Quirky

by Melissa A Schilling

  Nurturing Independence and Creativity

  THERE ARE A NUMBER of implications for nurturing creativity in individuals, families, and organizations that come from understanding the benefits and costs of separateness. The first and most straightforward pertains to spending time alone: if we are seeking creative ideas, it is very beneficial to give individuals time to work alone before engaging in collaboration. Individuals should be encouraged to not fear being unorthodox, and they should be asked to write down their ideas before any sharing or comparison takes place. Evaluation or judgment should be downplayed. Some companies, such as Google and 3M, take this idea several steps further and give employees in creative roles time (20 percent of work hours for Google and 15 percent of work hours for 3M) in which they are supposed to pursue projects of their own creation and choosing. Children are also likely to benefit from time to think, read, and write alone—overscheduling them and turning all activities into collaborative engagements could prevent them from fully developing their own ideas and discovering those things in which they are intrinsically interested.

  Second, norms of meritocracy and a tolerance for unconventionality have a surprising synergy, as we have often seen in the information technology industry. For example, consider what happened when Steve Jobs applied for a job at Atari in 1974. Jobs had seen a help-wanted ad in the San Jose Mercury that said “Have fun, make money.” He showed up in the lobby of the video game manufacturer wearing sandals and disheveled hair, and he told the personnel director that he wouldn’t leave until he was given a job. Al Alcorn, then chief engineer at Atari, was called and told, “We’ve got a hippie kid in the lobby. He says he’s not going to leave until we hire him. Should we call the cops or let him in?” Alcorn said to send him in. Despite Jobs’s startling appearance, Alcorn hired him. As Alcorn described it, “He just walked in the door and here was an eighteen year old kind-of a hippy kid, and he wanted a job, and I said ‘Oh, where did you go to school?’ and he says ‘Reed.’ ‘Reed, is that an engineering school?’ ‘No, it’s a literary school,’ and he’d dropped out. But then he started in with this enthusiasm for technology, and he had a spark. He was eighteen years old so he had to be cheap. And so I hired him!”71 Atari cofounder Nolan Bushnell noted that Jobs was “brilliant, curious, and aggressive,”72 but soon it was apparent that Jobs could also be very difficult to work with, openly mocking other employees and making several enemies in the process. To make matters worse, he had significant body odor. Jobs adhered to a fruitarian diet and believed (incorrectly) that it prevented body odor, so he did not shower regularly or use deodorant. Unfazed by the complaints, Alcorn resolved the problem by having Jobs work only at night.73 As Bushnell later recalled, “I always felt to run a good company you had to have room for everybody—you could always figure out a way to make room for smart people, so we decided to have a night shift in engineering—he was the only one in it.”74 Many organizations would have sent Steve Jobs—one of the most profoundly successful innovators of our time—away without even giving him an interview. However, Alcorn could see the creativity and passion of Jobs, and he was not about to let unconventionality be an obstacle to employing him.

  The third implication is in the way we teach or emphasize social skills. Social skills such as persuasiveness and the ability to build trust and rapport are, of course, valuable for acquiring the cooperation of others or accessing resources. They undoubtedly make many aspects of life easier and more pleasant. But we have to be careful that in our emphasis on social skills we do not extinguish either individualism or a person’s willingness to challenge norms. Rigid adherence to convention and agreeability is the surest way to prevent innovation. Furthermore, not all innovations will require extensive cooperation or accessing large amounts of resources. Marie Curie’s ambitious pursuit of science made her a very unconventional woman for her time, and she was subject to intense criticism and discrimination. If she had bowed to social norms, she would have neither achieved her remarkable accomplishments nor lived the life that fulfilled her. Furthermore, ultimately her discoveries of radium and radioactivity were so fundamental, so valuable, and so irrefutable that in the end it did not matter very much whether people accepted her. They had to accept her innovations.

  None of this means that we should actively turn our employees or family members into social pariahs, nor should we assume that all individuals are unconventional by nature or want to be breakthrough innovators. However, it does suggest that there are valuable reasons to signal that being unconventional is acceptable. By embracing weirdness, we might better allow the natural creativity of people to flourish. In fact, if we learn to embrace unconventionality, creative people will have better access to cooperation and resources—thereby giving us the best of both worlds.

  The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.

  —Apple’s “Think Different” commercial, 1997

  2

  “He’s like a walking moonshot.”

  Extreme Confidence

  Dean Kamen and Steve Jobs, as we have seen, had such great faith in their own capacity for reasoning and insight that they felt free to disregard the “rules” that constrained others. That faith in themselves enabled them to think big, fearlessly tackling projects that seemed impossible to others. Psychologists call a person’s confidence in her ability to solve problems and achieve her objectives “self-efficacy.” Exceptionally high self-efficacy can lead people to pursue problems that are bigger or more complex than most people would typically take on. Elon Musk and his quest to bring humanity to Mars and solve the problem of sustainable energy production illustrate the power of self-efficacy in its extreme.

