There is no lone genius, every great was built on idols and obsessions.
You know for the longest time I avoided idolizing people because I had this fallacy in my head, that the people we idolize never had idols themselves, that they were totally 100 percent self-driven. I thought they were born different, wired from the start to go their own way without inspiration.
But recently I started reading and listening to biographies, Steve Jobs, James Dyson, others, and what I found flipped that assumption on its head. Every single one of them was obsessed with history and past inventors. They had people they looked up to.
Steve Jobs was obsessed, and I mean obsessed, with Edwin Land, the founder of Polaroid. It was Land who planted the idea in Jobs’ head that a tech company could sit at the intersection of art, creativity, and even spirituality. That’s why Jobs hated those ugly, soulless, strictly profit-driven companies like IBM and Microsoft. They didn’t care about making beautiful products with soul. He once said meeting Edwin Land in his early 20s was like going to a shrine. That’s how deep the reverence ran.
Same thing with James Dyson. The man was so in love with technical invention that he wrote a whole book called "A History of Great Inventions". That tells you everything about how obsesed he was with technological history.
Now when I think about it, it makes complete sense to have role models you’re borderline obsessed with. Because what happens is your mind becomes saturated with their habits, their obsessions, their quirks, their way of seeing the world. Your perspective shifts. Your priorities realign. You start to unconsciously rewire yourself to match them.
That’s why I always say you can tell a lot about someone by their YouTube feed or their Kindle book list. Those inputs are a mirror of their inner world. It’s like that saying, we’re the average of the five people we spend the most time with. Except here’s the hack: those “five people” don’t have to be your friends.
If you spend five hours a day listening to a founder’s talks or reading their biography, you might as well consider them one of your friends. It’s still influence. It’s still rewiring. And honestly, most of us already have friends we just listen to without much back-and-forth, so what’s the difference?
The most important thing this practice does is saturate your subconscious with ideas. It rewires your mental operating system. If you’re listening to founders or reading biographies, your subconscious starts working on the problem of your life. It starts asking: What am I passionate about? Where’s my edge? What dots can I connect?
And the crazy part is, you don’t even have to consciously solve it. You just need to define the problem and then feed your mind with hours of these inputs. Slowly, automatically, your brain starts connecting the dots.
Even if you’re not a founder, this is gold. If you work inside a company, hearing how other companies solved problems will prepare you for when similar issues show up in your world, whether that’s operations, management, or strategy. It’s like training your subconscious in advance.
So yeah, for me this shattered the myth. The greats weren’t just self-driven lone wolves. They were obsessed students of history, stealing fire from the ones who came before them. And maybe that’s the real path, finding your own Edwin Land, your own source of obsession, and letting it rewire your entire operating system.