Episode 17: David McRaney
Redefining Genius with David McRaney
Episode S3E17: Show Notes
From psychology to neuroscience and beyond, concepts of intelligence, genius, and hyperfixation are key to our understanding of human potential. During this episode, David McRaney joins us to discuss a topic of great import to our course on transformative design; the complexity of the concept of genius. David is a famed journalist, author, podcaster, and expert on belief, currently researching his next book. Join us as we explore the origin story of genius, the role of obsessively pursuing one’s interest, and the inevitability of genius and the implications of labels. In closing, David answers two key questions on the autism spectrum and varying cultural contexts behind the concept of genius. Thanks for tuning in!
Key Points From This Episode:
• Introducing David McRaney, journalist, author, and podcaster.
• Why the topic of genius is important enough to him to research.
• Different ways to approach the topic of genius, from psychology to neuroscience and beyond.
• The origin story behind genius, and the concept of a birthday party.
• David’s findings from spending time interviewing individuals with extraordinarily high IQs.
• Jeremy’s current thesis that giving people the opportunity to pursue their interests until the point of saturation.
• Accounting for bias in the realm of genius and the danger of labelling.
• The relationship between hyperfixation, genius, and the autism spectrum.
• How works of genius usually come into existence.
• Cultural context for the concept of genius.
Quotes:
“If someone creates a work of genius, does that make them a genius? Or do we consider someone a genius before they make the work?” — @DavidMcRaney [0:13:56]
“IQ testing and intelligence testing, and quantifying human potential was biased right off the bat.” — @DavidMcRaney [0:21:41]
“Individualistic cultures are looking for that one person that’s an example, a demigod that we can all look to and say, ‘Yes, it’s possible. The humans can do such a thing.’” — @DavidMcRaney [0:27:06]
Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:
EPISODE 17 [TRANSCRIPT]
“DM: And when you’re born, you got a gift from these God beings, which was your genius, and the word for them meant, your “Youness.” I have to use phrases like this because we don’t have a word for this. Your unique dashness, your you dashness, and that’s everything. It’s the way you walk, the way you talk, it’s the things you like to eat and don’t like to eat but it’s also your talents and your obsessions and that’s your personality, all those things. Not necessarily anything that you would consider it an extraordinary quality, it’s just your uniqueness, your human individuality.”
[0:00:41.0] JU: You’re listening to Paint & Pipette. I’m your host, Jeremy Utley. I teach innovation and entrepreneurship at Stanford University. Thanks for joining me to explore the art and science of bringing new ideas to life. Let’s dive in.
[INTERVIEW]
[0:01:02.7] JU: So, we have the incredible privilege of having a famous journalist, author, podcaster here with us and he has a new project underway, which is related to the topic of genius. It’s probably something all of us here at Stanford are at least familiar with. There’s a famous study, maybe David can speak to that, this famous study commissioned about genius actually at Stanford a long time ago but it’s a topic near and dear to our hearts because of David’s unique definition of the word.
So, you might be thinking, “Genius, what does that have to do with transformative design?” Well, I’d love to help aluminate that, and maybe we can have a little bit of a conversation between me and David, and then you guys can ask him questions as well but I think it’s a topic that is of profound import to the topic of the course, transformative design, and it’s incredibly empowering when you realize the possibilities.
So, it’s a privilege to get to have David here, and hopefully, we can all learn something from him. So maybe David, just to get started, and by the way, I’m recording this, which you can listen to it later if you want to as well. So, that’s why we’re speaking into a microphone even though you’re not hearing anything over the loudspeakers. So, maybe we can start with the question of, “Why genius?”
[0:02:14.6] DM: Why genius?
[0:02:14.8] JU: Why did you undertake this as the next, I mean, you’ve written several very successful books, why is genius taking your fancy?
[0:02:22.5] DM: Oddly, a lot of books don’t have a good origin story because you don’t know where it really comes from exactly but this one does. I was working on my previous book, How Minds Change and one of the first interviews I did was with a researcher named Jim Alcock and he’s an expert in belief. He’s been researching it for 45 years. It’s his life’s path, it’s his life’s obsession, and a famous psychologist.
