And Now Let Us Praise, and Consider the Absurd Luck of, Famous Men

At first, snuffling through a head cold, I wrote several snarky responses -- e.g. " 'Success is never accidental,' said all multimillionaire white men." -- but never tweeted them. Because I've seen a lot of successful people in action and sometimes you're like, "Holy hell, Bill Gates (or Paul Otellini or James Fallows) is an impressive person." These are hardworking, brilliant people whom I did not want to demean. So, what I ended up tweeting was simple: "And failures?" 

It's important that we can recognize the skills of the successful while also noting the many prodigiously lucky factors that allow them to show those skills. To make this point, I want to tell you a couple of stories about Robert Noyce, "the mayor of Silicon Valley" to show what I mean.

Noyce plays a major role in the new PBS show, "Silicon Valley," which debuted this week, and for good reason. Noyce co-founded both Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel. He's a classic in the human genre of "Great Man."Tom Wolfe, who profiled him ("The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce") in the December 1983 issue of Esquire, said Noyce made people see a halo over his head. In fact, he's the model entrepreneur for people like Dorsey, whether they know it or not. He was selected by his peers to lead the world's most important semiconductor companies, established the start-up funding and organizational model that now defines the Valley, and almost certainly would have won a Nobel Prize if not for his death. 

People always seem to find stories about men like this from their youth that seem to mark them with greatness and serve as a metaphor for their genius. With Jobs, perhaps it's his time wandering in India developing his intuition. Edison had his newspaper business. Zuckerberg has his run-in with the Harvard's administration over hacking. Bill Gates has his own run-in with authorities over sneaking access to computers. Stories proliferate; usually you have a few to choose from.