As I pondered my notes on these two men—both so profoundly innovative and both sharing some peculiar personal traits that broke with social norms—I suddenly understood that we could gain insight into what makes some people serial breakthrough innovators by studying a smaller sample of exceptional innovators very deeply, using what is known as a multiple case study approach. A multiple case study process begins with writing a description or story of the case (like a biographer writes about her subject) but extends well beyond that as the researcher compares the cases, working iteratively through every possible pair, attempting to recognize commonalities and differences, and capturing the categories and patterns that emerge. Because this is a study of people who are rare outliers of innovative productivity and impact, the control group (what the cases are compared to) is the rest of us.4 That is, we are looking for characteristics that the innovators have in common that stand out for being unusual, such as traits they exhibit to a much greater degree than we would expect for a person drawn at random. Any dimension that figures prominently in one or a few cases is scrutinized closely in the other cases. Humans are prone to overgeneralizing from small samples, so one of the most important tasks is to try to strip away spurious commonalities. For example, Thomas Edison and Marie Curie were the youngest children of their families, and Benjamin Franklin was the youngest son (though not the youngest child) in a family of sixteen children. People have speculated about the effect of birth order on personality and behavior since at least the early 1900s. At that time, Austrian psychiatrist Alfred Adler proposed that firstborns would be more prone to neuroticism and substance abuse because of the excessive responsibility of looking after the younger children, and youngest children would be prone to having poor social empathy as a consequence of being overindulged. It would be easy to speculate that breakthrough innovators might be more likely to be youngest children because, as we shall see, not fitting in socially is a recurring theme among such innovators. But birth order does not survive closer scrutiny: Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, and Elon Musk were the oldest children in their families, and Nikola Tesla and Dean Kamen were middle children. Furthermore, of the innovators studied here, the one that least exhibits poor social empathy is Benjamin Franklin. It turns out that most empirical work on birth order has found zero effect on personality or behavior, despite the persistence of the myth!
It quickly became clear that it would be important to focus on people who had innovated repeatedly so that we could go beyond “right time, right place” explanations. They also had to be world renowned as innovators so that there would be no doubt about their accomplishments. And their innovations had to be important—they had to leave an indelible imprint on the world because that is the capability that we really want to understand. For practical purposes, they also had to be people who had been extensively written about because only then would we know something about their childhoods, their educations, their hobbies, their personalities, their talents, their motives, their experiences, and more. Once we understood them deeply as people, we could compare and contrast their characteristics and backgrounds, and integrate this with what we know from the science of creativity and innovation. I hoped such an integration would help illuminate what really matters. In the end, it did that and more. It exposed both the exhilaration that the innovators experienced and the great personal costs that they bore while pursuing something that they believed was incredibly important. It revealed the opportunities and constraints that have ensured that the lists of famous innovators have historically been dominated by men from developed economies. And, perhaps most importantly, it revealed that even though some factors have made these innovators unique and inimitable, there are also ways in which we can increase the breakthrough innovation potential in us all.
How the Innovators Were Chosen and Studied
TO CHOOSE A LIST of people that I could confidently identify as profoundly important serial breakthrough innovators, I first scoured dozens of lists of the most famous innovators, looking for people who topped multiple lists and whose contributions would be indisputable. It quickly became clear that there was much more consensus about contributions to technology and science than, for example, contributions to art and music. The appreciation of art and music is a subjective experience, and people vary enormously in how they will rank an innovation in these fields. Furthermore, once artists or musicians have earned acclaim, their subsequent work receives more attention. This can lead to a self-reinforcing advantage in being considered “important.” Technology and science innovations can also have subjective components and self-reinforcing advantages, but they usually have performance dimensions that are objectively measurable, leading to greater agreement about what is important. For example, when Marie Curie discovered the most powerful radioactive substance known at that time (radium), its importance was indisputable. When Albert Einstein first proposed his General Theory of Relativity, its value was at first subject to the interpretation of his peers. However, in 1919, when Sir Arthur Addington verified that Einstein’s predictions were correct during a complete solar eclipse, the theory’s merit was no longer subjective. When Elon Musk demonstrated that a rocket could, in fact, be landed and reused—and at a much lower price than the space industry had dreamed—the value of this innovation could not be denied, even by the space industry stalwarts whose competitive positions it threatened. A small group of technology and science innovators show up near the top of every famous innovators list; the same is not true for innovation in the arts. Thus, to sidestep the sometimes contentious issue of the definition of an important innovation, I decided to limit my focus to technological or scientific innovators and let public lists identify the candidates.
