As good things happen to you,
the probability that more good things will happen increases.
Right. So because once you're famous,
people give you all sorts of opportunities to do other things, right?
So your success doesn't go like this. It goes like this.
Zero > zero > skyrocket.
That's how it works.
But getting from zero to one...
If you're starting a business, the hardest customer you'll ever get is
your first one, and then the second hardest one will be your second one.
It's virtually impossible to get a first customer because they're going to say
to you... First of all, you're going to be selling to people
who are basically conservative and they're not going to be evaluate...
They're not going to be willing or able
to evaluate whether your damn product is good for anything.
So they'll say, well, who are your other customers?
And if your answer to that is, well, we don't have any.
It's like, well, then what they're going to be the first one?!
No, because people don't stick their necks out, at all.
Not a bit. Ever.
And so unless you're well established in the market, especially if you're
dealing with a big company, you can just bloody well forget it.
It's like a three year sales cycle anyways,
because big corporations move very slowly
and you might be able to find a small company that doesn't have much money,
who would be willing to use your stupid product for nothing,
if you're really nice to them.
And you can get one customer that way, it's very difficult.
And so you'll end up...
What do you think, the royalty, just out of curiosity...
So I've written a book.
It's going to be published by Penguin Random House in January.
What do you think the royalty is for an author on a book?
So you make something creative, you get a percentage of the sale.
What do you think the percentage is? Just out of curiosity?
Guess.
Yeah, it's like 5%. So, think about that.
So that means that you make your thing and 95% of it belongs to someone else.
And that's if things are going quite well for you,
and it doesn't really matter what you manufacture or produce.
That's about what you can expect.
Sales, marketing, distribution, it eats it all up.
If you're going to be an entrepreneur, you almost have the opposite profile.
As a soldier. You're very high in openness
and you're lower in conscientiousness, or at least conscientiousness is irrelevant.
And the reason for that seems to be
that if you're an orderly person and you like to follow procedures and rules,
it's kind of hard for you to start a company
because when you first start a company or engage in any other creative process,
because entrepreneurs turn out to be the same as artists,
you kind of have to...
You're not operating within a rule of governance structure.
In fact, there may be many times where you
have to break a small rule to move properly at a higher level of analysis.
There's no algorithmic way of generating a new company.
Right. Obviously.
And so it's people who are very high
in openness who happen to be good entrepreneurs.
And so this is something I thought was
extraordinarily cool because we'd also already known what predicts
managerial, administrative and academic ability.
IQ is crucial for any complex job.
So we'll just leave that behind.
But what predicts academic ability,
for example, at the University of Toronto, is intelligence, obviously.
But also conscientiousness. The correlation between
creativity and grades at the U of T is zero.
Zero. Right.
But it's not surprising.
The thing is, it's easy to be cynical about that.
But one of the things you have to understand about creative people is
that they continually step outside of the domain of evaluation structures.
Right? Because if you're going to say you're going to evaluate
the performance of 100 professors on their lecturing ability,
well, you kind of have to measure what's common
across all the professors in order to come up with the standards for evaluation.
Well, that means you're not going to be able to use that structure to evaluate
a particularly creative professor because he or she is going to do something
in a way that's so different that it won't show up on the evaluation measure.
And, of course, that's what happens in universities.
Somebody sent me a couple of days ago, somebody sent me an essay that they had
written for their master's thesis that was wildly creative, and they were basically
told to leave the program and that they couldn't continue, not in the mean way.
What happened was that what they were thinking was so outside of the conventions
in the discipline is that no one had any idea what to do with the essay.
So that's really the lot of creative people, right?
They're always stepping outside of evaluation structures.
It's not that surprising
that the relationship between creativity and grades at the U of T is zero.
We found out as well by looking at graduate student performance across
multiple institutions, that there was a negative correlation
between creativity and graduate school performance.
It wasn't even zero.
It was worse than negative.
Being creative was negative.
And you think, well, that could make you cynical as well.
But you can't be cynical in that way
because one of the things that happens in science is that science tends
to progress incrementally rather than in great leaps.
Now and then someone comes along who blows
the structure out of a science and advances it ridiculously like Einstein.
But like most people aren't Einstein, and maybe thank God for that.
Most of the time, you're in a discipline, you understand the discipline.
And then once you've developed understanding of the discipline,
you know what the next micro question is that should be answered.
And part of the reason that science is so
powerful is because it allows people who aren't genius level creatives to make
real advances in the generation of knowledge.
One tiny micro step at a time.
It doesn't matter. If there's 100,000 people doing it,
and each of them is making a micro step,
man, we're zipping along as fast as we possibly want to zip along.
And so it turns out to be conscientiousness.
That's the excellent predictor of graduate student performance.
That's the best predictor for law.
It's the best predictor for managerial positions.
It's the best predictor for administrative
positions, anything that has a structure of rules that needs to be applied.
Conscientiousness is a great predictor,
but it's not good for predicting artistic ability or entrepreneurial ability.
And that's also really important because one of the things...
This is partly why bureaucracies stultify, right?
Because what happens is as they develop, they get chock full of conscientious people
with a few psychopaths thrown in there just for good measure.
They get chock full of conscientious people busily zooming efficiently down
a single track, and then all of a sudden, the landscape shifts and they're going
very, very efficiently in exactly the wrong direction.
And then the whole bloody thing falls apart.
So you need to have some creative wing nuts in your organization to come up
with completely absurd ideas that might just on the off chance be true.
So creativity is strange in that manner,
too, because it's a high risk, high return game.
You're a lot safer in your life to find a functioning entity and to operate as
a cog within it, as long as the entity keeps functioning.
Because if you're creative and you go off on tangents all the time,
there's some probability that one of those tangents is going to be exactly what is
needed at the time, and you're going to become hyper successful as a consequence.
But there's much more probability that even though some of your ideas might
be highly valuable, the probability that this is the right
time and place for them is extraordinarily low.
So to produce a successful creative product, for example, in the marketplace,
you need a ridiculous combination of creativity, so that you keep generating
ideas, and then a network around you of people who have
skills that you don't and then the production of a product,
let's say, whatever that happens to be.
That's actually in demand by the marketplace at exactly that moment
and that someone else hasn't already done better.
So the sensible thing to tell anybody who wants to be creative is that's stupid.
You shouldn't do it.
Your probability of success is so low
that it's better just to do something sensible.
But the problem with that is that creative
people can't do that because they're creative.
And if they shut down their creativity,
it's like an extrovert who's gone to live in an isolated cell,
a creative person who isn't being and creative, they just wither and die.
So they're stuck within.