Quirky
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McClelland and others argued that individuals with a high need for achievement would tend to select activities and roles of moderate risk that were more likely to offer a combination of potential for recognition and high likelihood of success. Later research overturned this view, however, finding that people with high need for achievement tended to choose challenging, riskier goals with only moderate chance of success and that they would not only persist in the face of negative feedback but would also increase their efforts. That is, rather than being discouraged by negative feedback or obstacles, they would double down on their effort, tenaciously sticking with the problem. Here is the interesting part that turns our negative connotation of risk on its head: for people with very high need for achievement, the difficulty and risk of a task become a signal of its potential for reward—the powerful thrill that will accompany the task’s achievement. This association between difficulty and reward inoculates them from the frustration of initial difficulties.51 For individuals with high need for achievement, difficulty is an indicator of opportunity for gain rather than a threat of failure.
McClelland also noted that people with a high need for achievement often exhibit a strong desire for knowledge of their results and feedback, and they are prone to becoming exceptionally absorbed in their work.52 Each of these characteristics can be seen in all of the innovators here, particularly in Edison. He took great pleasure in amassing patents, being much more motivated to win patents than to accumulate material wealth. Patents offered tangible evidence of his inventive accomplishments even if he did not successfully commercialize all of them. In reading of Edison’s long hours at the laboratory or his self-imposed isolation at the Ogden mine, it would be tempting to conclude that he did not enjoy home life and was not that close to his wife, Mina. However, the tender and affectionate letters that Edison wrote to her while away at the mine portray a man who loved his wife deeply and missed her company. He wrote her with unabashed affection (e.g., addressing her as “Darling Sweetest Loveliest Cutest” and telling her that “There can’t [be] 1 woman in 20,000 that is really as smart as yourself”) and would note that he sometimes felt blue without her. However, Edison loved his work more. Even when it was clear that the mine was a failure and all the money invested in it had been lost, Edison described himself in a letter to Mina “as bright and cheerful as a bumble bee in flower time.”53
Research on the need for achievement is mixed on the role of intrinsic versus extrinsic rewards. On the one hand, individuals with a high need for achievement might experience strong intrinsic rewards from mastering skills, excelling at activities, and completing tasks. On the other hand, they can also be very sensitive to extrinsic rewards such as praise and prestige, and they may show a tendency for being extremely competitive.54 As a result, the need for achievement is often described in conjunction with a need for recognition, approval, and prestige. In other words, it is typical to presume that people who want to accomplish things do so, in part, because they want others to recognize their accomplishments and think highly of them. The innovators studied here also exhibit some mixed evidence about the importance of recognition and praise. In some instances, it is clear that peer approval was important to them. For example, Curie had been stoic when faced with discrimination for being a woman of science, but after the scandal broke regarding her affair with Paul Langevin, she had a nervous collapse and long bouts of depression, suggesting that she suffered in response to the intense criticism she faced at that time. Similarly, although Tesla was, by any measure, a very unconventional person, comments written by him in his letters and articles convey a man who believed that eventually the public would see that his visions of the future had been correct, and it was important to him that his efforts and tactics would be vindicated. However, it is also clear that most of these innovators were willing to defy social norms and bear significant disapproval in pursuit of their goals. For some of them—notably Jobs, Edison, and Musk—external evaluations were almost meaningless because they believed few, if any, people were qualified to really understand and judge their performance.
