Drew Hansen, Contributor
I write about innovation, entrepreneurship, and leadership
Fred Allen, a colleague at FORBES, wrote a post the other week that got me thinking. He pointed out a recent Tufts’ study that found that many of the world’s greatest leaders suffered from depression. It brought to my mind the oft-cited connection between creativity and mental illness.
Think about it. Tolstoy. Van Gogh. Dickens. All of them were brilliant, and all of them were a little bit nuts. I bet you can think of your own examples — other historical figures or maybe even people you know.
Famed psychologist Hans Eysenck asserted that creative genius correlates with a high level of what he called psychoticism. Psychoticism, as he defined it, is a dimension of personality that suggests a susceptibility to psychotic behavior. A person doesn’t have to suffer from schizophrenia or bipolar disorder to exhibit this trait; a predisposition is enough.
James Joyce and his daughter, Lucia, make the distinction between psychoticism and psychosis clear. Both father and daughter were likely predisposed to mood disorders, but Joyce lived a seemingly healthy life, unlike Lucia, who eventually went mad. Even Joyce wondered whether Lucia inherited her challenges from him, saying: “Whatever spark or gift I possess has been transmitted to Lucia and it has kindled a fire in her brain.” Perhaps Joyce’s writing was his way of maintaining stability throughout his life.
Challenges notwithstanding, these psychotic tendencies translate well in creative endeavors through what Eysenck refers to as over-inclusiveness. If creativity is the process of coming up with novel and meaningful solutions to perplexing problems, then over-inclusiveness is the ability to see more and more ideas as relevant to a possible solution. Drawing upon a larger sample of ideas, the creative genius finds connections and intersections that no one else sees and eventually formulates an approach that is both original and effective. Over-inclusiveness, therefore, is a cognitive trait that forms a foundation for divergent thinking, the method used to explore many possible solutions based on unexpected connections.
Divergent thinking is the hallmark of creative generalists. Generalists are often derided as a jack of all trades, master of none, yet their broad thinking and diverse interests enable the integration of ideas that leads to true breakthroughs. Steve Hardy, author of the Creative Generalist blog, says that ideas “need space to run around and occasionally bump into strangers.” He describes the following five behaviors of creative generalists:
I’m struck by the marked similarities between the creative generalist’s behaviors and the innovator’s discovery skills: question, observe, associate, network, and experiment. These skills are what’s needed to respond to the inevitable problems we’ll face throughout the 21st century.
The world’s obsession with specialization threatens its own progress. Subject-matter experts are placed on a pedestal, and we put more and more trust in them. The deeper their knowledge, the more intelligent they are, so it goes. But as the world becomes narrower, more fragmented, appealing to an ever increasing amount of niches, the rich network of connections from one field to the next gets lost. The need for generalists who can connect the dots will only grow in importance.
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