This is one of three paintings by Ford Madox Brown illustrating Shakespeare’s play King Lear. In the play Lear divided his kingdom between two daughters who were only interested in their own gain, leaving out Cordelia, the one who truly loved him. By the time he realized his mistake, it was too late. The kingdom was already lost.
King Lear survived the Raft of Medusa for decades. Yet, in his final moments, he was back to square one.
You spend your life playing this high-stakes game, asking, "Did I get it right?" But in your final hours, it’s about what you missed. Who’s waiting to stab you in the back. Who’s been lying all along. It’s about struggling to figure out what you were blind to. What didn’t seem to matter until it did—until it brought everything crashing down.
Every massive success will eventually come to a stage where the person/people who created it are either less capable, less hungry, or dead. Failing to pass the torch to the right person at the right time will have irreversible consequences.
You could choose your family. But then you are all but guaranteed to have liars, thieves, and idiots. It's statistically impossible for all of your family to be good.
Or you could divide it up amongst capable people, like Alexander. When he died, his generals became rulers of the kingdoms they managed. All of those kingdoms were in a decent position because they had good people in control. But then they just went to war against each other or fought off internal rebellions of the vengeful and the jealous from the previous regime.
Is it effective to shift from a single-power control to multi-power control? Most certainly not.
From Alexander to Silicon Valley. We see the same pattern in such firms like the tech giants and game studios. The founders leave, and those who take over? The magic is gone. The products suffer and the original passion fades. It’s not betrayal, like what Lear suffered, but it’s a dilution of what made the company great in the first place.
I think that there's reasons why people feel that way. The Bulls sucked after Jordan–is that his fault? Well, technically, yes. Was it an evil strategy he had? No. You've lost Michael Jordan, how do you recover from that?! Hope for the draft lottery I suppose…
It’s a deeply personal problem. Alea iacta est. The hockey stick hit the puck. It's going down the ice.
At the end of my success, everything I have ever done is going to be judged. And I won’t get to be a part of that conversation. Forty years of my work will be summarised by someone else. That summary will most likely be a single sentence. And the longer time goes on, the shorter that sentence will get. Now, what is my relationship to legacy? What is my relationship to the future that slowly forgets me?