Albert Bandura, a psychologist who wrote most of the earliest seminal works on self-efficacy and who has dedicated a substantial part of his career to studying how self-efficacy emerges and shapes the behavior of those who have it, notes that those with high self-efficacy are more likely to view difficult tasks as something to be mastered rather than avoided.40 Consider Elon Musk, in February 2002, flying back from Moscow having just been told by Russian rocket manufacturers, patronizingly and in no uncertain terms, that he could not obtain rockets for the price that he wanted ($8 million for two rockets). While the rest of “Team Musk” (which included two aerospace engineers, Jim Cantrell and Mike Griffin, and one of Musk’s buddies from college, Adeo Ressi) sat having drinks and nursing the wounds of defeat, Musk was furiously typing away on his computer. Before they could ask him what he was doing, he spun around and showed them a spreadsheet with detailed cost calculations and performance characteristics for a modest-sized rocket that would significantly undercut the prices charged by existing launch companies. As the men looked at him, dumbfounded, he stated, “Hey guys, I think we can build this rocket ourselves.”41 A moment that would have humbled and disheartened just about anyone else spurred Musk to take on more of the problem himself.
Note that perseverance and self-efficacy can be self-reinforcing: those who persevere at tasks are more likely to accomplish them, reinforcing their confidence in their ability to achieve what they set out to do. It should not be surprising, then, that numerous studies have shown that self-efficacy can lead to greater risk taking and entrepreneurship.42 Things that other people think are impossible may not seem impossible to a person who believes that she can overcome any obstacle. Ideas or methods that most people would find risky might not seem risky to someone who has greater faith in both her ability to assess the idea or method and her ability to execute it. Many researchers have argued that innovators and entrepreneurs are often more “risk seeking” or “risk tolerant” than most people; however, if the innovators or entrepreneurs have high self-efficacy, it might not really be risk seeking or risk tolerance that we are observing. What appears to be risk tolerance may simply be a different assessment of risk based on the individual’s differential belief in her ability to overcome difficult obstacles.
Where Does Self-Efficacy Originate?
THE THREE MAIN FACTORS that give rise to high self-efficacy are personal experience (one’s own prior experience of succeeding at a problem or task), vicarious experience (seeing how others succeed at a problem or task), and verbal persuasion (being told that one will succeed at a problem or task). Of these, not surprisingly, personal experience is the most powerful. As noted previously, it is likely that all of the breakthrough innovators had moments early in their lives that revealed they were smarter or more capable than many of the people around them. Many also had notable “early wins” that provided strong evidence of their innovative or entrepreneurial abilities. Musk’s creation and sale of a video game at the age of twelve is one example. Although kids of today can gain ready access to tools that enable them to design their own games, this was not the case in 1984, when the first personal computers had been on the market for only a few years.
Thomas Edison’s early success as an entrepreneur provides another example of powerful early wins: between the ages of twelve and fifteen, Edison opened a newsstand and a produce stand, and even hired two boys to work for him. By the age of fifteen, he was also publishing his own newspaper, the Weekly Herald. Edison was also an avid experimenter and tinkerer from a very young age and received his first patent—for an electronic vote recorder—by the age of twenty-two.
Benjamin Franklin, whose story is told in more detail in Chapter 4, provides yet another excellent example of an early win. As a sixteen-year-old, Franklin yearned to write articles for the New England Courant, the newspaper published by his elder brother, James, to whom Benjamin was apprenticed. Franklin knew that his brother would not knowingly publish the works of a teenage boy even—or perhaps especially—if they were written by his own brother. Franklin thus invented a fictitious character, a middle-aged woman by the name of Silence Dogood. Between April 1722 and October 1722, he wrote fourteen letters under her name, using disguised handwriting and sliding the letters under the print shop’s door after dark. The letters were a mix of storytelling and homespun philosophy, and they gained an enthusiastic following. This delighted Franklin, who noted in his autobiography, “They read it, commented on it in my Hearing, and I had the exquisite Pleasure, of finding it met with their Approbation, and that in their different Guesses at the Author none were named but Men of some Character among us for Learning and Ingenuity.”43 The success emboldened Franklin, who would go on to write increasingly provocative moral and political opinion pieces for his brother’s paper, and later for his own.
Steve Jobs explicitly described how an early win in developing the “blue box” played a crucial role in giving him and Steve Wozniak the confidence to create a computer. In 1971, when Jobs was still in high school and Wozniak was in college, Wozniak picked up a copy of Esquire that his mother had left on the kitchen table and ended up reading an article by Ron Rosenbaum titled “Secrets of the Little Blue Box.” Rosenbaum described how hackers had replicated the tones that routed calls on the AT&T network, enabling them to make long-distance calls for free. Rosenbaum also noted that the tones could be found in an issue of the Bell System Technical Journal. AT&T had already started contacting libraries, demanding that the issue be pulled from the shelves. Wozniak sprang into action. He called Jobs, and the two raced to the library at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. Although the library was closed, Jobs and Wozniak gained entrance through a door they knew was rarely locked and began furiously searching the stacks. According to Jobs, “It was Woz who finally found the journal with all the frequencies. It was like, holy shit, and we opened it and there it was. We kept saying to ourselves, ‘It’s real. Holy shit, it’s real.’ It was all laid out—the tones, the frequencies.”44 Together, using parts from Sunnyvale Electronics and diodes and transistors from Radio Shack, they built a digital version of a blue box.
