https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=3A0pMX2r2LE
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-governed 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, you know, it’s easy to be cynical about that, 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 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 of course, that’s what happens in universities. You know, 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, and 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 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. 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. 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 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. 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 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 creative, they just wither and die. So they’re stuck with it. But it is a high-risk, high-return strategy.