Start With Why

given him $50,000 for the project, a lot of money in those days. Money was no object.
    Langley assembled some of the best and brightest minds of the day. His dream team included test pilot Charles Manly, a brilliant Cornell-trained mechanical engineer, and Stephan Balzer, the developer of the first car in New York. Langley and his team used the finest materials. The market conditions were perfect and his PR was great. The New York Times followed him around everywhere. Everyone knew Langley and was rooting for his success.
    But there was a problem.
    Langley had a bold goal, but he didn’t have a clear sense of WHY. His purpose for wanting to build the plane was defined in terms of WHAT he was doing and WHAT he could get. He had had a passion for aeronautics since a very young age, but he did not have a cause to champion. More than anything else, Langley wanted to be first. He wanted to be rich and he wanted to be famous. That was his driving motivation.
    Although already well regarded in his own field, he craved the kind of fame of a Thomas Edison or Alexander Graham Bell, the kind that comes only with inventing something big. Langley saw the airplane as his ticket to fame and fortune. He was smart and motivated. He had what we still assume is the recipe for success: plenty of cash, the best people and ideal market conditions. But few of us have ever heard of Samuel Pierpont Langley.
    A few hundred miles away in Dayton, Ohio, Orville and Wilbur Wright were also building a flying machine. Unlike Langley, the Wright brothers did not have the recipe for success. Worse, they seemed to have the recipe for failure. There was no funding for their venture. No government grants. No high-level connections. The Wright brothers funded their dream with the proceeds from their bicycle shop. Not a single person working on the team, including Orville and Wilbur, had a college education; some did not even finish high school. What the Wright brothers were doing wasn’t any different from Langley or all the others trying to build a flying machine. But the Wright brothers did have something very special. They had a dream. They knew WHY it was important to build this thing. They believed that if they could figure out this flying machine, it would change the world. They imagined the benefits to everyone else if they were successful.
    “Wilbur and Orville were true scientists, deeply and genuinely concerned about the physical problem they were trying to solve—the problem of balance and flight,” said James Tobin, the Wright brothers’ biographer. Langley, on the other hand, was consumed with acquiring the level of prestige of his associates like Alexander Graham Bell, fame that he knew would come only with a major scientific breakthrough. Langley, Tobin said, “did not have the Wrights’ passion for flight, but rather was looking for achievement.”
    Orville and Wilbur preached what they believed and inspired others in the community to join them in their cause. The proof of their commitment was self-evident. With failure after failure, most would have given up, but not the Wright brothers’ team. The team was so inspired that no matter how many setbacks they suffered they would show up for more. Every time the Wright brothers went out to make a test flight, so the stories go, they would take five sets of parts with them, because they knew that’s how many times they were likely to fail before deciding to come home for the day.
    Then it happened. On December 17, 1903, on a field in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, the Wright brothers took to the sky. A fifty-nine-second flight at an altitude of 120 feet at the speed of a jog was all it took to usher in a new technology that would change the world.
    Remarkable as the achievement was, it went relatively unnoticed. The New York Times was not there to cover the story. Driven by something bigger than fame and glory, the Wright brothers were content to wait to tell the world. They understood its true significance to the world.
    What Langley and the Wright brothers were trying to create was exactly the same; both were building the same product. Both the Wright brothers and Langley were highly motivated. Both had a strong work ethic. Both had keen scientific minds. What the Wright brothers’ team had that Langley did wasn’t luck. It was inspiration. One was motivated by the prospect of fame and wealth, the other by a belief. The Wright brothers excited the human spirit of those around them.