And I was sitting down in front of him and I asked him, “Hey, just to get started,” it was very early in the research. I said, “You know, just an old journalist trick here being transparent with you, pretend I’m five years old. What does the word “Belief” mean? What’s the definition of the word “Belief?” And he pushed away from his desk and, “Oh, that is a tough one, my friend.” And I felt scared.
I felt like the icy thing go through my veins because of like, “Am I going to go back and tell my editors and everybody that I think maybe I can’t write a book about this?” And I ask him, I was like, “What do you mean? You’ve been studying this for 45 years, why can’t you give me a definition of the word belief?” And he looked me dead in the eye and said, “I can’t give you an answer because I’ve been studying this for 45 years.”
And I took a lot of rapid notes because that was like an explosive concept to me that the idea that the more expertise you have on a topic, the less you can define it and I just set it aside as a note and went back to, “Well, let’s talk about this.” And it wouldn’t go away. Like, it kept coming back up in my mind and I was – I started thinking, I would like to write a book about that concept.
But I wanted to find a hook to talk about that concept and I’m also obsessed with the idea that people – if you ask someone what the word genius means in this room, you’ll get a lot of different answers and it wasn’t a clearly defined concept and it started being thrown around a lot. From Elon Musk to Kanye West to whoever is famous at the moment, if they get labeled as a genius, I’m like, “You mean, genius like Beethoven? Like genius like Einstein? What do you mean?” And then it started to become an obsession in that way and that’s how it started.
That’s how the whole project started and I didn’t really expect this but it’s going from psychology concepts to neuroscientific concepts to cognitive linguistic concepts because there’s so many different ways to approach the idea and that’s why I’m here today. I’m here to learn from you more than anything else because I’m in that beginning idea explosion stage of like, what does this book actually going to be about and the thesis as what does the word genius really mean, and it turns out, you could write a lot of book about that topic. So that’s where it started.
[0:04:36.4] JU: Okay. So, you speak of origin stories, let’s talk maybe, you talked about the origin story of the book. Tell us about the origin of this idea of genius. Where does it come from, what is genius’s origin story, if you will?
[0:04:48.9] DM: This is great right? So, and that’s one of the great things about this project is, I keep being introduced to these new ways of approaching it. Was that what the book will be about? And it’s going to obviously be about a mishmash of all of this. One of the first things I wanted to do was, I went to like, Midsa Headquarters. I’m proud to say, I’ve never – the only journalist that’s ever been allowed to go inside Midsa Headquarters.
So that’s a side story but my first idea was like, we’ll go into like, IQ research and I talked to a lot of people in that world. I interviewed the man with the highest IQ in the world. Man, because the person with the highest IQ in the world was a woman who I have yet to interview and I interviewed the youngest person with the highest IQ currently, all that kind of stuff. At some point, I was like, “How do you start talking about the word?”
And I found a historian, Darrin McMahon who has made one of his like, obsessions is the discussion of how people have approached extraordinary individuals throughout history and I sat down with him and he told me the story of what I’ll tell you, although I’ve done a lot of side research since then, the origin of the word from his Latin roots, “Genere” means, it’s the same as the word that is the root of generate and genealogy and genitals and these are all words related to the concept of “Genere” which means, to bring forth, to bring into existence.
And the Romans are the people who gave us the first, like, instantiation of the concept. They, as part of their religion and mythology, which they did not start a mythology but they had a concept of the spirit realm, and is a bit analogous to like a guardian angel or something like that but they would have considered it a much more, like, defined idea. They believed that there are these spirits, they call them the “Geneai” who would extract a piece of the essence of all reality and bring it into the mortal realm and put it into a mortal being, which would be an individual human being.
