There is often the myth of the genius entrepreneur who has superhuman abilities, but someone who’s met a lot of successful entrepreneurs says that they’re a lot more normal than one expects.
Lloyd Blankfein, the former CEO of Goldman Sachs who led the firm from 2006 to 2018, appeared on the My First Million podcast with Sam Parr and made a striking observation: that the word “genius” gets thrown around far too liberally in business and tech circles, and that the reality of what drives success is considerably more human — and more humbling — than most people assume.
There are, Blankfein says, very few true geniuses in the world. “I don’t know if I’ve ever met one,” he said. When the interviewer pushed back — asking whether meeting someone like Jeff Bezos felt like encountering a person with plainly superior horsepower — Blankfein gave a nuanced answer. “Or most of the people I meet, I can’t… I’m not saying I can do what they do, but I can see how they can do what they do.” His point was that with the vast majority of highly successful people, the logic of their success is legible. You may not be able to replicate it, but you can follow it. The wiring is visible.
There are, however, rare exceptions. “Very few people have I met in my life where I can’t even see the world through their eyes, or I can’t even see how they do what they do.” When pressed for an example, Blankfein named Elon Musk — a man he knows well, having underwritten a number of his ventures at Goldman Sachs. “Elon Musk may be a guy like that, where I don’t know how,” he said. The interviewer asked if Blankfein had actually met him. “Oh yeah, a lot,” he replied. And even then, meeting Musk in person and working with him closely, Blankfein found his abilities genuinely opaque in a way that almost no one else’s were.
But Blankfein was quick to frame Musk as the extreme case, not the rule — and that was precisely the point. When people use words like “genius” or “superstar” to describe most successful individuals, those words lose their meaning. “There’s a lot of words that get tossed around — superstar — that get diluted,” he said. And what gets lost in that dilution is the real, more instructive story about how success actually works.
That story, for Blankfein, is one of normalcy and insecurity hiding behind impressive titles and outsized results. “The bigger takeaway is that I’ve known people who’ve done very, very well and in high office and high there, and guess what? After they finish speaking, they say, ‘How did I do?’ Like they want affirmation, and they’re insecure, and the kids don’t always like them. People are a lot more normal than you think they are, and people are a lot more insecure and a lot more… And sometimes the most successful people that you know are driven by it.”
The implication is significant: insecurity isn’t a bug in the system, it may well be a feature. The same vulnerability that makes powerful people seek affirmation after a speech might also be the engine that has driven them their entire careers.
This view aligns with a broader pattern that has been visible in the startup and tech world for some time. Sam Altman noted that even Elon Musk — the very person Blankfein singled out as the closest thing he’s seen to a true genius — is driven by deep insecurity. “Probably his whole life is from a position of insecurity,” Altman said. “I don’t think he’s a happy person.” Musk himself has spoken about how difficult and gruelling the entrepreneurial experience has been, once describing company-building as “eating glass and staring into the abyss.” Whatever genius looks like from the outside, it rarely feels comfortable from the inside.
Blankfein’s own story reinforces the point. He grew up in public housing in Brooklyn, clawed his way through the ranks of Goldman Sachs, and has consistently argued that success is less about innate brilliance and more about hard work, curiosity, and the willingness to walk through doors that others overlook. What the very successful have in common, in his telling, isn’t superhuman cognition — it’s the hunger that comes from having something to prove. That hunger, and the insecurity fuelling it, is far more common than the mythology of genius suggests. And for anyone watching from the outside and wondering whether they measure up to the people at the top, it’s reassuring to know that they aren’t all that different.