It's much easier to do hard or risky things (and convince others to do hard things) if you believe that doing so will save the world.
Whether it's true or not, it's a useful illusion. People who believe that it's all meaningless tend to sit on message boards and shit on others instead.
I'd rather take an honest, measured view of these companies. Many have the potential to change our lives, for both good and ill. Buying into the BS is a great way to short circuit healthy skepticism.
Who are the ones actually building the products that everybody else (and probably you, too) are using, though, and getting rich off it? They're the delusional folks who buy the BS.
This is something I've wrestled with a lot in my personal life: you can have an accurate self-image and never really accomplish anything, or you can have an inflated self-image and achievements that probably don't quite justify it but come a lot closer than the achievements of the people with accurate self-images. Empirically, there doesn't seem to be a middle ground, except for a few rare folks who seemingly have no self-image (they just don't think about it much). That sort of delusional megalomania seems to be a necessary motive force for tackling hard, risky problems. And if you don't have it, then some other delusional megalomaniac will be the one who actually attempts it, and gets resources simply because he's the only one trying.
Second-order survivorship bias. The vast majority of delusional megalomaniacs are abject failures (at least when compared to their own ambitions), and the number of them who live in the gutter and eat out of trashcans is at least four orders of magnitude higher than the number who find success.
People who find success often become delusional megalomaniacs after achieving that success, when they see their success as evidence of their own greatness, not before. The idea that it's the megalomania (or a black turtleneck) that makes you successful, or even makes you brave enough to attempt the things that might make you successful, is an illusion.
A defining commonality of delusional megalomaniacs is their destructiveness and their danger to the people around them and themselves. Worse, they tend to attract followers who both amplify the reach of that destructiveness and who create an echo chamber that reflects back and amplifies the megalomania that attracted them, making the situation worse.
> That sort of delusional megalomania seems to be a necessary motive force for tackling hard, risky problems.
There's no evidence of this. Everything difficult was not solved by assholes, and Zuckerberg didn't solve anything difficult.
I think reality is much much much more complicated (we humans don't even know enough collectively to make such statements with any accuracy), and there certainly is a middle ground. I think people with inflated self worth are more likely to "succeed" because they will run right over others and maybe not even stop to justify the horror they just committed to improve their own lot in life, due to their sense of entitlement complex (which I guess you did allude to a little). Either way, I like your comment, it made me think.
Great comment. I just want to point out the obvious you can believe you're great & be a nice, humble person.
The self-image comes into play when you're trying to act in a certain accordance with what's in your head. If you think you're bound for great things, you'll look for great things to tackle and you won't be satisfied until you're at whatever version of success you have in your head. If your self-image is happy & settled-down, you'll similarly stress over this. Eventually though, you'll probably get what you wanted because the law of attraction is quite real.
When you talk about accomplishment, it's a relative term though I understand you mean money in this case. Self-image is self-directed, and typically comes from a desire, which naturally comes from a lack. You will see many buy into the trap that money = happiness, and they will thus imagine themselves as some rich, successful tech CEO. After that, self-image has to match up with real-world, so work. The ones who truly believe they are will eventually succeed, and the ones with little willpower will fail. This goes for every facet of life.
That's why it's good to ponder "who am I?" because it's actually a step after "what do I want?" If you can see it, you can be it. Some will call it megalomania and others will call it dedication. Without knowing the person intimately, it's hard to understand which it is, but I'm an optimist and lean on the side of most successful people got there through a lot of hard work -- where their self-image was tested again & again.
The truth is nobody can tell you that you are or aren't successful. Ultimately, it's a personal decision and comes down to if your ideal version of yourself is staring back at you in the mirror.
But I don't know if I agree with the second. People who believe that something is meaningless, or hard to do, are at least not doing any damage, while saviors of the world have done plenty of damage. We humans seem to have an inherent bias for powerful persons, in that we tend to like them even if they're a terrible influence.
Hey, some people sit on messages boards and shit on others AND manage to build successful businesses that let them live the lives they want. I'd rather choose them as models than the douchebags drinking kombucha in their Tesla.
I think there's truth in what you're saying, it's just a bit dubious when that illusion is also used to generate billions in personal wealth. It raises the cynic in some observers.
Why leave out the option that some things are meaningless and some things are not? Why divide the world into conquering self-deluded bullshit artists and lazy cynical moaners?
Whether it's true or not, it's a useful illusion. People who believe that it's all meaningless tend to sit on message boards and shit on others instead.