Second, I limited the set to individuals who were widely associated with multiple innovations. The vast majority of people on famous innovator lists are associated with only a single important invention—for example, Percy LeBaron Spencer’s microwave oven, Leopold Godowsky Jr.’s Kodachrome color film, or Hedy Lamarr’s frequency-hopping spread spectrum technology for torpedoes. When an individual is associated with only a single major invention, it is much harder to know whether the invention was caused by the inventor’s personal characteristics or by simply being at the right place at the right time. To really know that we are gaining insight into what makes someone an exceptional innovator, it is important to identify serial breakthrough innovators who innovate for most of their lives. These are the rare people whose life’s purpose is based on making one breakthrough after another.
And, third, developing case studies of the innovators that are as complete and unbiased as possible requires both multiple published biographies of the individual and extensive first-person narratives such as autobiographies, interviews, and videos. In practice, this criteria tended to eliminate many innovators that I would have liked to study who either emerged too recently (for example, Larry Page) or lived too long ago (for example, Leonardo da Vinci). Finally, from the individuals prominent on the remaining list, I attempted to choose people from different areas of industry or science (e.g., medicine, aerospace, electricity, information technology) and from different time periods in order to avoid oversampling from particular “blooms” of innovation associated with a technological shock. Choosing individuals from different periods and fields helps to separate individual factors from contextual factors and improves the opportunity to triangulate about breakthrough innovation more generally. The final set of innovators that I chose to study and focus on in this book includes Marie Curie, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, Steve Jobs, Dean Kamen, Elon Musk, and Nikola Tesla, although I occasionally include examples about other innovators (such as Grace Hopper and Sergey Brin) to illustrate particular concepts.
Closely studying these breakthrough innovators reveals some important commonalities that help give us insight into what made them able—and made them driven—to change the world in such dramatic ways. Although they were extremely intelligent, that is not enough
to make someone a serial breakthrough innovator. Other factors played key roles. The innovators displayed some unusual characteristics—quirks—that had important implications for both the ideas they generated and the intensity with which they pursued them. For example, nearly every innovator I studied exhibited very high levels of social detachment. Marie Curie’s unconventionality and chronic depression led her to seek what she referred to as an “anti-natural” life,5 largely isolated from the social world and often isolated even from her children. Marie Curie was aware of her self-imposed isolation and knew that the way she had lived her life was not for everyone. Albert Einstein was similarly aware of his own detachment and isolation, recognizing both its benefits to his independence and originality and its costs to his psychic comfort. Thomas Edison’s deafness made him extremely uncomfortable in social settings, and his near-maniacal work habits meant that he spent most of his life in his laboratory, even sleeping on a table many nights. And Elon Musk, though sometimes referred to as a “playboy” in his adulthood, describes himself as bookish, nerdy, and devoid of friends as a child. In fact, he was so introspective that his family at one point considered the possibility that he was deaf. Separateness helped these innovators become original thinkers. Their isolation meant that they were less exposed to dominant ideas and norms, and their sense of not belonging meant that even when exposed to dominant ideas and norms, they were often less inclined to adopt them.
All of the innovators also exhibited extreme faith in their ability to overcome obstacles (what psychologists would call “self-efficacy”) from an early age. Consider Elon Musk’s decision (at the age of six) to walk ten miles across the city of Pretoria, South Africa, to get to a cousin’s birthday party or his later decision to personally resurrect the space program when he discovered that NASA had no plans to go to Mars. Musk is sometimes referred to as a “walking moonshot”6 because of his willingness to take on seemingly impossible goals. Many of the breakthrough innovators took on such goals because they had such high faith in their own ability to overcome obstacles that they did not buy in to the rules that other people accept as given. This is why some people referred to Steve Jobs as having a “reality distortion field” and why Dean Kamen could dismiss the four laws of thermodynamics as “man’s laws” rather than universal principles. Nikola Tesla similarly challenged what was possible and made statements about what he would achieve in the world that were so grand that people often dismissed him as having delusions of grandeur—until, of course, he proved he was right!
