Last week's blog post was about trends and innovations. One of the world's most famous innovators, Elon Musk, has just become the richest person in the world. What makes him so successful? What is his secret? A book can shed some light on these questions.
The inspiring book "Quirky" by Melissa Schilling. She researched eight innovation pioneers, what shaped their personalities and enabled their remarkable achievements. Namely, the book's title relates to the traits of Albert Einstein, Elon Musk, Nikola Tesla, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison, Marie Curie, Steve Jobs, and Dean Kamen. They invented technologies, achieved scientific breakthroughs and developed products and services that changed our lives and will continue to do so.
Author Melissa Schilling, an American innovation scholar herself and professor at New York University's Stern School of Business, analyzed the lives of these geniuses as well as their quirks and qualities. Using case studies, she portraits each personality and goes back to his respectively her early childhood years to recognize similarities and differences among them.
Commonalities among Einstein, Musk and Jobs
Overall, Schilling analyzes 7 traits. She also elaborates on three commonalities among Albert Einstein, Elon Musk and Steve Jobs. She finds that they share 1) a sense of social separateness, 2) high idealism and all three were 3) no perfect students. Let's take a closer look at these quirks.
1) Sense of separateness – All three personalities can be described as self-sufficient which comes at the cost of social attachment. Fully emerged in their own world, their minds grew by reading, writing and processing issues they were truly, intrinsically interested in. Their social separateness enabled them to think independently and challenge the widely accepted status quo. As Schilling puts it: "Because they didn't belong to the social world, they didn't have to obey its rules, freeing them to develop bold ideas and stick with them even in the face of criticism."
2) High Idealism – The key driver of their doings, and eventually their successes, was their idealism, their sense of a higher purpose. They were motivated to achieve big goals that go beyond common thinking and conceptualizing (think of "colonizing mars"). It was their ambition to change the way we think, how we behave on an everyday level. They were driven by a calling and full of confidence.
3) No perfect students – Their education did not follow rigorous ways. Driven by their visions and their ability to self-educate, they did not shy away from challenging educational structures. Einstein was said to be a "rebellious" student; Jobs dropped out of college but stayed on campus to take classes he was actually interested in (like calligraphy); and, after just two days, Musk dropped out of a PhD program at Stanford University to start a company with his brother.
Almost all of the eight innovators have one thing in common: they had access to books, and they devoured them.
Our take-away from the book: Believe in yourself!
Tapping into the minds of these extraordinary people is inspiring and triggers some thinking about how to nurture creativity, curiosity and innovativeness. Thus, the book offers input to entrepreneurs, managers, parents, researchers and other groups alike.
You cannot teach someone to become a genius, but you can enable a creative environment to inspire others and yield innovations. If you are a leader, the book helps to understand and connect better with quirky employees. Give them access to knowledge and maintain a can-do-atmosphere. If they don't feel pressured to conformity, it allows them to live out their innovative potential. The same goes for parents, by the way. As Musk's mother puts it: "He goes into his brain and then you just see he is in another world. He still does that. Now I just leave him be because I know he is designing a new rocket or something" (from the book "Elon Musk" by Ashlee Vance).
If you are hiring new talent, do not make premature decisions if an applicant stands out because of what might seem like unsocial or too idealistic behavior; and try to distinguish confidence from arrogance.
In case you are the applicant, this book encourages you to be confident and to believe in yourself. You can succeed even if you don't have the perfect CV and you took some detours to get where you are. The key is to know your narrative and to take the hiring manager along on your journey, so (s)he understands you and gets to see your potential.
The book also holds value for us recruiters. When recruiting for IT, engineering and life sciences experts, we at Coopers have come across some impressive personalities; it's one of our favorite things about our job. Looking out for their quirks helps us to understand their profile and to match them with the right company and the right position where they get to unfold their full potential.
So, whether you want to hire the innovation pioneer of tomorrow or you have big goals for your career, we will support you all the way. Get in touch with us!
Your Coopers Team
The book was first published in 2018 by PublicAffairs.
Picture from PublicAffairs.
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