Day 29:Are all founders unusual people
Friday
各位书友，今天我们一起阅读《Zero to One》第十四章THE FOUNDER’S PARADOX。
Are all founders unusual people? Or do we just tend to remember and exaggerate whatever is most unusual about them? More important, which personal traits actually matter in a founder? This chapter is about why it’s more powerful but at the same time more dangerous for a company to be led by a distinctive individual instead of an interchangeable manager.
所有的创始人都特立独行吗？或者我们只记住或夸大了创始人身上那些最独特的地方？更重要的是，创始人身上哪些个人特质是帮助他们成功的？本章将讨论为何由特立独行的人领导公司比普通的经理领导公司更为有力，同时也更为危险。
思考问题
What do you think? Normally we expect opposite traits to be mutually exclusive: a normal person can’t be both rich and poor at the same time, for instance.
你是如何看待：我们通常认为对立的特质互相排斥，例如，一个人不可能既贫穷又富有。
01 THE DIFFERENCE ENGINE
特立独行的个性是驱动公司进步的引擎
Some people are strong, some are weak, some are geniuses, some are dullards—but most people are in the middle. Plot where everyone falls and you’ll see a bell curve:
有些人强壮，有些人虚弱，有些人天赋异禀，有些人愚笨无知，但大多数人处于两个极端之间。画出人们所处的位置，就可以看见一条钟形曲线。
Since so many founders seem to have extreme traits, you might guess that a plot showing only founders’ traits would have fatter tails with more people at either end.
由于众多的创始人看似拥有极端特质，你也许会猜测变现创始人特质的曲线分布图的两个尾端会宽一些，因为两端的人多。
But that doesn’t capture the strangest thing about founders. Normally we expect opposite traits to be mutually exclusive: a normal person can’t be both rich and poor at the same time, for instance. But it happens all the time to founders: start-up CEOs can be cash poor but millionaires on paper. They may oscillate between sullen jerkiness and appealing charisma. Almost all successful entrepreneurs are simultaneously insiders and outsiders. And when they do succeed, they attract both fame and infamy. When you plot them out, founders’ traits appear to follow an inverse normal distribution:
但那并未捕捉到创始人最为奇特的一面。通常，我们认为对立的特质互相排斥，例如，一个人不可能既贫穷又富有。但这常常发生在创始人身上：初创公司的首席执行官名义上是百万富翁，手里却没有现金。他们有时愚不可及，有时魅力四射。几乎所有成功的企业家既是局内人又是局外人。当他们成功时，外界对他们褒贬不一。如果把创始人的特质以曲线展示，出现的是与常态分布完全相反的倒钟形曲线。
Where does this strange and extreme combination of traits come from? They could be present from birth (nature) or acquired from an individual’s environment (nurture). But perhaps founders aren’t really as extreme as they appear. Might they strategically exaggerate certain qualities? Or is it possible that everyone else exaggerates them? All of these effects can be present at the same time, and whenever present they powerfully reinforce each other. The cycle usually starts with unusual people and ends with them acting and seeming even more unusual:
这种奇特极端的特质组合从何而来呢？可能天生具有（天然的），或从环境中获得（后天的）。但是，创始人事实上并不像他们所表现得那么极端。或许他们巧妙地夸大了某种特质？或者可能是其他人夸大了他们的特质？这些影响可能会同时显现，而且不管何时显现，相互之间都会彼此强化。循环开始于不同寻常之人，最终这些人会表现得更加非比寻常。
The most famous people in the world are founders, too: instead of a company, every celebrity founds and cultivates a personal brand. Lady Gaga, for example, became one of the most influential living people. But is she even a real person? Her real name isn’t a secret, but almost no one knows or cares what it is. She wears costumes so bizarre as to put any other wearer at risk of an involuntary psychiatric hold. Gaga would have you believe that she was “born this way”—the title of both her second album and its lead track. But no one is born looking like a zombie with horns coming out of her head: Gaga must therefore be a self-manufactured myth. Then again, what kind of person would do this to herself? Certainly nobody normal. So perhaps Gaga really was born that way.
