I remember reading an article when I was about twelve years old. I think it might have been Scientific American where they measured the efficiency of locomotion for all these species on planet earth. How many kilocalories did they expend to get from point A to point B? And the Condor 1 came in at the top of the list, surpassed everything else. And humans came in about a third of the way down the list which was not such a great showing for the crown of creation. And—but somebody there had the imagination to test the efficiency of a human riding a bicycle. A human riding a bicycle blew away the Condor, all the way off the top of the list. And it made a really big impression on me that we humans are tool builders. And that we can fashion tools that amplify these inherent abilities that we have to spectacular magnitudes. And so for me, a computer has always been a bicycle of the mind. Something that takes us far beyond our inherent abilities.41
He wasn’t interested in complex and clunky computers that were machines for engineers; they had to be beautiful, intuitive machines for everybody. His mission was to create a computer that was no ordinary tool—it would be a revolution in how people think. As he stated, “The thing that bounded us together at Apple was the ability to make things that were going to change the world. That was very important.”42 When Steve Wozniak wanted to add extra ports to the Macintosh (like he had done with the Apple II) so that users could customize their computer with additional devices and features, Steve Jobs fought him. In Jobs’s mind, extra ports were a threat to the seamlessness and reliability of the computer. When Apple CEO John Scully and others proposed licensing the Mac operating system to other manufacturers—akin to how Microsoft competed with Windows—Jobs furiously refused: other companies could not be trusted to create the kind of “insanely great” experience that the Macintosh was intended to provide.
Jobs even insisted that the factory be painted a stark white. Debi Coleman, Apple’s manufacturing director, protested: “You can’t paint a factory pure white. There’s going to be dust and stuff all over.” However, Jobs would not relent, saying that the aesthetics of the factory were important—they influence a company’s sense of discipline in its engineering:
I’d go out to the factory, and I’d put on a white glove to check for dust. I’d find it everywhere—on machines, on the tops of the racks, on the floor. And I’d ask Debi to get it cleaned. I told her I thought we should be able to eat off the floor of the factory. Well, this drove Debi up the wall. She didn’t understand why. And I couldn’t articulate it back then. See, I’d been very influenced by what I’d seen in Japan. Part of what I greatly admired there—and part of what we were lacking in our factory—was a sense of teamwork and discipline. If we didn’t have the discipline to keep that place spotless, then we weren’t going to have the discipline to keep all these machines running.43
When sales for the Macintosh were slower than expected, Jobs became increasingly tense and volatile, and was prone to casting blame on others around the company. Eventually Apple’s board of directors pushed Scully to remove Jobs from the helm of the Macintosh division. Scully was reluctant, but Jobs forced a showdown between the two of them by telling Scully (and others) that it was Scully who should leave and that he should be made CEO. The board sided with Scully. Although they offered to keep Jobs on at the company in a research role, he stormed away from the company in a daze of fury and pain. In an interview with Playboy, he said, “I feel like somebody just punched me in the stomach and knocked all my wind out. I’m only 30 years old and I want to have a chance to continue creating things. I know I’ve got at least one more great computer in me. And Apple is not going to give me a chance to do that.”44
Despite the sense of betrayal that he felt, and the humiliating sting of losing control of the company he had built, Jobs did not relent in his idealistic beliefs about what made computers—or any other product for that matter—great. As described in more detail in Chapter 7, he went on to found NeXT Computers with the same intense passion about what a great computer had to be. Although the company’s hardware would not gain widespread adoption because of its high cost and a dearth of compatible software applications, its operating system, NeXTSTEP, was so exceptional that in 1996, Gil Amelio (by then the CEO of Apple) decided to cancel Apple’s efforts to develop a next-generation operating system for the Mac and instead buy NeXT and bring Steve Jobs on as part-time adviser. Jobs would soon be reinstated as CEO of Apple, and he led the company to one of the most remarkable comebacks of all time.
Jobs recognized the key role that passion had played in his success: “I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.… Unless you have a lot of passion about this, you’re not going to survive. You’re going to give it up. So you’ve got to have an idea, or a problem or a wrong you want to right that you’re passionate about; otherwise you’re not going to have the perseverance to stick it through.”45
Curie, Einstein, Franklin, Jobs, Musk, and Tesla all endured very difficult periods of public failure, ridicule, or discrimination. However, while each had moments of self-doubt, they were also so focused on a higher purpose that they measured their own success by a completely different metric than public affirmation. Thus, they pressed onward.
AN INNOVATOR’S IDEALISTIC GOALS can arise from a number of foundations such as spiritualism or nationalism. For example, Franklin’s idealism was based in a sense of duty and virtue that had its origins in his Puritan upbringing but evolved with his increasingly sophisticated philosophical reasoning. Jobs’s intense engagement with Zen Buddhism influenced his diet, his living environment, his sense of purpose, and his beliefs about product design. Zen teachings emphasized intense focus, intuition, and the filtering out of distractions. Jobs applied this to product design by insisting that products be simple, intuitive, and without unnecessary components. As Daniel Kottke, Jobs’s college friend and one of the first employees at Apple noted, “Steve is very much Zen.… It was a deep influence. You see it in his whole approach of stark, minimalist aesthetics, intense focus.”46
Curie’s story, discussed more completely in Chapter 6, provides an apt example of idealism rooted, in part, in nationalism. Marie Curie was born during a period in which Poland was brutally suppressed by Tsarist Russia. The Tsar’s agents attempted to erase Poland’s heritage—its literature, language, culture, and even history. To save the Polish identity, Polish philosophers began arguing for a movement known as “Polish positivism,” whereby Poland’s identity would be preserved through the contribution of Poles to science, technology, and economic progress. Education was thus the key to Polish patriotism. Furthermore, Polish positivism emphasized equality among all members of society and argued strongly for increased access to education for women, Jews, peasants, and others. As Eliza Orzeszkowa, a famous Polish positivist, wrote, “[A] woman possesses the same rights as a man… to learning and knowledge… on the basis of her humanity.”47 The idealism at the heart of Polish positivism played a very significant role in what Curie would become.
