I grabbed Melissa A. Schilling's book Quirky from the a display shelf at the library. The through-line of the year appears to be a study of weirdos and eccentrics, going back to the Beats, the Surrealists, and various internet searches. (I had not planned on formalizing this as a research topic for the year -- 2020: the year of eccentricity -- but it looks like that is what it has been so far).
First, a review of the book.
Quirky pulls together a close study of the following "breakthrough" serial innovators:
Albert Einstein, Elon Musk, Nikola Telsa, Thomas Edison, Marie Currie, Steve Jobs, Dean Kamen, and Benjamin FranklinI leave it to someone interested enough in the topic to read the book to find the author's discussion of why these individuals were selected [1]. Each chapter is organized by a trait most of innovators share, and the biography of one individual from the list is used to anchor the discussion.
I think Quirky does an excellent job of showing where there are similarities and differences. For example, all the serial innovators in the sample were workaholics. Also, all of them worked toward idealistic goals, except for Thomas Edison, and because he is the notable exception, extra attention is given to his motivations throughout his career [2]. The majority of the group showed heavily shortened sleep schedules, with Einstein's sleep patterns being the biggest outlier, sleeping 10 hours a night. Franklin slept seven, and apparently Elon Musk's sleep is an ongoing discussion online because we live in a very loud time (search it out for yourself).
After reading a few pages, I grew afraid that this book would become a business book, stopping near constantly to hype its own vision, and giving tips how we can all be serial innovators. I jumped to reading the back flap, and grew yet more concerned when I saw Schilling was "a published expert in the field of innovation", and associated with a string of business schools. I am happy to say that my fears did not come to pass. The traits and biographies are well-researched and discussed with rigor, and the discussions of implications are sparse and even-handed, leaving a lot for the readers to think about and draw their own conclusions upon. The book is honest: you might not be able to become a serial innovator of this level.
II
Here's one of the most interesting passages from the book:
In my [Schiller's] work modeling cognitive insight as a network process, I showed that individuals who are more likely or more able to search longer paths through the network of associations in their mind can arrive at a connection between two ideas or facts that seems unexpected or strange to others. What appears to be random may not be random at all -- it is just difficult for other people to see the association because they are not following as long a chain of associations (109-110).Many things spin off from this concept. For one, it really hard to follow the thoughts of the truly creative. They are usually seeing wider than other people to come up with their ideas. For this reason, Schiller recommends not pre-censoring the ideas of entrepreneurs and researchers.
Also, I think this means creative people are prone to find shorter, easier connections to be boring. To them, the repeated cliché can easily grow tedious. This brings up a possible reversal of causation -- perhaps boredom with easy connections is what drives these people to seek out longer chains. How much this chain seeking overlaps with or is subsumed by the Big Five Trait of Openess to Experience I leave as an open question (pun accepted).
My intuition was that seeking longer associative chains was separate from IQ, but something that could stack well upon it -- probably safer to say I thought they were mildly correlated, at best. Some research, visible at [3] indicates that might be the case. My intuition was based on interactions with people who at least self-identify as being high IQ. They often misunderstand what others say, and try to twist difficult questions into trivially stupid ones and then give a trivially stupid, uncreative answers [4], often expecting to be praised for their quickness. This could be a simple case of my maxim "contempt brain is stupid brain," but Paul Graham shows there are people who maintain this intellectual peevishness even towards people who are trying to help them get rich. Graham:
. . . I noticed a pattern in the least successful startups we'd funded: they all seemed hard to talk to. It felt as if there was some kind of wall between us. I could never quite tell if they understood what I was saying.[. . .]
Like real world resourcefulness, conversational resourcefulness often means doing things you don't want to. Chasing down all the implications of what's said to you can sometimes lead to uncomfortable conclusions. The best word to describe the failure to do so is probably "denial," though that seems a bit too narrow. A better way to describe the situation would be to say that the unsuccessful founders had the sort of conservatism that comes from weakness. They traversed idea space as gingerly as a very old person traverses the physical worldI see it working this way:
1) There are high IQ people.
2) There are people with high desire for long network paths who seek more knowledge (the IQ cheerleaders will point out that this requires an IQ threshold. Neat. Look at footnote [3] again).
3) Only when you have both do you load into you mind as much as you can, forging connections, seeing more, and being able to make mental manipulations in the larger space.
This is what it takes to be the best of the best in innovation.
As an aside, though some research indicates a mild correlation between IQ and Openess, I am highly interested in high IQ and Closed to New Experience because I want to understand internet assholes better. I may report on that some other time.
<end of my musings on the quote>
After the quote above, Schiller goes on to talk about Musk and Nikola Telsa's ability to do lightening calculations, store them in their head and keep flying, but I think that is too narrow of an instance of the point being made.
After all, Ian Stewart in the book Significant Figures states
Most lighting calculators are hopeless at anything more advanced than arithmetic; Gauss, as ever, was an exception (279).Multiple talents can overlap on top of one another. When they do in exceptional ways, you can get some exceptional innovators.
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[1] Two individuals I think could be easily added to the list are Buckminster Fuller and Thomas Jefferson. Doing so, however, wouldn't add much to the content of the book. Instead, think of them as independent tests to assess Schilling's conclusions. Interestingly, both are noted for odd sleep schedules, something else that seems common enough among serial innovators. Jefferson often stayed up several days in a row and then crashing up to 24 hours straight. And Fuller promoted his dymaxion sleep as just another item in his suite of weirdo ideas.
[2] Though Edison came out and told people he wasn't idealistic and just invented for money, his biographical sketch showed how curious he was and how willing to throw money at ventures based on how interesting they were for him to explore, rather than working as a profit center. He was actually a pretty bad businessman.
[3] From the abstract of this paper
When investigating a liberal criterion of ideational originality (i.e., two original ideas), a threshold was detected at around 100 IQ points. In contrast, a threshold of 120 IQ points emerged when the criterion was more demanding (i.e., many original ideas). . . In addition, we obtained evidence that once the intelligence threshold is met, personality factors become more predictive for creativity.
[4] Only my first year of teaching did I find this evasiveness amusing. (Not to say everyone who does it is high IQ -- which should tell you something about how much intelligence is really being used when someone does this). I thought the students doing this were being "sharp but not bright." (No, not something I ever said aloud). However, it also wears pretty thin pretty fast.