  Elon Musk was born on June 28, 1971, in Pretoria, South Africa. His father, Errol Musk, a successful electrical and mechanical engineer, had family roots in South Africa that stretched back two hundred years. Elon’s brother, Kimbal, described their father as “ultra-present and very intense.”1 Elon’s mother, Maye, grew up in the same neighborhood as Errol, but the story of how her family arrived in South Africa is interesting, and it perhaps suggests that a rejection of norms and a deep need for adventure were in Elon’s genes. His maternal grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, was born in the United States but lived most of the first half of his life in Canada. A deeply independent man, Haldeman had a distaste for the mainstream political parties of Canada and instead aligned himself with a political philosophy called Technocracy. The Technocracy movement argued for replacing politicians and businesspeople with scientists and engineers, who, the movement believed, had the technical expertise to run society and make it more rational and productive.2 The movement even had a plan for a new calendar that would divide the population up into seven groups, each working a workweek that began and ended on a different day so that industries could have uninterrupted production and there would be no “weekend effect.” At one point the Canadian government outlawed the movement, fearing its members would attempt to overthrow the government by force.3 Haldeman, who by 1940 was Canada’s leader of the Technocracy Party, defied the ban and on June 26, 1940, placed this notice in the Regina Leader-Post:

  STATEMENT OF PATRIOTISM BY THOSE WHO WERE TECHNOCRATS

  The political Government of Canada by Order-in-Council has declared Technocracy Inc. to be an illegal organization. This action was unjustified and unwarranted and can be classified as a tactical, political blunder. Technocracy Inc. from its inception has been unequivocally opposed to Nazism, Fascism, and Communism. On Sept. 5 1939, Technocrats all over Canada wired Prime Minister Mackenzie King that they stood ready to defend Canada from any alien attack. Following the issue of Technocracy’s General Regulations on Home Defence on June 1, which was published in most newspapers, Technocrats all over Canada contacted the R.C.M.P., the city police, and the military authorities offering their services in any capacity required for the Defence of Canada. Those who were members of Technocracy Inc. as loyal Canadian citizens will continue to render ful
l support to the defence program of the Dominion of Canada. Technocracy Inc. was the outstanding patriotic organization in Canada, therefore those who were its members must view the present action of the political government as an attempt at subversive sabotage of a national patriotic organization, unless this action is immediately rescinded.4

  Haldeman faced three legal charges for the notice but was undeterred. However, in 1941 the Technocracy movement changed its official policy from “unequivocally opposed to Communism, Fascism, Nazism and Socialism” to “complete economic and military collaboration with Soviet Russia” in response to Hitler’s invasion of Russia. Although the decision now appears to have been a practical choosing of sides, Haldeman could not accept any justification for allying with Stalin’s dictatorship and resigned from the Technocracy movement. For a few years he attempted (unsuccessfully) to establish his own political party and then in 1943 joined the Social Credit Party, a conservative-populist political party. In 1950, believing that Canadian bureaucracy interfered too much in the lives of individuals and also that the moral character of Canada had begun to decline, the iconoclastic Haldeman made the startling decision to move his wife, Winnifred, and four children (including Elon’s mother, Maye) to South Africa, a place he had never even visited. Haldeman was also a pilot and owned his own private plane, a single-engine Bellanca Cruisair. Upon arriving in South Africa he reassembled the plane, which he had shipped in crates to his new country, and used it to survey the area and pick a place to live. They decided on Pretoria.

  The Haldeman children grew up in a household where adventure was the norm. On one occasion in 1954, Joshua and Winnifred Haldeman flew their plane to Australia and back, a round trip of 33,000 miles. They may still be the only private pilots to have accomplished this feat. On another occasion they tied for first place in the 8,000-mile Cape Town to Algiers Motor Rally. Joshua Haldeman also became famous in South Africa for taking his family on rugged and daring expeditions through the bush of Botswana on an enthusiastic mission to find the Lost City of Kalahari. It is fitting, then, that he would have a grandson who would take on the even more daring mission of bringing humanity to Mars. Elon’s mother and her siblings grew up in a home where goals were to be big and boundaries to be challenged. Maye’s brother Scott noted that they were raised to believe “there’s nothing a Haldeman can’t do.”5

  In school, Maye was a nerdy child who loved math and science, but her stunning good looks led her into a career of modeling. After marrying Errol Musk, the couple had three children, Elon (the oldest), Kimbal, and Tosca. Elon was smaller than the other children his age and was often bullied in school. He also had such a curiously introspective streak that his family worried that he might be deaf. After tests revealed that his hearing was normal, his family realized he was just an avid thinker and gave him the nickname of “genius boy.” Although he was quiet, his independent and confident nature was evident at a very early age. Once, for example, when Elon was six, his parents told him he could not go to a cousin’s birthday party. The defiant young Elon walked there on his own, making a four-hour, ten-mile journey across Pretoria.

