The cost of success🏆

Built for success?

Little did young Howard knew, but what started as a regular monday morning would later turn his world upside down and change forever who he was and who he would become.

While a business meeting was taking place on a monday morning in January 14, 1924, a rather young Howard Hughes Sr. would stand up all of a sudden, placing a hand on top of where his heart was and suddenly fall to the ground as he would fight to grasp his last breaths of air in this world.

Dying from a heart attack is as common as catching a cold, and regardless of how many zeros you’ve got in your bank account, you’re not safe of getting one.

The successful inventor and tool magnate, Howard Hughes would pass away at the age of fifty four, leaving three fourths of his empire to his son, Howard Hughes Jr. to deal with in his absence.

In a move of almost incomprehensible foresight, young Howard decided to buy out his relatives shares from his dad’s company having bequethed them as part of his will.

It was a bold move, specially coming from a young man who most saw as a spoiled child with zero experience in business, but this would be one of the several moments Hughes would demonstrate his brilliance as years to come would allow this company to make billions in cash.

No one can argue whether Hughes was gifted, visionary, or a natural businessman…he just was.

Being a mechanical genius, a fearless pilot and a master at recognizing trends before anybody, would sure make Hughes a success.

Unfortunately his ego had other plans for him…

Hughes’s downfall

One would think that, with the genius Howard had as well as all the money in the world thanks to his father’s company, he would become a impersonation of success and a businessman to look up to for generations to come.

Though, there’s so much more than history books dare to tell…

If you were to look up the life of Howard Hughes, you would stumble upon articles who describe Hughes as:

“an American business magnate, investor, record-setting pilot, engineer, film director, and philanthropist.”

It’s always more attractive and exciting to hear about the rebel and eccentric billionaire who made “his fortune” by being bold so we can all think:

“Oh, I want that!”

But reality is much more blunt and crude in contrast to what newspapers portray.

Here’s a summary of some of Hughes’s feats (if you can call them that…) for you to look and make your own assumptions of whether he was the success history portrays him to be:

• After purchasing control of his father’s tool company, Hughes abandoned it almost immediately except to repeatedly siphon off its cash

• He left Houston and never stepped foot in the company’s headquarters again

• He moved to LA where he decided to become a film producer and celebrity

• Trading stocks from his bedside, he lost more than $ 8 million in the market leading up to the Depression.

• His most well known movie Hell’s Angels, took three years to make, lost $ 1.5 million on a budget of $ 4.2 million, and nearly bankrupted his fathers’ tool company in the process

• He lost another $ 4 million on Chrysler stock in the early 1930

• He got into the aviation business, creating a defense contractor called the Hughes Aircraft Company which, despite some astounding personal achievements as an inventor, Hughes’s company was a failure. His two contracts during World War II, worth $ 40 million, were massive failures at the expense of the American taxpayers and himself.

• The most notable, Spruce Goose, which Hughes called the Hercules which was one of the biggest planes ever made. Took more than five years to develop, cost roughly $ 20 million, and flew a single time for barely a mile only 70 feet above water. only to be left abandoned at his insistence and expense, in an air conditioned hangar in Long Beach for decades at the cost of $ 1 million a year.

• Deciding to double down on the movie industry, he bough movie studio RKO and produced losses over $ 22 millions - going from two thousand employees to fewer than five hundred - as he ran the company into the ground.

• That’s not all. He also spent millions on private investigators, lawyers, contracts for starlets he refused to let act, property he never lived and more.

When you see all of Hughes’s “achievements¨, it’s hard to understand the reputation media built for him as he was quite possibly the worst businessman of the twentieth century.

So, the question remains:

How did someone so brilliant, with so much skills and money, managed to fail repeatedly?

Sustaining success

It’s one thing to battle your way towards success, and an entirely different thing to sustain it.

As Ryan Holiday puts it: Success toys with out mind and weakens the will that got us there in the first place.

“We know that empires always fall, so we must think why - and why they seem to always collapse from within” - Ryan Holiday

As we’ve seen with Hughes, what eventually brought him down and led him to live the rest of his life in a state of reclusiveness and deteriorating mental health, was that he was unable to control himself, to control his ego…

He was so publicly and visibly unable to handle his birthright properly, fueled by bad habits, addictions, and an insatiable ego that made him addicted to the spotlight in whatever venture he got in.

Without the right values, success is brief…

As intoxicating as success is, the harder part is to sustian it, and to be able to do so requries sobriety.

We can’t keep learning if we assume we already know all there is to learn.

So, will you be able to handle success…?