Andrew Carnegie sold his steel company in 1901 and then spent eighteen years trying to get rid of the proceeds on purpose. He funded 2,509 libraries. He was not being sentimental.
While Caesar was in Gaul, he was not in Rome. That was the problem. His reputation was being decided in a city he was nowhere near, by men who had every reason to shape the account in their favour.
In 1893 his alternating current lit the Chicago World’s Fair. Two years later his polyphase system went into Niagara Falls. The grid that charged your phone last night is, in its bones, Nikola Tesla’s design.
Most founders can tell you their revenue to the dollar. Ask what it costs to deliver one unit of the thing they sell and you get a range, a shrug, or a number invented on the call.
In 1799 the Hudson’s Bay Company had 530 men working its posts across North America. 416 of them came from Orkney, a small archipelago off the north coast of Scotland.
In 2013 Nipsey Hussle released a mixtape called Crenshaw. He gave the music away free. Then he printed 1,000 physical copies and sold them at $100 each. They sold out. Jay-Z bought a hundred of them.
Almost every philosophy that survives seventeen centuries is a philosophy of addition. Learn more, earn more, become more. Plotinus taught the opposite.
Alexander crossed into Asia in 334 BC and never saw Macedon again. Eleven years of campaign, an empire stretching from Greece to the Indus, dead in Babylon at 32. He was never beaten in the field.
