This article on the founder of IKEA reveals some interesting tidbits…
- one can move to Switzerland and negotiate a fixed income tax rate related to the value of one’s house
- Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of IKEA, is richer than Bill Gates now, partly because of the slide of the dollar and partly because Billg has been giving money away; the 77-year-old guy is worth roughly $50 billion
- like our local hero George W., Mr. Kamprad has had trouble with alcoholism (perhaps we need to encourage young people to drink more?)
Alcohol is supposed to be so bad for brain cells, productivity, etc. How can we explain the fact that so many hypersuccessful people are or were alcoholics?
During the early days of the American Civil War, Abraham Lincoln was warned that Ulysses S. Grant was a drunkard. Lincoln allegedly replied, “Find out what kind of whiskey Grant drinks and send a barrel of it to all my other generals.”
The most successful person I know is a raging alcoholic. Unfortunately, so were the bums near my old apartment who could be seen buying a single can of beer with their last dollar at the hilariously misnamed “Winner’s Corner” convenience store.
Some people just have that drive, and a few million dead brain cells aren’t going to stop them.
I think someone is mistaking cause and effect. It’s the success that drives one to drink, not the other way around.
I think it’s just that people with addictive personalities have the drive to succede (once they focus that addictive energy on something more constructive).
The assumption here is that you need to have intact brain cells to be hypersuccessful. May be you need them for cracking complex mathematical problems. But success (if defined as making lots of money) requires some other attributes…
Let’s see, we have a multibillionaire entrepeneur who happened to later become an alcoholic, and we have a drunkard failed CEO who was installed into political office by family friends, and from this we are going to make a conclusion about the effects of alcoholism on success.
Fabio, haven’t you learned yet? If you can’t extrapolate from a few examples to the broadest of claims, you have no part to play here. Please take your logical fallacy finding smarts elsewhere!
Check out any bio on Southwest founder Herb Keller, quite the drinker.
The most financially successful businessmen tend to devote all their time and energy to their business, often to the exclusion of loved ones, those who are supposed to take priority in their lives. They exhibit a sort of obsessive behavior that is not inconsistent with the aforementioned “workaholism,” and as you point out not neccesarily incompatible.
By the way, if you redefine success so that money is not the sole factor, I think you’ll find alcoholics do not make out nearly so well.
The focus of thought should be the definition of success rather than its relationship with alcoholism. By the way, once, one of my had beautifully put it: “The biggest achievement in life is to define one’s own parameters of success”.
I think Bulgakov once said “If a man doesn’t drink he is either ill or secretly hates people surrounding him”. Sick people and anti-socials can hardly succeed in life. Therefore drinking is a requirement (but may be not the only one) for success.
” many hypersuccessful people are or were alcoholics?”
The only persons, hypersuccessful or not, who “were” alcoholics are dead. Live alcoholics may not be active but still remain alcoholic until the end.
Because success is proportional to risk, and risk-taking behavior is related to alcoholism