Quirky
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A sense of separateness can also be self-reinforcing: individuals who perceive themselves as not fitting in may socially isolate themselves because of shyness or fear of rejection. They may not develop social skills that make it easy for them be comfortable in social settings and may also experience failed social encounters that cause them to retreat still further. Others may have excellent social skills but use them only in selective occasions (both Jobs and Einstein were noted as being capable of exceptional charisma yet were also famous for their detachment and for their rejection of social norms). Such people may become so accustomed to doing things their own way that conforming to the structure or routines of others is difficult or irritating for them. On a more positive note, they may also learn to relish and make productive use of their time alone.
These latter two points may explain why so many of the most famous innovators struggled with (or skipped) formal schooling but keenly pursued self-education. Albert Einstein, as described previously, was a difficult and irregular student who graduated at the bottom of his class but studied intensively on his own. Steve Jobs and Dean Kamen both dropped out of undergraduate programs. Jobs famously said that “looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked far more interesting.”44
Kamen, who is probably best known for inventing the Segway personal transporter (his most famous though not most successful invention), also developed the first portable drug infusion pump, the first portable kidney dialysis machine, several prosthetic limbs, and the iBot, a wheelchair that can climb stairs. He is widely regarded as one of the most accomplished electromechanical engineers in the world and is often compared to Thomas Edison and Henry Ford.45 He has won many awards (including the US National Medal of Technology and the United Nations Global Humanitarian Action Award) and has received roughly a dozen honorary doctoral degrees despite having never finished an undergraduate program. Kamen had earned mediocre grades in middle school and high school, and had frequent conflicts with his teachers. He resented being told what to do and would argue with them over the way they taught math and physics. He also frequently refused to answer test questions, explaining, “I decided taking a test is a fool’s errand. Because the ones you know the answer to, don’t waste your time writing down. And the ones you don’t know the answer to, why shine a bright light on how stupid you are?”46 Later, when he was enrolled at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, he refused to go to classes: “I said, ‘I’m paying my tuition to have the entire faculty as business consultants. I recognize that is not consistent with your model, which is, You know better than I and I have to take this much math and these electives, and all that stuff is valuable, but right now I’m focused, I’m allowed to make a rational decision, I can pay you this tuition and avail myself of this extraordinary faculty, but I’m not going to waste my time in class because the opportunity costs would be too high.’”47 He ended up dropping out before graduating but remained an avid reader of science texts.
Elon Musk and Sergey Brin both dropped out of doctoral programs. Musk’s approach to his early schooling was utilitarian: he excelled in classes that appealed to him and ignored the others. As he puts it, “I just look at it as ‘What grades do I need to get where I want to go?’ There were compulsory subjects like Afrikaans, and I just didn’t see the point of learning that. It seemed ridiculous. I’d get a passing grade and that was fine. Things like physics and computers—I got the highest grade you can get in those.”48 He also noted, “When I went to college I rarely went to class. I’d just read the textbook and show up for the exams.”49 Although he earned excellent grades and was admitted to Stanford’s doctoral program in physics, he dropped out on the second day after deciding he would rather spend his time revolutionizing methods of payment and banking. Brin has a similar story. Bored in high school, he dropped out a year early and was accepted by the University of Maryland. Like Einstein, he had a tendency to correct his professors; unlike Einstein, his quieter and more studious demeanor did not inspire the rancor that Einstein’s careless wit had provoked. He graduated with a dual degree in math and computer science in 1993 and went straight into the Stanford doctoral program, where he passed all of his qualifying exams within the first couple of months (most students do not take the exams until their third year). Brin thus didn’t need to take any classes—he just needed to write a thesis to graduate. Instead, Brin worked on various projects that interested him (one of which was with Larry Page and evolved into the Google search engine) and never bothered to complete the thesis.
Some breakthrough innovators had almost no formal education. For example, Benjamin Franklin went to school from the age of eight to ten and was almost wholly self-educated. Thomas Edison, despite his mere three months of grammar school, was a voracious reader and by the age of twelve had read Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Hume’s History of England, Sears’s History of the World, Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, and the Dictionary of Sciences.50
When people see that brilliantly successful people drop out of school, many infer that education had nothing to do with their success or was even an impediment. However, that is far from the case. All of the breakthrough innovators I studied invested heavily in self-education. They were avid consumers of knowledge, but they followed their own rhythms rather than an instructor’s pace. They went deeply into a topic or broadly across topics they chose rather than following the path of a syllabus. They were fueled by intrinsic motivation—a true love of learning—even if they had no love for school.
TIME ALONE CAN BE both cause and consequence of a sense of separateness. Most of the innovators had childhoods and young-adult periods characterized by significant time spent in solitude, pursuing their own interests. Solitude is valuable for creativity; it affords people the time to think about and pursue those things they find intrinsically interesting.51 It can help them to develop their own beliefs about how the world works and to develop a self-concept that is less structured by the interpretations or opinions of others. Solitude also enables people to pursue cognitive paths of association without the contaminating effect or interference of the associations made by others, a point we will return to when we discuss brainstorming groups.