And when you were born, you got a gift from these God beings, which was your genius, and the word for them meant, your, “Youness.” I have to use phrases like this because we don’t have a word for this. Your unique “Dashness”, your you “Dashness”, and that’s everything. It’s the way you walk, the way you talk, it’s the things you like to eat and don’t like to eat but it’s also your talents and your obsessions and that’s your personality, all those things. Not necessarily anything that you would consider it an extraordinary quality.
It’s just your uniqueness, your human individuality and they really relish in this idea, these early Romans that so much so that every year on the day of your birth, you would hold a little ceremony where you take a little confection and you’d burn it down to the ground and the ideas that it was going into the ether and you would sing a hymn to that one particular genius, they call it the spirits, the genius as well.
It’s confusing to us, they would use the same word for both but they had no problem with it and you’d thank that genius for bringing you into the mortal realm and that – and I did not believe this even when the historian told me this but I had to cross-reference it a couple of times. This is true, that is the origin of the birthday party. The birthday party came from this ceremony and of all the things that like went viral from their culture, this one went mega viral.
It’s within a lot of other cultures and it spread across not only through Western civilization but many other civilizations, and what fascinates me to no end bout this is that we kept the ceremony and almost, it really still means the same thing. If I have a birthday for someone or someone has one for me, we’re celebrating that person’s uniqueness, their “Youness” but somehow along the arc of this idea and the word and the idea that it maps on to, the word is kind of popped off and it went on its own path.
Because as the different cultures use that word when someone did issue something extraordinary, you would say like, “Wow, that’s a testament to that person’s genius” which originally meant a testament to their uniqueness, their unique perspective, and how they approach the problem but at some point, it became just to mean only when it was extraordinary and that’s not what it was originally meant to mean.
But it certainly means that in our current culture and I find one of the most fascinating things about this investigation so far is that modern psychology, especially humanistic psychology, they want to harken back to the original way of looking at this. The human potential is, everyone has the potential to create as they would say, a discontinuity between my label as a genius moment but they are much more in line with the original concept of this word. So, I can’t get enough of that. That leads you into so many different places to explore the idea.
[0:09:03.1] JU: So then, let’s go there because we’re kind of coming right to the perfect dovetail with the course, if you think about it, transformation as – and our first project, right? Achieving value being alignment, right? Our entire first design project is around identifying those areas of ourselves where we’re at misalignment with. We actually started with a eulogy. So, from birthdays to eulogies for example, or for a moment, we started the class by having students write their eulogy and then we mapped, what are the gaps.
Where do you stand in relation to where you hope someone would speak about you at the end of your life? And we call those misalignments and the goal of the first design project was to identify and to structure address them through new habit formation, simple daily things you can do. So, you can tell, we’re definitely aligned spiritually, so to speak. The question in my mind is, as you think back, to before the word popped off of the kind of arc.
I love that visual of the arc and the word just popping up at some point. How do you think about someone discovering their “Youness?” And I mean that as perhaps, distinct – I think everybody can understand how their personality is different or things like that and not to diminish that, there’s a significant aspect of this conversation. In so far, as someone wants to say, contribute something discontinuous, I like that definition as well.
How does one discover the opportunities for discontinuous contribution that reside within themselves?
[0:10:32.4] DM: That’s a great question. I mean, that’s why I’m here, right? Because we talked about this when I interviewed you for my show and then, I was like, “Wait-wait, you’re doing something that I need to be a part of” because as it was explained to me by lots of different people who are in different domains and my own early research. So I went, on the road for six months and spent time with people who had extraordinarily high IQs and also people who might be labeled as genius for what they’ve done.
And they all had the same – like, they had a very similar story between them or there was something that seemed to be, they shared, which was they tended to be people who played a lot in different spaces and we get seriously obsessed. Like I call them like, autodidact dilations that were seriously obsessed and they would get into something for what could be anything, Legos or you know, how to cook crawfish in different ways.
Like, every person has some obsession they would get into and they would basically get to a saturation point with it and at that saturation point, they would be like, “Well, that was fun” and they’d move to another thing to be obsessed with and they do this over and over again until they got into something that they were like, that couldn’t reach a saturation point and they were like, “I got to get to this” and they will work on it, work on it, work on it, and they would lock into a discontinuity.
