Something odd and interesting happens to a lot of people who become very successful. Once the initial thrill wears off, they come to perceive their success as 'a catastrophe' and even as 'a kind of death,' as the playwright Tennessee Williams famously put it, after The Glass Menagerie became a smash hit in 1944. Athletes, scientists, generals, entrepreneurs, executives, performers, and politicians have expressed this paradox in different words. Paul Samuelson, an economist who won the Nobel Prize in 1970, later concluded that, 'After winners receive the award and adulation, they wither away into vainglorious sterility.'

Understanding this bizarre inversion, or perversion, of success is one of the things that I set out to do in my book, Hannibal and Me: What History's Greatest Military Strategist Can Teach Us About Success and Failure, inspired by a famous line in a[...]

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