The popular myth is that Bill Gates is a visionary. He foresaw his MS-DOS operating system as a goldmine, and he tricked IBM, the biggest computer company on earth, into letting him retain the copyright. Microsoft software still dominates the desktop more than 30 years after Gates helped launch the personal computer revolution.
This story fits with the widely-held notion that coming up with a "big idea" is what it takes to accomplish a lot, and become very wealthy.
Though most people I surveyed for my forthcoming book, Business Brilliant, also hold this belief, an important subset do not.