Henry David Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, Rudyard Kipling, and Franz Kafka are among the many famous writers noted for the role that solitude played in their creative processes.52 Thoreau’s journals and works are filled with statements about how he valued time alone:
By my intimacy with nature I find myself withdrawn from man. My interest in the sun and the moon, in the morning and the evening, compels me to solitude. (journal, July 26, 1851)
I thrive best on solitude. If I have had a companion only one day in a week, unless it were one or two I could name, I find that the value of the week to me has been seriously affected. It dissipates my days, and often it takes me another week to get over it. (journal, December 28, 1856)
You think that I am impoverishing myself withdrawing from men, but in my solitude I have woven for myself a silken web or chrysalis, and, nymph-like, shall ere long burst forth a more perfect creature, fitted for a higher society. (journal, February 8, 1857)
I have an immense appetite for solitude, like an infant for sleep, and if I don’t get enough for this year, I shall cry all the next. (letter to Daniel Ricketson, September 9, 1857)53
Solitude is not, of course, the ideal that most people seek. Many find it very uncomfortable because, as noted in more detail later, humans are social animals. If time alone is valuable for creativity, then perhaps the degree to which people are comfortable being alone influences their likelihood of tapping their latent creative capability. If this is the case, it explains why so many studies have concluded that creative geniuses are more likely to be introverts—introversion could be an enabling trait for creative people. Consistent with this idea, noted creativity researcher Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi observed in 1996 that adolescents who could not tolerate solitude often failed to develop their creative talents because that development typically requires solitary engagement in such activities.
Separateness does not mean that the entire creative process is conducted alone—even for serial breakthrough innovators. Many creative ideas arise through the recombination of ideas or the knowledge of others, and still more require the cooperation or collaboration of others in order to refine and implement them. Steve Jobs could not have built computers without the help of Steve Wozniak or developed the iPhone, iPod, or iPad without the help of Jonathan Ive and others; Einstein sought help from Michele Besso and Marcel Grossmann for some aspects of his work; Elon Musk and Thomas Edison built laboratories full of technical experts to help them execute their ideas; and even Marie Curie, as we shall see in Chapter 6, required considerable assistance from her husband to discover radium. However, it is also true that all of the innovators exhibited extraordinary independence and developed many of their most important ideas or inventions on their own. As noted above, many of Einstein’s breakthrough discoveries were developed in almost complete isolation. Tesla, as described in Chapter 3, worked almost entirely alone, bringing others into his projects only when the designs were complete. Musk astonished space industry veterans when he designed his own reusable rocket by studying aerospace in borrowed rocket science textbooks. And although Edison is famous for having built research and development (R&D) laboratories, he was a consummate tinkerer from a very early age, and his earliest inventions, such as his first improved telegraph transmitter, a stock-price printer, and an electric vote recorder, were solo creations. As shown in Chapter 5, Edison was virtually immune to the influence of others and, as described by one biographer, “Edison’s need for autonomy was primal and unvarying; it would determine the course of his career from beginning to end.”54
STUDIES BY PSYCHOLOGISTS OF groups engaged in brainstorming reinforce the benefits of solitude for creativity. Brainstorming groups have been a tenet of faith in business schools for close to a half-century, ever since Alex Osborne, in his highly influential book Applied Imagination, opined that “the average person can think up twice as many ideas when working with a group than when working alone.” Brainstorming groups have been extremely popular in both businesses and business schools, and doubts about brainstorming’s efficacy border on heresy. However, dozens of subsequent laboratory studies found results opposite to Osborne’s claim: brainstorming groups produced fewer ideas, and ideas of less novelty, than the sum of the ideas created by the same number of individuals working alone.
Three theories have emerged to explain why brainstorming groups are less productive than people working alone. First is the free-rider issue: the possibility that some people may shirk when others in the group start generating ideas. Second is evaluation apprehension. People may self-censor many of their ideas in group brainstorming sessions for fear of being judged negatively by others. The third explanation is production blocking. As people take turns voicing their ideas, those bringing up the rear may forget their ideas before having a chance to voice them. Furthermore, the process of attending to another person’s ideas redirects a listener’s train of thought, essentially hijacking her own idea-generation process.
