On a beautiful day exactly 75 years ago, Howard Hughes smiled for the camera, hung up the in-cockpit 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 colossal 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 the best illustration of a massive, drawn-out, and ultimately useless project.
The point being, don’t be like this. Don’t roll “the sweat of your life”, your name and reputation, and possibly your country of residence into one drawn-out project which won’t get a chance for even a test flight until years from now.
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. I’ve heard Dan Kennedy say it often. Joe Vitale has got a book by that title. But I bet it goes back a century or more, in some slightly different phrasing, with the same basic idea. Maybe you can enlighten me.
Anyways, let me take my own advice, and wrap up this post:
My email newsletter is now available for you to join. In case you’d like a chance to get copywriting, marketing, and persuasion ideas into your head — so you can start getting that money that speed promises — here’s where to go.