on and on. It's a short review of an autobiography of Tony Hsieh that focuses less on business-building details than on the psychological/personal evolution of a young Asian American man -- who, despite his growing success and adulation by the media, found himself deeply unsatisfied and dependent on booze and drugs. The review ends with this tidbit, which I found insightful:<p><i>> Hsieh, in the end, was a rich guy who, early in his career, used his Harvard connections and some seed money to buy a series of lotto tickets in the tech boom, and then used his expanding wealth and influence to spread a bunch of marketing, in the form of pseudo-psychology, into the world. He slept with his employees and terrorized his closest friends. His descent into addiction and his untimely death were certainly tragic, but I couldn’t find much to admire about Hsieh in “Wonder Boy,” nor did I understand why I was reading dozens of meticulously reported, almost snuff-film-like pages about his journey into ketamine addiction and mania. None of this means that “Wonder Boy” is a bad or dull book—on the contrary, it should be mandatory reading for anyone who is interested in big tech. But it did not give much of an answer to the question of how and why so much of the press and the public got suckered in by Hsieh’s generation of tech evangelists.</i>
This touches on something I've been mulling for a while when I read twitter. There's an entire ecosystem of self-proclaimed successful entrepreneurs who parlay that into various fabulous claims. But for me it's always been difficult to isolate luck. In the early days of facebook there were a dozen social media companies that could have become The Future, and there's probably hundreds of people who were around early enough that if they'd been on the winning team they'd have had atleast tens of millions of dollars to show for it. Did they make the difference between Facebook being the winning platform? Maybe? Probably not. Atleast not <i>everyone</i> at facebook in the early days could have been the difference between facebook being a billion dollar behemoth or not. So it seems to me there are <i>atleast some</i> multi-millionaire tech bros who are there entirely by luck. And if you made $10m, $20m, $100m and had early Facebook on your CV? Well you can spend the rest of your days waxing lyrical about how astute and innovative you are and how you're the master of the universe. Hell, you can set up your own VC gig and start putting some of that reputation to work.<p>Are you any good at anything? Probably not. But you're not going to take 100% losses on everything and people are going to pay you a decent chunk to manage their money and get in on those investments that you - a genius thought leader - can identify as being the next sliced bread. At the end of the day even if it goes badly you can probably dump your shit investments on dumb retail investors. You're never going to be broke, and no one knows if you have $10m in the bank or $100m.<p>I guess the only thing you can't do is start a podcast where you're loudly stupid every week, that would be a real dumb move, but other than that based on a little luck you can coast for the rest of your life.
>“While surrounded by friends in the Bahamas as a newly minted millionaire, Tony felt a sense of melancholy. What’s next? What is happiness? What am I working toward? he wondered.”<p>can't understand how some of these guys don't have the wherewithal to live in the moment from time to time
"But what really separated all the losers from those who had been able to amass a large fortune was a whole lot of lucky breaks in a row."<p>"Zappos, the company that ultimately made Hsieh famous, wasn't his idea."<p>"Over time, Hsieh's interest in junk psychology extended beyond happiness and into even stupider realms. He became obsessed with Neil Strauss's "The Game," the infamous guide for so-called pickup artists which taught men how to manipulate women via techniques like "negging" and "peacocking.""<p>"When Hsieh ultimately embarked on an ambitious project to revitalize downtown Las Vegas and turn it into a new tech hub, he boasted to a reporter about how he had used methods from "The Game" in selling his vision for the city to potential investors."<p>"But ["Wonder Boy"] did not give much of an answer to the question of how and why so much of the press and the public got suckered in by Hsieh's generation of tech evangelists. cD-"
AFAICT, Zappos tuned into a desire on the part of (mostly) women to buy shoes, and return them for any reason, or no reason. They did a very good job of that for a while, and being in Lost Wages they had access to a different labor pool than Silicon Valley. So calling that "luck" just means you're envious.<p>That said: the rest was a cult, for sure. Whereas the PayPay Mafia went on to do other things, good or bad, he went on to be like a 20-something rock star who suddenly comes into massive riches. Drugs beckon. Hangers-on are eager to hang on.
In his book, Hsieh wrote about three types of happiness: pleasure, passion, and purpose.<p>Pleasure is the easiest, but most fleeting. Passion can sustain you for years, but eventually will pass. Purpose can last you a lifetime.
Tony’s story is a story of untreated bipolar disorder, which often is accompanied by addictions, narcissism, etc. People with bipolar can ride their mania to great success, but as they tilt into unreality they damage themselves. Seeking to reclaim the mania during the depressive phase they turn to drugs, which can induce a fleeting mania. The story of Tony is more a story of the opportunists who exploited his mental illness and fed his mania for their own profit. It’s not an indictment of tech, moguls, myths, or whatever. It’s an indictment of the state of mental health care in the US and the unfettered greed of our fellow man.