Professors Michael Diehl and Wolfgang Stroebe set out to test these theories with a series of experiments that compared brainstorming groups with people working alone whose ideas are combined, using high school and college students.55 First, to test the free-rider explanation, they told some groups that ideas would be evaluated for each person individually and some groups that ideas would be evaluated collectively. Groups that were told ideas would be evaluated collectively generated slightly fewer ideas, explaining a significant, though minor, amount of the productivity losses in brainstorming groups. Next, to test the evaluation-apprehension explanation they told some groups that their ideas would be evaluated by anonymous judges and told other groups that their ideas would be evaluated by their peers, under the assumption that judgment by peers would induce the greatest evaluation apprehension. They found stronger results for the evaluation-apprehension explanation: groups that were told their ideas would be judged by their peers generated significantly fewer and less novel ideas than groups that were told they would be evaluated by anonymous judges. Finally, to evaluate the possibility of production blocking, the researchers created several different conditions. In some conditions, individuals worked alone in rooms and spoke their ideas into a microphone, but lights indicated when they were allowed to contribute their ideas and when they needed to wait while others contributed. In some of the rooms the individuals could hear the contributions of others, and in some they could not. This study resulted in the largest production losses by far: being required to wait to give ideas caused people to submit far fewer ideas, an outcome that many of us have experienced. Now imagine what happens when people do not have to take turns but instead volunteer ideas at will: the most outgoing people in the group may dominate all of the idea submission while the quieter people, or those more worried about social pressure, do not submit many (or any) of their ideas. Furthermore, if they do submit their ideas, they may submit only those ideas that build upon the ideas that were already contributed—a sure way to drive out novelty.
Professor Brian Mullen and his coauthors Craig Johnson and Eduardo Salas decided to assess how reliable these findings were by conducting a meta-analysis (where the results of multiple studies are combined) of twenty studies of brainstorming groups. They found that productivity losses in both quantity and quality of ideas were highly significant and were large in magnitude. Losses increased with larger groups and with supervision by an experimenter or other authority. Like Diehl and Stroebe, these analysts found that only negligible losses were caused by free riding, but unlike Diehl and Stroebe, they found that production losses were greatest for evaluation apprehension, followed by production blocking. 56
Together, then, these studies show that brainstorming groups diminish creative outcomes because we lose our ideas when others are talking, and we do not express our most novel ideas because we worry about what others will think. Isaac Asimov, one of the most famous science fiction writers of all time and also a biochemistry professor at Boston University, presaged these findings in an unpublished essay written in 1959: “My feeling is that as far as creativity is concerned, isolation is required. The creative person is, in any case, continually working at it. His mind is shuffling his information at all times, even when he is not conscious of it. (The famous example of Kekule working out the structure of benzene in his sleep is well-known.) The presence of others can only inhibit this process, since creation is embarrassing. For every new good idea you have, there are a hundred, ten thousand foolish ones, which you naturally do not care to display.”57
Later, a series of studies by Professor Eric Rietzschel and coauthors showed that group selection (rather than generation) of ideas also reduces novelty as groups of people tend to prefer and select ideas that are feasible over those that are original.58 For example, both interactive groups (people brainstorming together) and nominal groups (people brainstorming separately and then combining their ideas) were asked to generate ideas for improving course instruction in a psychology department. Then all of the groups were instructed to interactively select the “best” ideas. The ideas were then assessed by independent raters for their originality and feasibility. For example, the idea “Use hypnosis to increase students’ concentration” was considered highly original, whereas “Teach courses in smaller groups” was considered unoriginal. “Maintain a stricter policy against cell phones during exams” was considered highly feasible, but “Make all course books available in digital form” was considered infeasible. Overall, these studies found that when groups interactively ranked their “best” ideas, they chose ideas that were less original than the average of the ideas produced and more feasible than the average of the ideas produced. In other words, p
eople tended to value feasibility more than originality. If a brainstorming group is intended to elicit novel ideas, asking groups to select and submit their best ideas is not the way to achieve that outcome. This also highlights the importance of both the breakthrough innovator’s tendency to have different beliefs about what is possible and the breakthrough innovator’s willingness to pursue projects even if they have a high likelihood of failure—points that are further discussed in the chapters on self-efficacy and idealism.
Nonconformity and Rebelliousness
THE INNOVATOR’S SENSE OF separateness can also give rise to a sharp tendency to disregard or rebel against rules. For example, nonconformity was a central element of Einstein’s moral philosophy. His study of the philosophies of Hume and Mach taught him to be skeptical of things that he could not observe and to question conventional theories. Further, his job at the patent office did not subject him to the homogenizing norms of academia, and his job required him to ferret out false claims or flawed logic in patent applications. Each of these factors played a part in helping Einstein become a profoundly independent thinker. As Walter Isaacson described him, “His success came from questioning conventional wisdom, challenging authority, and marveling at mysteries that struck others as mundane. This led him to embrace a morality and politics based on respect for free minds, free spirits, and free individuals. Tyranny repulsed him, and he saw tolerance not simply as a sweet virtue but as a necessary condition for a creative society. Einstein argued, ‘It is important to foster individuality,… for only the individual can produce the new ideas.’”59