He had a hippy indy prog record company that got lucky with an unexpected hit record. The rest is investing, self-marketing, and networking, hard work (a la Jobs or Carmcak or Gates etc.) was seldom required.
But something tells me probably does something besides sit around and sip Daiquiris (or read HN) all day. "Networking", if you want to call it that. Or "investing" in ways that don't actually lose money takes actual work, you know.
That is: "work", nonetheless.
If we contrast it with sitting at home or at some beach drinking Daiquiris (which is still a huge part of his time), then yes.
If we contrast it with what is actually work, stressful hard work, then no.
Then we'd be shifting the goalposts.
The point is that, while it's not like he toils away in a coal mine -- and we know he ain't no brain surgeon -- whatever it is that Branson actually does, by any common sense definition it qualifies as "work".
Hmm. I'm not going to say you're overgeneralizing, because you probably do have observational data behind your summation above. But even if it applies to the majority of "escapists" -- there's a significant percentage out there who not only do have plan; they make up for a good chunk of the truly brilliant and creative people who do anything truly interesting, at all.
The closest I can get to these people's underlying thought mechanics is that they just don't want to subordinate any time at all to anyone else. They want complete 100% control over all of their time. Which would be really nice, but c'mon now.
OK, now we're getting somewhere. But is it really that outlandish? There's this category of people known as "small business owners", you know - who basically fit that description. In fact, if you look around, there's quite a lot of them out there. In addition to, you know, genuinely creative people -- successful film makers, musicians and the like.
Are you saying they all should've just thrown in the towel, gotten a teaching job or something because... there's just no "there" in these pursuits they were almost blindingly attracted to?
C'mon now.