Most people don't know about Samuel Pierpont Langley.

And back in the early 20th century,  the pursuit of powered man flight was like the dot com of the day. Everybody was trying it.

And Samuel Pierpont Langley had, what we assume, to be the recipe for success.

I mean, even now, when you ask people, " Why did your product or why did your company fail?"

and people always give you the same permutation of the same three things:

under-capitalized, the wrong people, bad market conditions.

It's always the same three things, so let's explore that.

Samuel Pierpont Langley was given 50,000 dollars by the War Department to figure out this flying machine.

Money was no problem.

He held a seat at Harvard, and worked at the Smithsonian, and was extremely well-connected;

He knew all the big minds of the day.

He hired the best minds money could find, and the market conditions were fantastic.

The New York Times followed him around everywhere, and everyone was rooting for Langley.

And how come we've never heard of Samuel Pierpont Langley?

A few hundred miles away, in Dayton Ohio, Orville and Wilbur Wright,

they had none of what we consider to be the recipe for success.

They had no money; they paid for their dream with the proceeds from their bicycle shop;

Not a single person on the Wright brothers' team had a college education, not even Orville or Wilbur;

And the New York Times followed them around nowhere.

The difference was Orville and Wilbur were driven by a cause, by a purpose, by a belief.

They believed that if they could figure out this flying machine, it'll change the course of the world.

Samuel Pierpont Langley was different.

He wanted to be rich, and he wanted to be famous.

He was in pursuit of the result. He was in pursuit of the riches.

And lo and behold, look at what happened.

The people who believed in the Wright brothers' dream, worked with them with blood and sweat and tears.

The others just worked for the paycheck.

They tell stories of how everytime the Wright brothers went out, they would have to take five sets of parts,

because that's how many times they would crash before they came in for supper.

And eventually, on December 17th, 1903, the Wright brothers took flight.

And no one was there to even experience it.

We found out about it a few days later.

And a further proof that Langley was motivated by the wrong thing:

The day the Wright brothers took flight, he quit.

He could have said " That's an amazing discovery, guys, and I will improve upon your technology." but he didn't.

He wasn't first, he didn't get rich, he didn't get famous, so he quit.

People don't buy what you do; they buy why you do it.

And if you talk about what you believe, you will attract those who believe what you believe.

But why is it important to attract those who believe what you believe?

Something called the law of diffusion of innovation, if you don't know the law, you definitely know the terminology.

The first two and a half percent of our population are our innovators.

The next thirteen and a half percent of our population are our early adopters.

The next thirty-four percent are your early majority, 34% - your late majority, and 16% - your laggards.

The only reason these people buy tuch tone phones, is because you can't buy rotary phones anymore.

We all sit at various places, at various times on this scale.

What the law of diffusion of innovation tells us, is that if you want mass-market success, or mass-market acceptance of an idea,

you can not have it until you achieve this tipping point, between 15 and 18 percent market penetration, and then the system tips.

And I love asking businesses, " What's your conversion on new business?"

And they love to tell you, "Oh, it's about 10 percent," proudly.

Well, you can trip over 10 percent of the customers,

We all have about 10 percent to just "get it".

That's how we describe them, right?

That's like that gut feeling, "Oh, they just get it."

The problem is: How do you find the ones that just get it before you're doing business with them versus the ones who don't get it.

So, it's this here, this little gap, that you have to close, as Jeffrey Moore calls it "Crossing the Chasm"--

because you see, the eralies majority will not try something until someone else has tried it first.

And these guys, the innovators and the early adopters, they're comfortable making those gut decisions.

They're more comfortable making those intuitive decisions that are driven by what they believe about the world,

 and not just what product is available.

These are the people who stood in line for six hours to buy an iPhone when they first came out,

when you could have just walked into the store the next week and bought one off the shelf.

These are the people who spend 40,000 dollars on flat-screen TVs when they first came out, even though the technology were substandard.

And by the way, they didn't do it because the technology was so great; they did it for themselves.

It's because they wanted to be first.

People don't buy what you do; they buy why you do it. And what you do simply proves what you believe.

In fact, people will do the things that prove what they believe.

The reason that person bought the iPhone in the first six hours, stood in lines for six hours, was because of what they believe about the world, and how they wanted everbody see them: they were first.

People don't buy what you do; they buy why you do it.