Where does the need for achievement come from, and can it be taught? Early work in sociology and philosophy argued that attitudes toward work and achievement were rooted in deep cultural and religious belief systems. As early as 1904, Max Weber argued that frugality and entrepreneurial spirit were some of the consequences of Protestant asceticism. Later work by psychologists such as David McClelland extended this view and argued that cultures differ in their need for achievement and that such differences could, in part, explain differences in economic development across populations and societies.55 McClelland (and others) believed that factors such as religion, social class, and childhood parenting practices affect an individual’s development of need for achievement. Furthermore, McClelland believed that need for achievement could, to some degree, be taught and that this offered important opportunities to improve economic development. His classic—and controversial—1961 book, The Achieving Society, drew considerable criticism for the ways that it generalized concepts from individuals to whole cultures, nations, or tribes. In fact, in his review of the book written for the Journal of Economic History, economist Julius Rubin described it as “one of the most fascinating and irritating, one of the most valuable and misleading books I have ever had the pleasure and displeasure of reading.”56 However, one of McClelland’s findings that appears to have withstood the scrutiny of several decades of subsequent research is that high-achieving individuals typically have parents who set high standards for them yet were not excessively restrictive or authoritarian. For example, parents who did not let children make decisions for themselves did not tend to rear high-achieving children. Recent work, including studies by Oliver Schultheiss and Joachim Brunstein, draws a similar conclusion. In their review of three studies that explored childhood antecedents of high need for achievement, they conclude that individuals are more likely to have a high need for achievement if their parents emphasize early (but age-appropriate) self-reliance and mastery of basic skills, and encourage them to set challenging goals for themselves.57
Energy and “Flow”: The Pleasure of Work
WE HAVE SEEN THAT part of a breakthrough innovator’s motivation to work is tied to outcomes such as fulfilling ideals, pursuing superordinate goals, amassing achievements, and earning recognition and praise. However, many of the breakthrough innovators also exhibit another driver of hard work not related to these outcomes: pleasure in the feeling of work itself. The process of being fully engaged in a task—either mental or physical—can be extremely pleasurable or satisfying. An apt description is offered by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his concept of flow: “the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.”58
Csikszentmihalyi was born in Hungary in 1934 and spent time in an Italian prison as a child during World War II. Surrounded by misery and loss, he began to understand a phenomenon he would later call “flow” by losing himself in chess: “I discovered chess was a miraculous way of entering into a different world where all those things didn’t matter. For hours I’d just focus within a reality that had clear rules and goals.”59 People in a state of cognitive flow may intensely focus on a task and lose all sense of time or self-awareness. Csikszentmihalyi also discusses flow in the realm of physical activity, such as the pleasure an individual might feel while dancing, completely lost in the rhythm of music, or the feeling of one’s muscles being exerted or stretched to their limit in running or yoga.
One cannot help but notice the parallels in Csikszentmihalyi’s analysis of flow and Dyer and Martin’s 1910 description of Edison when they note his “same intellectual pleasure as the chess-master when confronted with a problem” or the way he “meets obstruction with the keen delight of a strong man battling with the waves.”60 According to Csikszentmihalyi, flow is most lik
ely to occur when there is an appropriate match between an individual’s capability level and the challenge she is facing. If the challenge is below her capability level, the individual will be bored; if the challenge is above her capability level, she will experience anxiety. However, in many realms an individual’s capability level increases with experience; thus, the challenges she takes on must also be increasingly difficult in order to experience flow. This is illustrated perfectly in Kimbal Musk’s description of Elon’s need to constantly move on to bigger and more important challenges, such as his intention to send humans to Mars: “His mind needs to be constantly fulfilled. The problems that he takes on therefore need to be more and more complex over time to keep him interested.”61
Csikszentmihalyi’s observation that flow is more likely to occur when an individual’s capability level matches the challenge she is facing highlights another interesting point that helps us to better understand the behavior of Edison and others like him. Although we tend to focus on the exceptional cognitive abilities of innovators, Edison appears to have also had exceptional physical capabilities. His colleagues frequently noted his seemingly boundless energy, strength, and stamina. This may have had a biological foundation. Research on humans, rodents, and other species has shown that individuals vary tremendously in their amount of voluntary daily energy expenditure. For example, studies have shown that humans not only make widely different choices about voluntary exercise (which is to be expected given their diverse objectives and cultural influences) but also exhibit significant differences in spontaneous physical activity (e.g., fidgeting) or, more generally, “non-exercise activity thermogenesis” (“NEAT”). NEAT is the energy expended by an organism for everything that is not sleeping, eating, or sports-like exercise. It includes things like working, playing, grooming, and fidgeting. Although differences in NEAT are definitely influenced by lifestyle and cultural norms, there are also biological reasons for such differences that may include differences in energy metabolism and in neurotransmitter patterns.62
Humans make awkward research subjects for studies of energy expenditure because it is difficult to standardize their living environment and diet, and harder still to control for their motivations (such as wanting to fit into skinny jeans). Mice, with few known concerns about how they look in jeans, make much better research subjects in these respects. In one study, for example, thirty-five three-week-old male mice (sets of siblings from ten families of an ordinary house mouse strain) were put into cages with running wheels, Purina rodent chow, and water. Their voluntary running was recorded by instruments that counted the revolutions of the wheel. Remarkably, the mice exhibited very large individual differences in their voluntary running activity. The least active mice ran an average of twenty-four revolutions per day; the most active ones ran almost 14,000 revolutions daily. Furthermore, although there was great variation across individuals, there was a strong correlation in activity over time for a given mouse. That is, some mice ran consistently less, others consistently more, despite being closely related, having identical resources, and being in identical habitats.63 These findings were subsequently replicated by dozens of studies that identified significant individual variation in energy expenditure within an animal species, including mice, rats, dogs, fish, birds, deer, and lizards. Most of these studies attributed the variation in voluntary energy expenditure to a combination of biological and psychological factors, including differences in personality traits such as “boldness” or “aggressiveness.”64 For example, mice that quite aggressively attack and eat crickets also exhibit higher levels of voluntary exercise. Intriguingly, constant fidgeting, which is a form of NEAT, is also often cited in mania, ADHD, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Furthermore, elevated dopamine (as discussed in more depth in Chapter 3) is linked to both creativity and hyperkinesia (an increase in muscular activity that can result in excessive abnormal movements). Could extreme innovators like Edison be similar to mice who run significantly more revolutions on a wheel—in other words, could they have vastly higher voluntary energy expenditure caused by biological or psychological factors? Those who knew Edison certainly seemed to believe that he was bold and fearless, exerted a remarkable amount of effort, and had more physical stamina than an average man. I know of no existing studies relating NEAT to innovation, but it is an intriguing area for future research.
