so now we've also spent a lot of time
selecting entrepreneurs I worked with
this company in California that has
started schools for entrepreneurs in a
hundred and now I think 160 different
countries all over the world and this
the guy who started this who's name is a
Dale ressies a real it's an absolute
monster the guy started well he started
all those schools in five years 165
schools you know in all all across the
world eight different languages and
we've been screening people for
entrepreneurial ability and if you're
gonna 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 like 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 governed
structure in fact there may be many
times where you have to break a small
rule to to move properly at a higher
level of analysis there's there's no
algorithmic way of generating a new
company right obviously and so it's
people who are very high in openness who
happened 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 and
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 it's not surprising the
thing is you know 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 gonna
say you're going to evaluate a hunt the
performance of a hundred 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
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 you know um 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 and that they couldn't
continue not in the mean way they 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 then that's really the law of
creative people right they're always
stepping outside of evaluation
structures and so 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 but it 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 it may be
thank God for that most of the time
you're in a discipline you 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
to make real advances in the generation
of knowledge one tiny micro step at a
time it doesn't matter if there's a
hundred thousand people doing it and
each of them is making a micro step man
were 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
Kanchana
justice is a great predictor so 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 bureaucracy
stultify right because what happens is
they they develop they get chock-full of
conscientious people with a few
Psychopaths thrown in there just for
good measure they get chart full of 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 wingnuts in
your organization to come up with
completely absurd ideas that might just
on the off-chance be true and 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 your 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 market place 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 it's it's 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 a you
know in an isolated cell a creative
person who isn't being creative they
just they just
wither and die so they're stuck with it
so but it is a high-risk high-return
strategy so probably better if you want
to be creative or if you are and you
should take this advice to heart because
I've been watching people for a long
time if you want to engage in a creative
pursuit you should find something stable
to do that will generate you an income
and you should pursue the thing that
you're creative about on the side
because monetizing creative production
is so bloody difficult that especially
now like especially in like artistic
domains generation of music and that
sort of thing is like you just have no
idea how many million songs there are on
the internet and the vast majority of
them commercially available get
downloaded zero times like 80 80 million
songs or something like that on the net
and I believe it's something in the
neighborhood of 70 million get
downloaded 2-0 times and then there's a
hundred that can get downloaded like
three hundred and fifty million times
and so those people are wildly
successful and everyone else collapses
in failure yep
no we'll talk about that more okay so
that's not a bad overview for for
initial foray into psycho metrics