  Musk was a zealous reader, with a particular taste for science fiction and fantasy. He devoured books by Jules Verne, J. R. Tolkien, and Robert Heinlein, and he was particularly influenced by Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. As Kimbal notes, “It was not unusual for him to read ten hours a day,” and adds, “if it was the weekend he could go through two books in a day.”6 Elon himself notes, “At one point, I ran out of books to read at the school library and the neighborhood library. This is maybe the third or fourth grade. I tried to convince the librarian to order books for me. So then I started to read the Encyclopedia Britannica. That was so helpful. You don’t know what you don’t know. You realize there are all these things out there.”7 As Musk’s mother pointed out, “He would just find everything interesting. He wanted to explore everything.”8 He also had an exceptional memory (discussed in more detail in Chapter 3) and was able to recite facts from the encyclopedia at will. If, for example, his sister happened to wonder aloud what the distance was to the moon, he would immediately provide the exact measurement at both perigee and apogee, much to the shock and awe of those around him.9

  At the age of ten, Musk bought a computer and taught himself to program. By the age of twelve he had created and sold his first piece of software—a video game called Blastar that he sold to a computer magazine for $500.10 This kind of very early success undoubtedly taught Musk some important lessons about what he was capable of achieving.

  Musk began to dream of America as a refuge for smart and innovative people. As he noted in an interview, “I remember thinking and seeing that America is where great things are possible, more than any other country in the world.”11 And, if he stayed in South Africa, he would also soon be subject to that country’s compulsory military service, which he desperately wanted to avoid. According to Musk, he was not against the military per se, but he did not think it would be a good use of his time. He began to badger his parents about moving to America, but his father, who had business interests that kept him entrenched in South Africa, had no intention of moving. Furthermore, he did not want Elon to leave on his own and said he would pay for college only in South Africa. Not to be thwarted, the fearless sixteen-year-old Musk took a bus to the Canadian Embassy and obtained a passport (his mother is a Canadian national), and at seventeen, against his father’s wishes, moved to Canada. He supported himself with odd jobs such as shoveling grain, cutting wood, and cleaning the boiler room of a lumber mill, and he began attending Queen’s University. Musk’s parents had divorced when he was nine, and his departure inspired Maye, Kimbal, and Tosca to move as well; soon all four were living in Canada.

  Musk was similar to Albert Einstein, Dean Kamen, and Steve Jobs in not being a diligent student in the traditional sense. He found it difficult to apply himself to topics that he did not see as directly useful. However, his remarkable intelligence and memory made up for his poor attendance and uneven attention, enabling him to get grades good enough to secure a scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania. He transferred there after one year at Queens and ended up completing two degrees, one in physics and the other in economics. He was then accepted into Stanford’s doctoral program in physics.

  Musk moved to Palo Alto after graduation, planning to start the doctoral program in the fall of 1995. That summer, however, as he watched Marc Andreessen, a man even younger than himself, take the start-up Netscape Communications public for an astonishing market value of $2.9 billion, he suddenly began to question his plans. It was clear to him that the Internet was going to change the world in a fundamental way, and this struck a deep chord within him. It was extremely important to Musk that he work on “stuff that really mattered.”12 After only two days on the Stanford campus and with only $2,000, a car, and a computer, he withdrew from school and began creating an Internet company.

  In 1994 Elon teamed up with Kimbal, and the pair borrowed $28,000 from their father to start Global Link Information Network, later renamed as Zip2. The company sold a software platform that enabled newspapers to create and host their own online “city guides,” websites that would help users find events, restaurants, and other services. The timing was perfect: the penetration of the Internet was growing exponentially, but most businesses did not yet fully understand how to harness it. As Musk noted, “When we tried to get funding in November 1995, more than half the venture capitalists we met with didn’t know what the internet was and had not used it.”13 However, soon Musk’s company was hosting the websites of nearly two hundred media companies, including the New York Times local directory site called “New York Today.” It also hosted newspapers owned by Hearst, Times Mirror, and Pulitzer.14 In February 1999, Compaq bought Zip2 for $307 million in hopes that it could use the platform to help one of its other products, AltaVista, become a top portal for search, media, and shopping.15 Elon and Kimbal received, respectively, $22
million and $15 million from the sale.

  Now a millionaire at the age of twenty-eight, Musk was faced with the prospect of what to do next. Spending a life in leisure was absolutely not an option for the fiercely driven Musk. As he notes, “The idea of lying on a beach as my main thing sounds horrible to me.… I would go bonkers. I’d have to be on serious drugs.… I like high intensity.”16 In trying to assess what he would do with his life, he asked himself, “What would most influence the future? What are the problems that we have to solve?”

  It seemed obvious to Musk that financial institutions were ripe for technological revolution, so he founded X.com to operate as an online financial services and e-mail payment company. The company’s premier product was a person-to-person e-mail payment system. Later, X.com would merge with Confinity, which had also developed a person-to-person payment system, called PayPal. Preferring the PayPal brand name, Musk agreed to drop the X.com brand from the merged product. In 2002 Ebay bought PayPal for $1.5 billion in stock; Musk got $165 million from the sale.