It has become clear to us that all successful people are completely insane. Some hide it better than others. But to our minds, whenever you look closely and long enough at someone who has attained a level of eminence, you’ll find there’s a sort of film between you and that person, because they have separated, if ever so slightly, from the reality you inhabit. This may seem obvious when you hear that Shaq spends $1,000 a week on apps, or that a senator like John McCain thinks his opinions matter. But look closely also at the people around you—your boss, or your boss’ boss, or your boss’ boss’ boss. Is there not something in them that remains ever unaccountable, a little odd?

We have been observing this universal companion of success for some time and have noted that it seems to be true across fields, personalities, and cultures that otherwise have about as much in common as a stalking cheetah and a raccoon carcass. So, we set our brains to trying to understand why this is so.

The key fact, which many people choose not to see, is that in any meaningful human endeavor—meaning one subject to the complexities of real life, not a game—it’s impossible to say with certainty why one effort succeeds where another fails. Think of two embryonic businesses or fledgling movies about to sail into the market. Sure we look back, after one has risen and one fallen, and find a batch of reasons for the difference—the plot, the lead actor—but no one can look at these things a priori and declare which will succeed. If they could, we wouldn’t have failures.

The greatest proof of this in our minds is that Shakespeare wrote King John. He’s arguably the greatest literary mind of all time, and he didn’t know ahead of time that that heap of words would bomb like a plucked turkey thrown from the Tower of London (or live turkeys thrown from a WKRP helicopter).

Add on the fact that, while we can’t know what actually made a venture successful (and the answer may be luck, which is just another word for “I don’t know”), we always look for explanations, clamp on to the ones that have the slightest meat of plausibility, and worry, shake, and gnaw them into splinters. Thus an actor, after appearing in one successful movie, gets a $20 million payday for his next project. Someone thought he was the reason the first film was a success.

So, we don’t know ahead of time what makes any effort successful or not, we then look desperately for a reason to explain it, and finally we try to repeat what we suppose worked. But, as you can probably see at this point, we’re as likely to be wrong as right in the factors we select to explain success, and thus what we go on repeating. And so each time we succeed, we risk moving further away from reality by repeating our mistaken twist of reality.

This process occurs in small-scale, individual successes as much as the familiar examples we’ve discussed above. Imagine a prototypical, unfortunate successful person as she goes through this painful process. She excels in school. She gets a good job and makes moves that lead to her shooting up the career ladder as her peers bob and lag behind her. She keeps doing things that work, and so she keeps finding explanations for why they worked, and then she keeps replicating those factors to repeat the success.

Maybe the first time she closed a deal, she was wearing heels, which made her feel taller and stronger. After wearing heels and succeeding a few times, she won’t wear anything but heels, and in fact becomes terrified of not having enough heels to wear. She probably has a closet full of them. Or maybe a whole vacation home stocked with backup heels. Or possibly she’s hired someone to buy as many heels as possible and always be on call, 24 hours a day, in case of emergency. Maybe she even has another person on call in Milan, Italy, which, if you consider it, is about the only place on the planet any reasonable woman would ever buy shoes (unless a Milanese cobbler comes to the reasonable woman’s home once or twice a year to fit her for her bespoke shoes).

You can see how success is like a train ride, moving consistently and inexorably toward Crazy Town. This phenomenon is acting all the time everywhere there’s success, but it’s often invisible, since the successful person rarely chooses an explanation as visible as shoes or a superstitious twitch—but rather chooses the most pernicious lie, their own competence. Thus, with each success, they become more and more convinced that some quality within them—intelligence, persistence, talent, judgment, charm—is the consistent force nudging them up the ladder. Since they’ve found their explanation within themselves, they believe they deserve any recognition that comes with success. Thus you have arrogance. You have billionaires believing they’re entitled to whatever they have and whatever they don’t have but want, pegging the value of their souls at a few million times that of the average person because of the wealth they’ve accumulated through a series of successful decisions. Thus we have executives with gold wastebaskets in their offices. We have tycoons throwing parties where champagne pours out of ice statue penises. And they’re completely sure they deserve it. That is the dispositive symptom of their insanity.

Have we succeeded in convincing you?

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