After using the blue box to perform several pranks (including calling the Vatican and waking a bishop at 5:30 A.M.), Jobs suggested that they build and sell the boxes for a profit. They bought parts for about $40 and sold the boxes for $150. As Jobs recalled, “We made a hundred or so Blue Boxes and sold almost all of them.”45 The blue box business came to an end when a would-be customer drew a gun on the two young men and stole one of their devices. However, as Jobs noted, “If it hadn’t been for the Blue Boxes, there wouldn’t have been an Apple. I’m 100% sure of that. Woz and I learned how to work together, and we gained the confidence that we could solve technical problems and actually put something into production.… You cannot believe how much confidence that gave us.”46
In 1994 Jobs would articulate the sense of empowerment with which he lived his life in a videotaped interview for the Santa Clara Historical Association:
When you grow up you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world, try not to bash into the walls too much, try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money. But life.… That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact. And that is everything around you that you call life was made up by people no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. And the minute that you understand that you can poke life and actually something will, if you push in something will pop out the other side, you can change it, you can mold it.
That’s maybe the most important thing, is to shake off this erroneous notion is that life is there and you are just going to live in it versus embrace it, change it, improve it, make your mark upon it. I think that’s very important and however you learn that once you learn it, you’ll want to change life and make it better cause it’s kind of messed up in a l
ot of ways. Once you learn that you’ll never be the same again.
Although studies of self-efficacy unanimously conclude that the most reliable source of self-efficacy is personal experience, other evidence suggests that vicarious experience can increase self-efficacy. That is, people learn about what they are capable in part by observing the achievements of others.47 Seeing others accomplish their objectives even in the face of great obstacles can inspire an individual, giving her the sense of “If they can do it, I can too.” As a complex, learning, social creature, much of what a human learns about how to interact with the world comes from watching others, viewing their behaviors and the consequences of those behaviors. Like most social animals, we learn what is safe to eat not by randomly tasting things but by watching what others eat; we form beliefs about what we can physically or mentally accomplish in part by experimentation and in part by observing what others can physically or mentally accomplish. Musk’s decision to drop out of the doctoral program and start an Internet company after witnessing Marc Andreessen’s successful IPO of Netscape is an apt example.
Experimental studies have shown that giving people an opportunity to witness someone else’s success can create large and enduring effects on self-efficacy.48 Although most people do not follow the experimental research on vicarious learning, many intuitively understand its powerful effect. Managers and teachers have long taken advantage of this principle by using hero stories as a form of role modeling that shapes how we perceive and respond to problems. Hero stories are particularly effective if the hero is someone we can identify with and do not feel is innately smarter or stronger than us. When organizations celebrate the story of a person who took initiative to overcome significant obstacles or who showed persistence when others had given up, they are using a hero story to signal to others what is valued in the organization and what employees are capable of. For example, Nike uses the story of track coach Bill Bowerman’s efforts to make a better running shoe. Bowerman wanted to create a running shoe that would provide excellent traction without the metal spikes that were the standard of the day. His inspiration came one morning while he contemplated his waffles: what if you reversed the pattern and formed a material with raised waffle-grid nubs? Several experiments (and several ruined waffle irons) later, Bowerman had created waffle-soled shoes that debuted at the 1972 Olympics. Bowerman’s Waffle Trainers put Nike on the global athletic footwear map and initiated a period of unparalleled growth.49 Nike employs this story frequently, ensuring that all employees are familiar with it, and notes, “Bowerman’s legacy as an original thinker and innovator will forever be linked with the waffle sole, which like many brilliant inventions is so simple and intuitive it resonates immediately and broadly.”50 The Bowerman story is effective because it shows that powerful innovation can come from anyone. Bowerman was a track coach—not an engineer or from another technical background—and because Bowerman’s inspiration came from waffles, the story shows that inspiration for innovation can come from literally anywhere.
