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 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 of governing 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 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 I.Q. is it 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, ...
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 is 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,
they continually step outside of the domain of evaluation structures. Right, because if you're going to say you're going to evaluate, ...ummm
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 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 then 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.
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 lot 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, 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 maybe 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 level creatives,
to make real advances in the generation of knowledge. One tiny micro step at a time.
Doesn't matter if there's a hundred thousand 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. 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 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
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 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, a,
a, network around you of people who have skills that you don't, and then the production of a, of a,
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 going 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.
NaGB