One time Barry Diller was visiting Sergey Brin and Larry Page. The topic of the meeting was to see how the greatest media mogul could work with the greatest Internet moguls.
It was like two galaxies colliding to create something beautiful when seen from light years away.
Larry Page was texting or doing something on his phone.
Barry Diller was disgusted: “Either choose me or the phone”.
Larry Page, without even lifting his head from his phone, said to the biggest media mogul in history, “I choose this”. Referring to his phone.
So Diller spent the rest of the meeting talking to Sergey Brin.
I love James Altucher, but I’m going to call bullshit on this story. This is just a little too just-so. If it happened at all, it was probably done in jest and they all got a laugh out of it.
This story sets up a myth: Great Man meets Great Man and Great Man wins.
The meta-story is: great men are not like you and me.
While that’s true on some level (I’m sure Sergey’s deep understanding of indexing lends an interesting perspective on the world), the reality is that most people, even very successful people, fail most of the time. Most of their ideas aren’t very good. But if you can execute well on one good idea, then it becomes an almost unstoppable train that overruns the bad ideas.
This is a very good thing: Powerful ideas can have powerful consequences, while most bad ideas have almost none.
This is a bad myth: It takes a Great Man to spawn great ideas.
We need less myth-making in the world.