世界上最为著名的人许多都是创业者——他们不见得创立企业，但是每个名人都在建立培养自己的个人品牌。比如Lady Gaga是最具影响力的当代人物之一。但这真的是她吗？她的本名不是秘密，但是几乎无人知晓或者说没人在意。她着装奇特，若是其他人穿上同样的服装会被当成精神病患者。Lady Gaga使人相信她“生来如此”——与她的第二张专辑和最佳单曲同名。但没人天生长得像个僵尸，头上还有两个犄角，因此，Lady Gaga必定是个自我创造的神话。那么哪类人会这样装扮自己呢？当然是不同寻常的人。因而Lady Gaga或许确实生来如此吧。
02 WHERE KINGS COME FROM
王者从何而来
Extreme founder figures are not new in human affairs. Classical mythology is full of them. Oedipus is the paradigmatic insider/outsider: he was abandoned as an infant and ended up in a foreign land, but he was a brilliant king and smart enough to solve the riddle of the Sphinx.
极端的创业者形象在人类世界里早就出现了。经典神话里这样的人物比比皆是。俄狄浦斯就是典型的既为局内人又为局外人的例子：他是弃婴，颠沛流离到陌生国土，但同时他又是一位英明的国王，聪明机智，破解了斯芬克斯之谜。
Romulus and Remus were born of royal blood and abandoned as orphans. When they discovered their pedigree, they decided to found a city. But they couldn’t agree on where to put it. When Remus crossed the boundary that Romulus had decided was the edge of Rome, Romulus killed him, declaring: “So perish every one that shall hereafter leap over my wall.” Law-maker and lawbreaker, criminal outlaw and king who defined Rome, Romulus was a self-contradictory insider/outsider.
罗穆卢斯和雷穆斯出身高贵，却被遗弃。他们发现自己的皇族血统后，决定建一座城池，但对选址问题他们意见不一。雷穆斯跨越罗穆卢斯确定的罗马城边界时，罗穆卢斯杀了雷穆斯，以儆效尤，“这样以后就没人敢越城池半步了”。罗穆卢斯既是立法者，又是犯法者；即是违法的罪犯，又是缔造罗马的国王。罗穆卢斯既是局内人，又是局外人，在这一点上他是自相矛盾的。
Normal people aren’t like Oedipus or Romulus. Whatever those individuals were actually like in life, the mythologized versions of them remember only the extremes. But why was it so important for archaic cultures to remember extraordinary people?
普通人不会像俄狄浦斯，也不会像罗穆卢斯。但不论这些人在真是生活中是什么样，神话版本只记住了他们的极端特质。为什么在古代文化中，铭记非比寻常之人如此重要呢？
The famous and infamous have always served as vessels for public sentiment: they’re praised amid prosperity and blamed for misfortune. Primitive societies faced one fundamental problem above all: they would be torn apart by conflict if they didn’t have a way to stop it. So whenever plagues, disasters, or violent rivalries threatened the peace, it was beneficial for the society to place the entire blame on a single person, someone everybody could agree on: a scapegoat.
声名远扬之人与臭名昭著之人组成了大众情感宣泄的通道：他们因成功而被赞美，因灾难而被指责。远古社会面临一个最重要的基本问题：如果无法解决冲突，社会就会四分五裂。因此，当瘟疫、灾难、暴力斗争威胁和平宁静时，将骂名转嫁到所有人一致赞同的替罪羊身上对社会是有益的。
Who makes an effective scapegoat? Like founders, scapegoats are extreme and contradictory figures. On the one hand, a scapegoat is necessarily weak; he is powerless to stop his own victimization. On the other hand, as the one who can defuse conflict by taking the blame, he is the most powerful member of the community.
