On a beautiful day exactly 72 years ago, Howard Hughes put down the telephone and took hold of the controls.
He was piloting the largest flying boat ever built.
I’m talking about the Hughes H-4 Hercules, aka the Spruce Goose.
In spite of the nickname, The Goose was mostly birch. That didn’t stop it from being enormously expensive for the time, and with good reason. As Hughes put it:
“It is over five stories tall with a wingspan longer than a football field. That’s more than a city block. Now, I put the sweat of my life into this thing. I have my reputation all rolled up in it and I have stated several times that if it’s a failure, I’ll probably leave this country and never come back. And I mean it.”
Well, I guess Hughes didn’t mean it all that seriously. Because he didn’t leave the country, even though, by all practical measures, the Goose turned out to be a failure.
After all, once Hughes lifted The Goose above the sparkling waters off Long Beach, CA, it flew for less than a minute, for less than a mile.
That was its one and only flight.
And even this one lousy flight came well after the end of World War II, even though The Goose was designed to be a war transport plane, and even though the whole point of building The Goose out of spruce (or birch) was the wartime restriction on materials such as aluminum.
So yeah, the Spruce Goose remains a great illustration of a massive, optimistic, and very impractical and useless project.
The point being, don’t be like Howard Hughes.
Because money don’t love Spruce Goose.
Money loves speed.
(I’ve tried to track down who coined that saying, but I don’t have a definitive answer. The farthest back I’ve been able to go is to direct marketer Joe Vitale, who is mentioned in Mark Ford’s Ready Fire Aim as promoting the idea that fast is more profitable than perfect.)
Of course, I’m not saying to cut corners and be sloppy in your work.
But if you put the sweat of your life into one project, and roll up your whole reputation into one thing, odds are you’ll wind up with a multi-million dollar goose on your hands. And the bitch won’t even fly.