All of the innovators also pursued their projects with remarkable zeal, often working extremely long hours and at great personal cost. Most were driven by idealism, a superordinate goal that was more important than their own comfort, reputation, or families. Nikola Tesla wanted to free mankind from labor through unlimited free energy and to achieve international peace through global communication. Elon Musk wants to solve the world’s energy problems and colonize Mars. Benjamin Franklin was seeking greater social harmony and productivity through the ideals of egalitarianism, tolerance, industriousness, temperance, and charity. Marie Curie had been inspired by Polish positivism’s argument that Poland, which was under Tsarist Russian rule, could be preserved only through the pursuit of education and technological advance by all Poles—including women. Idealism is a very powerful intrinsic motivator that can induce individuals to exert exceptional effort toward a problem. In fact, it may occupy their energy and time to such a level that it causes them to disregard motives that other individuals might find more important, such as the desire for social interaction or leisure. This might partially explain why so many breakthrough innovators have been criticized for abandoning or neglecting their families (e.g., Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison, Steve Jobs, Marie Curie). Idealism helps focus innovators by making their long-term purpose very clear, helping them to make choices among the competing demands of their attention. Having lofty superordinate goals, such as Tesla’s desire to achieve global wireless transmission of energy and to free mankind from physical toil, or Musk’s ambition to colonize Mars, gave these innovators a drive and single-mindedness that helped them avoid getting caught up in other interesting problems. They often led their lives as if they had blinders on to keep their attention locked on target. It also made them resilient to failure or criticism because they believed that their goals were important and intrinsically honorable and valuable. For example, Franklin once had to endure a brutal attack by prosecutor Alexander Wedderburn in England’s Privy Council while facing a jeering crowd of England’s elite. However, Franklin remained stoic and silent during the proceedings and never shrank from public life because his belief that he was pursuing his duty to serve God and mankind gave him a moral high ground that helped make him resilient to such attacks.
Idealism was not the only force that drove the innovators. Most of them also worked so hard and so tirelessly because they found work extremely rewarding. Some had an extremely high need for achievement (a personality trait associated with a strong and consistent concern with setting and meeting high standards, and accomplishing difficult tasks), so they took great pleasure in amassing accomplishments. Many also appeared to experience the pleasure of “flow” from working incredibly hard (i.e., work was autotelic—rewarding for its own sake). For example, Edison was competitive by nature and enormously energetic. He enjoyed the process of achieving things, and the physical and mental activity of work gave him pleasure. Many of Edison’s projects turned out to be unprofitable, and he was known to berate the patent system’s inability to defend inventors from “pirates.” However, in general he expressed little remorse or discouragement about disappointing outcomes. The work itself was his primary joy. “I never intend to retire,” he stated. “Work made the earth a paradise for me.”7
In sum, there are very strong commonalities among exceptional breakthrough innovators that make these people similar to one another and also make them atypical, or quirky. Studying these people and integrating what we learn about them with existing research on creativity and innovation helps us understand the mechanisms by which the characteristics led these innovators to create one profound innovation after another. This distinction between the characteristics and the mechanisms by which the characteristics led to innovation is important because even though serial breakthrough innovators are rare and in many ways inimitable, we can still harness some of these mechanisms to discover and unleash innovative potential in ourselves and others. For example, understanding the innovator’s sense of separateness points out the importance of giving people time alone to pursue their own interests and form their own ideas. It highlights how dangerous norms of consensus are to innovation and reveals the advantages of helping people to embrace their weird sides. People also find it illuminating—and often a relief—to see just how many innovators did not do well in school precisely because of their creativity or their tendency to challenge rules. A surprisingly large portion of the breakthrough innovators have been autodidacts—self-taught people—and excelled much more outside the classroom than inside. Although many people will have heard anecdotally that some innovators did not do well in school, this book shows exactly why innovators might not flourish in school and how they were successful anyway.
I HAVE ORGANIZED QUIRKY around the three main themes of creativity and originality, effort and persistence, and situational advantage. Almost all breakthrough innovation starts with an unusual idea or with beliefs that break with conventional wisdom. Thus, my focus in the first few chapters is on the factors that helped to inspire the innovators to be unconventional, to be creative, and to generate original ideas. We will see here how the breakthrough innovators’ quirky natures make them less likely to buy into established theories and paradigms, and more likely to come up with pathbreaking solutions.
However, creative ideas alone are almost never enough. Many people have creative ideas, even brilliant ones. But usually we lack the time, knowledge, money, or motivation to act on those ideas. For
example, we may not know whether our idea will work or how it could be implemented. It may seem too difficult or too risky. Thus, most insightful, creative ideas are brief wisps of thought that are swept away by other, more immediate concerns. It is rare that someone with a breakthrough idea has the motivation, resources, and persistence to pursue it, and although a person could give such an idea to someone else with better motivation and resources—an established inventor or firm, perhaps—it is probably rarer still that this “someone else” will pursue the breakthrough idea. This is because by their very nature, original ideas are often initially hard for others to understand and value. The odds of one person’s breakthrough idea fitting well with another person’s resources, motivation, and worldview are slim. This is why when breakthrough innovations have been brought to the world, it is usually because the innovator has invested remarkable effort and persistence in executing the idea—often in the face of failure and opposition. Every breakthrough innovator studied here demonstrated extraordinary effort and persistence. Most worked extremely long hours, forfeiting leisure, sleep, and time with their families in single-minded pursuit of their mission. Many stuck doggedly to a solution that others had deemed irrational or doomed. Where does such fierce commitment and energy come from? Chapters 4 and 5 show that idealism, need for achievement, unusual energy levels, and “flow” provide some answers to this question.
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