谁是合适的替罪羊？和创业者一样，替罪羊也是极端而又矛盾的人。一方面，替罪羊必须弱小，无力保护自己不受伤害；另一方面，作为能承受指责平息冲突的人，他又是社会中最强大的一员。
Before execution, scapegoats were often worshipped like deities. The Aztecs considered their victims to be earthly forms of the gods to whom they were sacrificed. You would be dressed in fine clothes and feast royally until your brief reign ended and they cut your heart out. These are the roots of monarchy: every king was a living god, and every god a murdered king. Perhaps every modern king is just a scapegoat who has managed to delay his own execution.
行刑前，人们像供奉神一样供奉替罪羊。阿兹特克人认为这些受害者是神仙下凡，他们要为之献祭。被杀害前的短暂时间里，替罪羊享受着锦衣玉食。这是君主制的根本：国王是人世间的神，每个神都是被谋害的国王。或许现代国王只是能够给自己延缓刑期的替罪羊。
拓展
OF THE SIX PEOPLE who started PayPal, four had built bombs in high school. Five were just 23 years old—or younger. Four of us had been born outside the United States. Three had escaped here from communist countries: Yu Pan from China, Luke Nosek from Poland, and Max Levchin from Soviet Ukraine. Building bombs was not what kids normally did in those countries at that time.
PayPal的六个创始人中有四个在高中时期造过炸弹。当时，其中的五个人仅有23岁，甚至更年轻。四个人不是在美国本土出生的，其中三人来自社会主义国家或前社会主义国家：潘宇来自中国，卢克·诺塞克来自波兰，马克斯·列夫琴来自乌克兰。当时在那些国家制造炸弹可不是小孩子该做的。
The six of us could have been seen as eccentric. My first-ever conversation with Luke was about how he’d just signed up for cryonics, to be frozen upon death in hope of medical resurrection. Max claimed to be without a country and proud of it: his family was put into diplomatic limbo when the USSR collapsed while they were escaping to the U.S. Russ Simmons had escaped from a trailer park to the top math and science magnet school in Illinois. Only Ken Howery fit the stereotype of a privileged American childhood: he was PayPal’s sole Eagle Scout. But Kenny’s peers thought he was crazy to join the rest of us and make just one-third of the salary he had been offered by a big bank. So even he wasn’t entirely normal.
我们六个被视为怪胎。我和卢克的第一次交谈是关于他为什么要签约参加人体冷冻的实验，即人死后将尸体冷冻，并期待未来医学进步可以起死回生。马克斯自称无国籍，而且以此为傲，苏联解体，他们全家来到美国，其家人处于外交尴尬境地。拉斯·西蒙斯原以停在公园的拖车为家，后来进入伊利诺伊州的理工学校。只有肯·霍威利有着美国孩子的优渥童年：他是PayPal唯一的鹰级童子军。但是肯的同学认为他加入我们是疯狂的，况且薪水只有聘用他的那家大银行的1/3。所以他也并不完全正常。
本月共读《Zero to One》英文版
点击公众号菜单栏“共读社群”立即加入有书英语共读
☞ 领读达人：刘亚南，英语共读负责人，85后
☞ 主播：熊叔，别人说我英语讲得像母语，是个美国人，我笑~谁说不出国门就学不会地道美语?别人说我拥有TESOL国际教师资格证~，我笑~自己只是个教书的逗比小光头罢了。
☞ 设计：刘莹
☞ 编校：陈珺洁
—共读书籍简介—
《Zero to One》涉及哲学、历史、经济等多元领域，解读世界运行的脉络，分享商业与未来发展的落实。该书将帮助我们思考从0到1的秘密，在意想不到之处发现价值与机会。
值得关注的是，这本《Zero to One》绝非学术讨论或者思想大师们的论战，自问世起，它的影响就迅速超越了投资圈，在美国亚马逊图书畅销总榜上跻身前列。