The effects of personal experience and vicarious experience on self-efficacy raise an interesting question about failure: Does experiencing failure or witnessing failure lower self-efficacy? The short answer is “yes, but probably not to the degree that success can increase it, on average.” There is an interesting asymmetry in how humans process failure. We tend to attribute successes to our personal abilities, and we tend to attribute failure to external factors beyond our control. This is known as the “self-attribution bias” or the “self-serving bias.” It is an instinctive process that helps to preserve self-esteem, and at the species level it probably helps to ensure that we generally learn through errors of commission rather than errors of omission. We are, on average, overconfident, and from the perspective of fueling innovation, that is a great thing. Some important factors temper this, of course. For example, depressed people tend to have less of a self-serving bias and also have lower self-efficacy. People in collectivist cultures such as Korea or Japan, where the self is perceived as highly interdependent with others, might have lower self-attribution bias than people in individualistic cultures such as those in North America or Western Europe, where the self is perceived to be autonomous and independent (although the evidence on this is mixed and is complicated by the challenges of adapting a study across different cultures).51
Last, we should consider the role of verbal persuasion in self-efficacy. That is, can you convince people they are capable by simply telling them? Studies show that verbal persuasion can be effective in increasing the self-efficacy of children but that it is not particularly effective in adults. Telling adults that they will achieve their objectives will often fail to convince them if they have not experienced such success themselves or seen it among people with whom they identify.52 Furthermore, verbal persuasion will not be effective even in children if it is not perceived as substantive and genuine.53 Interestingly, although Bandura argued that negative feedback was more effective at diminishing self-efficacy than positive feedback was at increasing self-efficacy, the subsequent empirical research on this question is scant and mixed.54
The overwhelming conclusion of the research on self-efficacy is that if we want to increase it, we want people to witness and experience success at overcoming difficult problems. We want to set people up for early wins by giving them problems that are hard enough to be challenging yet are likely to be solved. This will help to build both their repertoire of approaches to problem solving and their confidence. We also want to avoid the destructive effect of “rescuing” individuals when they face obstacles that they might ultimately overcome on their own. Although providing generous assistance to others can be valuable for social bonding, it can also create or reinforce the belief that they could not solve the problem themselves. In some instances it may be better to instead just offer encouragement and show our faith in their ability to overcome the obstacle. We can also increase the likelihood of people finding their own “early wins” by lowering the price of failure or even by celebrating bold-but-intelligent failures, a topic that we will return to in Chapter 8.
The creative genius may be at once naïve and knowledgeable, being at home equally to primitive symbolism and rigorous logic. He is both more primitive and more cultured, more destructive and more constructive, occasionally crazier yet adamantly saner than the average person.
—Frank Baron
3
“Ideas came in an uninterrupted stream.…”
The Creative Mind
How much of a serial breakthrough innovator’s capacity or drive is nature versus nurture? Do these individuals have “gifts” hardwired into their biology that we could never hope to imitate? Or are they primarily empowered by their context—their families, their resources, their moment in time? When people discuss the possible roles of nature in breakthrough innovators, two questions loom particularly large: Are they smarter than most people? Are they crazier? My research indicates that the answers to these questions, at least with respect to exceptional serial breakthrough innovators, are “yes” and “probably.”
A long history of research in psychology and a recent surge of research in neuroscience have explored the ways in which particularly creative people might differ in their intellectual capabilities, patterns of association, and neurochemical balances. This body of research is diverse and rapidly changing—for example, new techniques in imaging brain activity have given rise to rapidly advancing trajectories of research in this area, and it is impossible to summarize everything here. However, there are a few main threads that stand out: primary process thinking and remote association, working memory and executive control, the personality trait “openness to experience,” and rapidly emerging evidence on neurotransmitters such as dopamine and their effects on things such as latent inhibition and psychopathologies often associated with creative genius.
Nikola Tesla’s story provides ample evidence of the separateness and self-efficacy discussed in the previous two chapters; he was a
loner who fearlessly asserted his ambitions and theories, taking on tasks that others would have deemed impossible. However, Tesla’s story also highlights something else quite distinct: the potential for atypical mental faculties and psychopathologies to influence creativity. Tesla had an interesting combination of exceptional intellectual ability, extraordinary working memory, and probable neurotransmitter irregularities that gave rise to symptoms of mania, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and oversensitivity to sensory stimuli. Tesla thus aptly illustrates what research in neuroscience has only recently begun to elucidate: the biological bases of creativity. Many of the innovators are extremely intelligent, and as will be noted later in the chapter, several exhibit some symptoms of mania, but none exhibit both traits at such extreme levels as Nikola Tesla. His case turns out to be exceptionally valuable in helping us to understand the creative mind. Tesla’s unusual traits and capabilities are so extreme, and the mechanisms by which they aided his innovation so clear, that it is like having a giant searchlight that points out dimensions we need to examine in the other innovators. For example, a person might not notice that most of the serial breakthrough innovators sleep significantly less than the average for the population. It isn’t usually highlighted in articles or biographies about them, and it’s not something that is generally brought up in the creativity literature. But after you note Tesla’s extreme in this regard, you start to pay more attention. You hunt down references that indicate the actual hours they sleep, and you do the math. The difference is big enough that you wonder how you missed it before, but you could have never missed it with Tesla—he slept two hours a night when he slept at all. Before studying Tesla you might not notice references to other innovators’ memories, but after being exposed to Tesla’s eidetic (photographic) memory and how he used it, you pay attention, and you begin to notice that the stories of innovators are littered with statements about their exceptional memories. Just as you might not notice moles on your skin until a particularly large one catches your attention, or you might not realize you have mice in your house until a brazen one pauses to stare you down, you could have easily overlooked some of the interesting traits of serial breakthrough innovators until you discovered Tesla, who had those traits turned up to a volume that you could not ignore.
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