Ben Wilson’s cancer diagnosis brought back an old podcast, an old version of myself, and an uncomfortable thought about ambition and mortality.
Ben Wilson, the creator of How to Take Over the World, has cancer.
I learned about it through My First Million. Normally, news like this about someone I don’t personally know would not affect me much.
But this one did.
I don’t know Ben Wilson. I have never met him. But I have listened to him for hours.
Ben was once a producer of My First Million. He also created How to Take Over the World, a podcast studying some of the most ambitious and consequential people in history.
The name itself was enough to attract me.
How to Take Over the World.
I am silent, but I am ambitious.
If someone promises to teach me how to take over the world, I am going to listen.
An old companion
I listened to the podcast extensively around 2022–23, when I had returned from a long leave and joined the Corporate Accounts Group at SBI.
I was trying to find my footing.
On one side, I was bubbling with ambition. On the other, I was struggling to establish my competence and find my place in a completely new environment.
I know myself a little better now.
Looking at my own history, I have noticed that it generally takes me around four months to stabilise in a new role. CAG was similar.
During that period, podcasts became companions.
My First Million was an obvious choice. And through it, I discovered How to Take Over the World.
I loved the idea.
Study Napoleon. Study Steve Jobs. Study the Rothschilds. Study people who built extraordinary things. Look at how they thought, worked and operated.
It was exactly the kind of material I wanted.
Eventually, though, the podcast disappeared from my regular listening.
At the time, I wanted content constantly. How to Take Over the World required enormous research and episodes arrived more slowly than I wanted.
I became impatient.
Other things filled my feed.
And I moved on.
Then Ben returned
A few weeks ago, I heard Ben mentioned again on My First Million.
He had cancer.
Suddenly, memories of that period of my life came flooding back.
And for some reason, I felt terrible.
There was also an uncomfortable irony that I could not stop thinking about.
Here was a man who had built a podcast called How to Take Over the World. He had dedicated years to studying ambition, power, greatness, strategy and extraordinary lives.
And now he was confronting something much more fundamental.
Mortality.
Of course, the title was never meant literally. But the contrast hit me nevertheless.
We spend enormous amounts of our lives trying to control things.
Career.
Money.
Status.
Our bodies.
Our future.
Our place in the world.
And then something can arrive that reminds us how limited that control really is.
A strange feeling
What disturbed me even more was my own history.
I have spent years doing things that I knew were bad for my health. I have smoked. I have drunk. I have neglected my body at different points.
And yet here I am.
Working out.
Trying to become healthier.
Planning decades into the future.
Thinking about building wealth.
Thinking about what I want to create.
Thinking about the person I want to become.
There is no fairness equation here. There is no simple explanation for why illness reaches one person and not another.
That may be exactly what unsettles me.
I am not particularly afraid of death.
What I felt was loss.
The possibility that this voice I had listened to during an important period of my life might someday become silent.
So I started going backwards through the podcast.
Old episodes that I had once ignored because I was impatient.
And while listening, another strange thought appeared:
How many are left?
Not how many episodes.
How much time?
Taking over my little part of the world
Perhaps there is something useful hidden inside this discomfort.
I still love ambition.
I still want to build things.
I still want wealth. I still want health. I still want to become capable of doing things that currently seem beyond me.
Ben’s diagnosis doesn’t make me want those things less.
If anything, it makes me question the time I waste while wanting them.
There is something almost absurd about waiting endlessly for the perfect time to live the life we already know we want.
Maybe taking over the world was never really about controlling the world.
Maybe it is about taking responsibility for the small part of it that actually belongs to us.
Our work.
Our health.
Our relationships.
Our attention.
Our time.
I hope his treatment works.
For now, I have returned to his backlog.
But I am listening differently.
Years ago, I listened because I wanted to learn how extraordinary people conquered the world.
Today, I am listening with the uncomfortable awareness that eventually, for every one of us, the world wins.
Until then, there is work to do.