I’ll explains what that – why I use that word in a moment. One thing I could not help but notice though was all of these people also shared the privilege of being able to do that. Either through luck or maybe they did something that got them there, a lot of luck usually, luck by birth or luck by happenstance, they could serially jump into a bunch of obsessions and a lot of people are offered that opportunity.
So, whether or not they realize that they were expressing their human potential because they were given or afforded the opportunity to do so, and when I spent time with Scott Barry Kaufman who is an intelligence researcher and also a human potential researcher, he was like, very adamant about, “Yeah, that’s where human psychology is now” is the idea that if we afford more people the opportunity to just you know, fart around and find their thing until they find, “Oh yeah, I actually do find the space or place where I will play until the day I die” it increases the likelihood that they will find a discontinuity and you have a –
So, I spent time with David Krakauer at the Santa Fe Institute for Complexity and he had the best insight into that, which was what we currently, in our culture, use the word to refer to most often is when a person has played in a space and they find a discontinuity there and so you have this step-wise progress of that domain and then they shoot way ahead, and who knows how they do it.
Oftentimes, it wasn’t through, they don’t have anything extraordinary about them that would have gotten them there, they just happened to be looking at a place of one or was looking or using a method nobody had ever used. He liked to talk about irrational numbers like, they were working on a simple version of it. They were working on a complex problem that required math that apparently didn’t exist yet and they’re like, “What if we just made up some numbers?”
[0:13:17.5] JU: Yeah, sure. Yeah, no problem, I’ve got microphone voice, go ahead.
[0:13:20.4] DM: There are these people, David Krakauer talked about the invention of irrational numbers as a good example of a discontinuity, a group of mathematicians who is trying to solve equations that they couldn’t solve. They were like, “You know, we could solve this if we made up numbers that don’t exist.” And so they did and then they did solve the equations and then you know, we get all sorts of insights in the quantum physics.
And we have, you know, global satellite systems that use irrational number equations because they just made up something, and that created a gigantic leap in mathematics just because they went through, and he called that a discontinuity and he would refer to that as a work of genius and there’s a philosophical debate as to whether or not, if someone creates a work of genius, does that make them a genius or do we consider somebody a genius before they create the work.
This is about semantics and linguistics but it’s part of the problem, part of the mystery of it all.
[SPONSOR MESSAGE]
[0:14:10.3] JU: Research is clear that our first idea probably isn’t our best idea. That’s true for you, me, as well as your organization but that first idea is an essential step to better ideas. So, how do you improve your idea flow? That’s my passion and the work I do with organizations. If you’d like to explore how I can help your organization implement better ideas, let’s talk. Check out my website, jeremyutley.design, or drop me a line at jutley@jeremyutley.design. Let’s make ideas flow better.
[INTERVIEW CONTINUED]
[0:14:45.5] JU: My overall answer to this is it seems to be and my thesis currently is like increasing the opportunity for people to become obsessed with a thing and then abandon it if they’re not interested. You know, they reach a saturation point until they find the thing they’ll work on maybe forever.
The larger population, you have people doing that, the more likely someone will, most of them will not, someone will discover a discontinuity that we’ll all benefit from. We will collectively look at that and say, “Genius” but it still plays with the original concept of it because we allow them to take their uniqueness and apply it. So, that’s my current thinking.
So, how do you think about, I’m a big believer in passion and I have written about it in different times. I think about Steve Jobs, part of the reason that he was able to make the iPod is because he loved music and he actually says, “The reason that Microsoft Zune sucks is because they weren’t making something that they wanted their friends to love but we love music and we made a product that our friends would love” right?
You think about Jeff Bezos, Jeff Bezos was obsessed with books growing up. It’s not surprising to me he did something interesting regarding books. You know the other thing he was obsessed with? He’s a valedictorian of his high school and do you know what he gave his valedictory speech on? Meet me in outer space. How many of you, when you see him going up in a rocket ship think, “Oh, that’s a billionaire’s club thing, he’s just trying to compete with Richard Branson.”
