How to be successful: steal ideas and copy people

I landed in Lagos at midday, and stepped out of the plane into the african sunlight. Policemen sat on small stools, holding AK-47s in their arms and looking bored.

I went through customs quickly, walked out to see a familiar face outside. My friend Richard was outside, we had studied together in Berlin. His face was fat and round, he looked very different from the quiet and studious guy from my University days, he exuded confidence and strangely enough, satisfaction.

He grabbed my hand in an enthusiastic handshake, a huge smile on his jolly face. We drove through the roads of the lagos mainland – narrow, with houses leaning into the streets, blank windows reflecting the huge pools of muddy water filling in the pits and holes in the road.

His SUV shut us off from the honks of wildly driving motorcyclists, the stench from open gutters and the heat of the afternoon sun. The air conditioner blew out filtered and cold air into our faces.

We drove to my hotel, dropped off my things, and I had a rest. Richard came to pick me up in the evening to visit a nearby lounge for some drinks.

We arrived as the red African sun stabbed itself on the silhouettes of distant palm trees. The evening had come, and the cool ocean night breeze had returned to the island, giving that slightly salty smell that reminds one of holidays.

Outside the lounge, the streets were lined with huge SUVs, sleek and long black cars and groups of fat young men slowly strolled into the entrance, car keys prominently dangling from their hands.

We got to talking, and Richard told me what he had done since we finished university. Though he had studied Computer Science, same as I had, when he got back, he had found it a bit difficult to actually successfully do software development. The electricity kept going off and internet access was very expensive and slow. So he decided to start an IT training center, and from there branch off into other fields.

It was obvious he had become very successful. Success always interests me, and I asked him how he did it. He grinned that familiar grin I knew well, and pulled out something from his back pocket. It was a small a frayed book. I looked at it to decipher the title – “The art of war”. I looked up at him, quite disappointed. What a cliche!

“It’s not what you think, Max”, he said, holding on to a half empty glass of whiskey. “This book has an insight in it that’s not in the pages.”

“When I first read this book, shortly after coming back from Germany, I thought I would be able to apply the knowledge in there. But the information in there was completely abstract and irrelevant to my desire to start a software company. There was no overlap. I was looking for ideas, and this book was telling me about how fight a war against an enemy. But then, I made a realization.”

“It’s really difficult to sit down, come up with an idea and then work on that idea without any goal or clear end-point. An idea is a vague beast, you are not sure if it is good or bad, and when you are working on it, the waves of doubt are going to creep up on you.”

“This book, “the art of war” is about strategy, but all the strategy is about how to defeat other people. It all makes sense, it calls out to something primal in us. We are men, we are creatures of battle, we want to lock horns with the alpha animal and dominate.”

“But when you work on an idea you came up with yourself, your life is not like that. There is no enemy, apart from that vague and shifting demon called doubt. Your greatest enemy is yourself, your fear, you uncertainty, your doubt. So it’s all very hard.”

“What this book showed my is that you need an enemy. You need someone to battle against, someone that you can crow at when the battle is won. When you have someone battling against you, it solidifies your position, it motivates you, it enrages you. It’s war after all, and that’s one thing humans are naturally good at.”

“So I knew that to be successful, I needed an enemy. I needed someone to do battle against, someone I was working against.”

“And so I learnt to copy and steal. Copying an idea from someone, trying to play catch-up to someone, looking at a persons implementation and making it better and more effective gives you that enemy that you need.”

“And besides, that person has does the research. He has found out how it all works.”

“To make my first business, I walked into an IT training center and studied Java for a month with them. I took photos of the place, I questioned all the students, I discovered how much salary the teachers were paid. Then I found a better location, made a nicer place and offered his teachers 10% higher salary.”

“Yes, the owner of the training center was pissed off and vowed to destroy me, but that’s what I wanted. I wanted him to be my enemy, because then I could use this book to battle him. I could win, and in winning, satisfy myself.”

“I drove him out of business, and I repeated the same process with my second business, a hotel. Since then, I’ve been doing that – I find a successful business, I discover as much as possible about it, re-implement it all, then battle them for supremacy.”

“War is fun, Max. Start battles against others by copying and stealing what they are doing – it gives you a clear and primal goal to work towards.”

Later that night, we drove back to the hotel in his expensive SUV. He dropped me off at my hotel, gave me that firm handshake of a confident and successful man, and I went off and slept to the creak of the slowly spinning ceiling fan.