Anyone who has raised or closely observed a border collie intuitively understands the points of this chapter about being driven to work. Bred to herd sheep, the border collie is an extremely energetic dog with seemingly unlimited stamina and an intense need for physical and mental stimulation. The border collie’s drive to work is so strong, in fact, that if the dog is not given an outlet for its physical and mental energy, it can become aggressive or neurotic. In dog breeding circles there is a saying that “A border collie needs a job, and if you don’t give him one, he’ll come up with his own, and you won’t like it.” All of the innovators here, but none more so than Edison, resemble border collies in their behavior. We don’t yet completely understand why some individuals want or need to expend more energy than others, but it suffices to say there could be both biological and psychological reasons that individuals such as Edison exhibit physical and mental strength that “seemed to be without limit.”
I feel incredibly lucky to be at exactly the right place, in Silicon Valley, at exactly the right time historically where this invention has taken form.
—Steve Jobs, in an interview with Robert X. Cringely, 1995
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“The sixties produced an anarchic mind-set.…”
Opportunities and Challenges of an Era
How much does being in the right place at the right time matter in the making of serial breakthrough innovators? The short answer is that it definitely matters but it’s not enough. Being in the right place at the right time is what economists would call a “necessary but insufficient condition.” Moments of technological or cultural change—such as the industrial revolution, the countercultural movement, or the rise of information technology—create rich periods of opportunity that increase innovation, and this opportunity may be crucial for the emergence of a serial breakthrough innovator. However, it is also clear that even in such periods, the emergence of this type of innovator is rare—most people inventing during even such fertile periods will not go on to become famously important innovators. In this chapter and the next we will look at how the place and time influenced the innovators’ success for better or worse. In this chapter we will focus on the role of timing—opportunities and challenges created by the era. In the next chapter we will focus on the role of resources, including which resources matter and why. The two are often inextricably entwined: the resources you have access to will depend, in part, on when and where you are, as will be illustrated by the account of Steve Jobs growing up in Silicon Valley during the computer revolution.
Few stories illustrate the opportunities and challenges of an era as poignantly as that of Marie Curie, whose parents and community were passionately dedicated to the education of women at a time when formal education for women was extremely rare. She was born Maria Salomea Skłodowska on November 7, 1867, in Warsaw. In the late eighteenth century, Russia had invaded Poland and seized territory in three successive partitions that eliminated sovereign Poland for 123 years. The Polish people suffered greatly under the ruthless suppression of Tsarist Russia. The tsar’s agents vigorously enforced a “Russification” that attempted to erase all traces of Poland’s literature, language, culture, and other aspects of its heritage. Children could not be taught Polish history or literature, nor could they be taught in Polish—they had to learn and use Russian instead. Many Polish educators (like Marie Curie’s parents) and other Poles in influential positions lost their posts or were demoted to less influential roles.
Initially the Polish people had fought back, but two uprisings by Poles in November 1830 and January 1863 were catastrophic and led to increased efforts to Russify Poland and
the exile or imprisonment of hundreds of thousands of Poles.1 After the failure of the uprisings, many in Poland, including Curie’s parents, Władysław and Bronisława Skłodowska, concluded that their country could not be saved through military means. Instead, education, science, and hard work were the only ways to preserve Poland.2 Both parents were from the lower aristocracy of Poland known as the szlachta class. The szlachta were legally privileged nobles, but they had lost most of their land and wealth under Russian rule. All members of this class were considered socially and legally equal, even if they had far less wealth than the richest szlachta (the “magnates”), and they were typically disdainful of using titles and other forms of hierarchical distinction. They valued intellectual achievement over materialistic goods.
Władysław was a math and physics teacher who gave his children a broad education in both the sciences and the forbidden Polish literature. Later, after Marie Curie moved to France, he continued being engaged in her education by working on advanced math problems with her through the mail. Bronisława was also a teacher and at the time of Marie’s birth was the headmistress at Freta Street School, a private girls’ academy in Warsaw.