I know I did and then I started studying and I go, “Wait, since he was 14 years old, he’s been obsessed with this question of going to space.” And to me, I mean, by the way, that’s not to endorse those personalities or management styles or anything like that. It’s to say, I do see evidence that love and passion plays into one’s ability to create a disproportionate or discontinuous difference, and yet at the same time, I’m also aware of like, Cal Newport.
[0:16:34.2] DM: Yeah.
[0:16:34.7] JU: He’s got a book called So Good They Can’t Ignore You, and the whole premise of his book is, passion is baloney and people say, follow your passion, that doesn’t mean anything. He takes down even Steve Jobs's speech at Stanford about following your passion and how that’s not even true about Steve Jobs and so, I would love to hear, how do you think about that, which is to say, to me, out of both sides of my mouth, I’d say, it’s at least not straightforward that the answer is follow your passion.
So, how do you think about that, going back to this question again of finding your “Youness,” how does one know, is this a passion where there’s going to be a discontinuous advance or is this something that I tough to keep in check and maybe not indulge so much?
[0:17:15.6] DM: It comes up in creative pursuits and artistic pursuits a lot, right? Like, a person in those spaces isn’t trying to create a discontinuity – I think in stem world, that framework makes a lot of sense. The Institute for Complexity Science, you know, they enjoy that because of the framework. The – but you know interestingly, Krakauer, it was a very bizarre thing to bring up out of nowhere as far as the conversation as going was that we’re seeing that one person playing basketball on a team uses more calories, more glucose is going to the brain than a person trying to solve a math equation.
And he was like, “So, what are we?” he is like, “I’m aware because there’s a little bit of bias in my world that we’re not considering all domains of human endeavor.” The definition of genius in that world or in the world of like violin or in the world of anything, culinary arts is going to be slightly skewed in that direction. A lot of people in those worlds who are considered genius were just doing their job. They were just trying to solve problems that they were facing and that’s problems the whole career field was facing.
There is this side of things that I’m going to slowly wade into, which is I get people who – they love genius so much, they want to talk about it all day long and there are other people who are just trying to get through the day. Now, there are a whole – many stories through history of people we consider genius level or they’ve done something that we would consider a work of genius that they were simply trying to solve the problem of, how do I get food in my mouth and the mouths of my children and there has to be something there to talk about and so, I’m at the beginning of looking into that.
[0:18:40.1] JU: The necessity framework perhaps. Necessity framework perhaps, necessity being the mother of genius. So, one last question, and then I’ll open it up to the class as well. I’d love to talk about similar to actually to Luisa’s comment earlier regarding generative AI and bias, I read another book. I can’t remember, I think it was written by a guy at Yale, who is talking about genius in some capacity.
And he mentioned how among a survey of kind of a mixed survey, men and women, different races, ages, nationalities, et cetera if they were asked to name 10 geniuses, on average, a woman’s name didn’t come up until number seven or eight or something like that and even among educated women, the first genius on their list wasn’t until something like seven or eight and which is to say, there’s definitely gender bias there.
How do you think about accounting for bias in this realm or in this topic and how does one offset, you know, to use the large language models as an example, there’s a lot of bias baked in and just to use that as a metaphor, how does one become aware of one’s own large language model biases as one thinks about genius and one’s own life or in the world, et cetera?
[0:19:51.0] DM: This is enormous, right? Because the history of this expiration is very, very old white duty, and the thing is, and I was shocked to find this, I was shocked that it was going to be a big part of the investigation is that as soon as we started quantifying these things, it went to Eugenics immediately, like, immediately, and there’s a period of time, I don't know where or when is it, I wasn’t shocked to learn this.
Like, when the IQ test was developed, it was originally developed by French public schools because they were just trying to figure out how do we get people who were like peasant-y to come to school and so we can’t teach everyone. It’s going to be expensive, some people can’t come. I didn’t realize that the whole idea in the very beginning was exclusion. They were like, “Some people don’t get to go to our public schools.”
