“True literature can exist only where it is created, not by diligent and trustworthy functionaries, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics.”-Yevgeny Zamyatin, “I Am Afraid”
It seems that to build something unique and lasting in this world, you need to be a bit mad. Such is the conclusion I came to upon reading this article about Scarecrow Video founder George Latsios.
If Latsios had used his earnings to pay his taxes and been more fiscally conservative in his approach to buying movies (he’d travel to Japan just to buy rare laserdiscs), Scarecrow would’ve looked more like Blockbuster — and been the poorer for it. Financial ruin is never a good business strategy, but Latsios’s unwillingness to be practical is what allowed for the rarity of Scarecrow’s collection. As his ex-wife Rebecca Soriano put it, “He wasn’t afraid to do whatever he felt, and that’s the reason Scarecrow exists. If he didn’t have the nerve to do it, Scarecrow wouldn’t be there.”
One wishes he’d had someone else run the financial side of things (people with vision tend to be awful at the practicalities of life), but despite bad financial decisions in the past and an economy that no longer supports video rental stores in the present, Scarecrow remains, while other stores have closed. And it wouldn’t have existed at all without George Latsios.
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” -George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman
Dreams of Literary Grandeur 
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