Founders · 2 min instead of 1 h 11 m · Oct 14, 2026
The Wright brothers won by solving control, not lift
Ben Wilson
Host, How To Take Over The World
David SenraHost · Host, Founders
Has read an entrepreneur's biography every week for Founders since 2016.
About this segment
While dozens of rivals chased propulsion and lift, Wilbur Wright saw from watching birds that staying in the air was the hard problem. They spent years on gliders, then added an engine.
From “Lessons from History’s Greatest Leaders & Conquerors | Ben Wilson”, Oct 14, 2026. Watch the full episode
“The hard problem to solve is control, is once you're in the air, can you stay in the air?”
Takeaways
- Rivals all attacked the obvious problem of getting airborne
- Watching birds showed that constant micro adjustments were the real challenge
- Solve the hard problem first and the easy one becomes trivial
In this episode
Full episode- 13:11Great decisions come from knowing what to give up3:17
18:04The Wright brothers won by solving control, not lift1:56
- 22:26Great leaders share three traits: vision, communication, focus2:14Up next
Transcript
Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.
- 18:06
So that's where I have this original realization is reading about the Wright brothers. Um, because at the time that they're trying to solve flight, there are dozens of other people trying to solve flight. It's popular at the time. It's, uh, it's like the AI of the moment, right? A lot of different people are working on it. Everyone realizes it's the future. So why do they succeed? Well, because everyone is doing the obvious thing. And what's the obvious thing? You're trying to get something in the air. So you're focusing on propulsion and lift of like, you're focused on trying to make something fly. And Wilbur Wright realizes that's actually an easy problem to solve. The hard problem to solve is control, is once you're in the air, can you stay in the air? Because he actually realizes this from looking at birds. He's looking at birds and he realizes, wow, if you look at them,
- 18:53
they're making micro adjustments, you know, multiple micro adjustments every second. They're shifting their wings. They're moving up and down. They're moving all the time. And so he realizes we actually don't need to focus on lift or on getting into the air at all. We need to focus on once we're in the air, how do we stay in the air? And so he goes to North Carolina, he builds these gliders. And for multiple years, they are just working on control on once we're in the air, how do we stay? And a glider really, it's like a big kite.
- 19:22
is the way you think about it. Yeah, exactly. And they go to North Carolina because there's wind coming off the ocean all the time. And so they just have someone on the ground holding rope while he's in this giant kite figuring out, all right, how do I steer? How do we change this thing to make it so that we can stay in the air? At the end, he basically slaps an engine on it and it's done. He was right.
- 19:43
Once you figure out how to stay in the air, the problem of lift was trivial. And so it was that realization that actually lift is not an important problem to solve, that allows them to focus on the more important thing. So why do you think breaking trade-offs is such a profound idea? Because especially today,