So, they’re like, “Let’s develop a test to figure out where to put people in what grade they should go in” and you know, they did it by averaging them and figuring out, “Well, you’re above average, you’re below average, you’ll go into a class that’s advanced, you’ll go one that’s behind” and that’s how we all solved this problem and the result of that was the IQ test and then the IQ test was quickly wrapped into a lot of other academic domains.
And as soon as it was in those, it started being used for nefarious purposes. In the United States, you know, you used to come to Ellis Island and they would give you an IQ test. If it was too low, you might get sterilized because they didn’t want to have more morons and imbecilic in the population, and at the time, moron and imbecilic were scientific labels for a person of a certain IQ and as soon as they had that thought, they also had, “What do we call people with an above IQ?”
And they’re like, “Oh, we’ll use the phrase, we’ll use the word genius” And they put the genius label on you and once they had that, they’re like, “Oh wow, what if we try to just make generations of geniuses?” And that went straight to Eugenics and across the Eugenics of that ear was extremely, anyone who doesn’t look like me doesn’t get to be a – put into that category, clearly just by the fact of the color of their skin or the nature of their ethnicity that person couldn’t even possibly be a genius and it was right there from the beginning.
Like, IQ testing and intelligence testing, and quantifying human potential was biased right off the bat. You would think that maybe we got passed that by now or at least we’re aware of it but one month from today, I’m going to go spend a week with two Eugenicists who live in Pennsylvania. They recently went on the news. I thought I had like exclusive rights to them but they have a pretty strong PR campaign going.
Simone and Malcolm Collins are billionaires, who are billionaire couple, who are gene editing their children through whatever means they’re able to get around the legality of that. They call themselves the Gattaca Couple. They’re trying to alter the genetic makeup of their offspring to be geniuses and they actually started a small school, the genius school just for the other people who are doing this, what they call the pronatalist movement.
And it reeks of Eugenics and I’ve told them this, I’ve been very transparent with them, like, “When I put you in this book, that’s now I’m going to describe this.” “No, it’s fine.” they’re proud of it, they’re okay with it. They believe they can convert all of this too, their way of seeing things and you know, they’ll say things like, “We knew your child was destined for it, to have a disorder, would you use this technology to prevent that because you don’t want them to have a disadvantage and so, if we knew that they were going to have a certain level of intelligence, would you use this to give them above level of intelligence to eradicate their disadvantage?”
That’s how they argue for it and they aren’t the only people doing this. There is a pronatalist movement in this country currently, of people that have the money to do this thing and they’re going to be a part of the book because the history of human potential research has a lot of eugenics wrapped up in it. So, there is not been a whole lot of DEI in this world to put it very simply and I tend to, you know, face that head-on.
[0:23:15.0] JU: All right, let’s open it up for questions. Coco, did you have a question?
[0:23:18.7] COCO: You mentioned very briefly the like potential ties to like autistic behavior but I was previous to when you said that, I was kind of curious of just like you talking about the type of hyper-fixation and like just the way that that hyper-fixation goes I feel like especially in the US and like I would say the US not even just like Western society, there is like if you hyper-fixate on things you are most likely on the spectrum.
And that like receives a lot of pushback in different ways. So, like how would you I guess characterize the experience or like interviews that you’ve had with people that you now see that like that’s maybe a common trend towards achieving something brilliant and like supporting that in a society or given that we live in the US, in a society that maybe does not value that aspect of hyper-fixation to people.
[0:24:04.3] DM: That’s a super cool question. Yeah, it comes up a lot and also the sort of gender nature of autism comes up a lot. It’s just one of those things it’s not clearly defined for it, like nothing, just genius isn’t clearly defined. The idea of what are we talking about when we talk about hyper-fixation and should there be a word for it and labels matter. A lot of this project is all about these labels.
Even moving to the word – using the word gifted instead. That was an attempt to like kind of euphemism for these terms so that it wasn’t so problematic. The gifted programs are all clearly problematic in the sense that why isn’t everybody getting that same treatment in the school, right? Oddly enough, Simone is on the spectrum, she was very upfront about this. So, this Eugenesis it feels that their opinion is if you want to talk about how there’s such a wide range looking at this, their opinion that they believe that’s an advancement in the human species.
They believe that’s the next level thing that hyper-fixation is something that we should move toward and they want the gene-edited so that everyone’s hyper-fixated at least in her level. She also, by the way, she has a phobia of doorknobs. I think I should bring that up for some reason, I do plan to ask her, “In your Utopian future that you imagine” because they have a very long-term plan by the way.
They want to take over the species, they want their genes to be dominant and they also want to train their children to be good at politics, so that they can take over the political system in the United States and then eventually, the planet. Yes, it sounds like a supervillain plan, that’s what I told them. I said, “I feel like I’m James Bond strapped to a chair and you are just telling me your plan” and they’re like, “Oh, that’s funny.”
So, we’ll see, we’ll see, I tend to approach them objectively and see what they’re up to but as you can see, I have a bias going in. I will say as far as all the different veins of that, I’ve spent time in especially the people who – that I have spent time with, with an extremely high IQs or people who have done something we might consider a work of genius, they certainly are hyper-fixated whether or not we would put them on any kind of labeled spectrum.
And the understanding of autism and how it works and whether or not we should even create a category of that class of our human traits is of such debate that I’ll have to discuss it but I will – luckily, as my approach to science journalism is to just tell the reader I’m not the expert. I’m talking to experts, I have a question I’m trying to get to here is the current level of debate on that topic, and from what you’re talking about, that’s how I have to approach it is that we’re very early in discussing those issues.
But they are definitely a part of the thing because hyper-fixation is required for the stem side of what a genius would be. I don’t know if I answered anything but the truth is, I don’t know, and that was a very large way of saying I don’t know but I am very fascinated with it and it is on the board. It is not something that I can look away from.
[0:26:26.3] COCO: This kind of goes along with that because it made me think of how I’m in this other class about like designing for accessibility and our project right now is about ADHD and autism in like the workplace and we talk a lot about like the challenges that they face working with others and I’m wondering if you have noticed like works of genius happening on a more solitary level or like with others in conjunction?
[0:26:55.2] DM: I’m glad you asked this question. This is a testament to what this word has been so western for so long and the pursuits and to trying to understand it and a lot of people have been so western because individualistic cultures are looking for that one person that’s an example, a demigod that we can all look to and say, “Yes, it’s possible. The humans can do such a thing.” Perhaps, I could do such a thing and then everyone will look at me and say, “You’re amazing.”
And I would get rewards and I’ll be famous and I’ll have ultimate validation. It is a very Western way of looking at the world and that’s because psychology is a very Western science and these concepts, even the word itself comes from this lineage and it is not looked upon this way in other cultural, you know, domains. Like the idea of working together and coming with a group solution to a problem, which everybody’s ideas are included and everybody’s problems are thought about.
It isn’t part of the Western-like genealogy of this concept and it’s so easy to not recognize that if you’ve been steeped into that culture your entire life. So, yes, 100% part of the process right now is saying, “Okay, that’s how these people talk about it in this particular area of experience and cultural influence but what of other cultures of impression and do they even have this concept and some cultures don’t?” It’s a fascinating way to see it.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
[0:28:12.3] JU: By day, I’m a professor but I absolutely love moonlighting as a front-row student next to you during these interviews. One of my favorite things is taking the gems from these episodes and turning them into practical tips and lessons for you and your team. If you want to share the lessons you picked up from this episode with your organization, feel free to reach out. I’d be thrilled to do a keynote on the secrets that I’ve gleaned from creative masters or put together a hands-on workshop to supercharge your next offsite adventure. Hit me up at jutley@jeremyutley.design for more information.
[END]
The first question an innovator must answer is not “can I make it?” but rather, “should I?” This has become something of a mantra among CEOs I work with, as a needful protection against the gravitational pull of the organizational bureaucracy.