Curie’s family became passionately invested in self-education and in secretly educating others to preserve Polish nationalism and culture. The commonly held view at the time was that women were neither physically nor mentally suited for work outside the home. However, young female Poles inspired by Polish positivism began to proudly challenge the notion that women belonged only in the home: higher education was their right—their duty, in fact. It was Curie’s intense interest in Polish positivism and social change that led her to become involved in the “Flying University,” a secret, mobile academy that delivered a university curriculum to Polish women. She became heavily invested in educating herself and others, and that ultimately inspired her to overcome incredible odds to go to Paris for higher education. Much later in her career she would write, “I still believe that the [positivist] ideas which inspired us then are the only way to real social progress. You cannot hope to build a better world without improving the ind
ividuals.”48
IDEALISM IS SIMULTANEOUSLY VERY fulfilling and very costly. On the one hand, idealists experience a sense of deep satisfaction and connection to something larger than themselves by holding and pursuing their ideals. On the other hand, the pursuit of ideals also often requires them to make sacrifices in other important areas of their lives. Many of the breakthrough innovators studied here kept extremely long hours, getting little sleep and forfeiting time with friends and family. Curie was known to work herself to exhaustion, frequently fainting at her laboratory bench and ultimately dying from radiation poisoning. Einstein spoke at the memorial given for her at the Roerich Museum: “Her strength, her purity of will, her austerity toward herself, her objectivity, her incorruptible judgment—all these were of a kind seldom found in a single individual.… Once she had recognized a certain way as a right one, she pursued it without compromise and with extreme tenacity.”49
In her tenacity and refusal to compromise, she also turned over nearly all caregiving responsibilities for her children to her father-in-law. In the biography that Marie’s daughter Eve would write after her mother’s death, Eve expresses great admiration and respect for her mother. However, there are also overtones of sadness and longing—undeniable signs of the pain and sense of loss she felt by not having more of her mother. For example, in describing her grandfather, who took on a large share of the raising of Eve and her sister Irène, Eve wrote the following: “Without the blue-eyed old man their childhood would have been stifled in mourning. He was their playmate and master far more than their mother, who was ever away from home—always kept at that laboratory of which the name was endlessly rumbling in their ears.”50 As she continues,
The struggle against sorrow, active in Irène, had little success in my case: In spite of the help my mother tried to give me, my young years were not happy ones.… It is not without apprehension that I have striven to grasp the principles that inspired Marie Curie in her first contacts with us. I fear that they suggest only a dry and methodical being, stifled by prejudice. The reality is different. The creature who wanted us to be invulnerable was herself too tender, too delicate, too much gifted for suffering. She, who had voluntarily accustomed us to be undemonstrative, would no doubt have wished, without confessing it, to have us embrace and cajole her more. She, who wanted us to be insensitive, shriveled with grief at the least sign of indifference.51
Self-denial is another pervasive theme. Jobs held to an extremely restrictive diet (often fruitarian) in pursuit of his ideals during many periods of his life. Both Franklin and Einstein strived to adhere to a vegetarian diet at various points in their lives to align more closely with their moral principles, although both struggled with such adherence because of the lack of support for vegetarianism at that time. As Einstein noted in a letter to Hermann Huth in 1930, “Although I have been prevented by outward circumstances from observing a strictly vegetarian diet, I have long been an adherent to the cause in principle. Besides agreeing with the aims of vegetarianism for aesthetic and moral reasons, it is my view that a vegetarian manner of living by its purely physical effect on the human temperament would most beneficially influence the lot of mankind.”52
All of this raises an important question: do we want to nurture idealism in ourselves and others? Idealism played an important role in the achievement of great things by these innovators, but it should also be clear that idealism is not uniformly positive. Many of these individuals led difficult lives and imposed difficult lives on those around them because of their intense focus on an ideal. It is also important to note that idealism poses yet another risk not illustrated by the innovators here—the risk that the superordinate goal pursued by the individual leads to actions that most of us would consider ignoble or even evil. Many of the most atrocious acts of history were perpetrated by people who sincerely believed they were acting on a moral ideal. Nationalism has inspired many instances of war, terrorism, and even genocide. Religious differences have been used to justify repression, persecution, and even massacre throughout the ages. In fact, historical evidence suggests that holy wars can be the most ruthless and bloodiest of them all.53 “Ordinary wars” (in the words of Roy Baumeister, who has written extensively on the causes of evil) often have pragmatic concerns—a city that is captured is more economically valuable, for example, if its inhabitants continue to live and work—whereas in a holy war such pragmatism may be dismissed in pursuit of a purer ideal. Adolf Hitler’s racially motivated ideology led to the murder of at least 5.5 million Jews and millions of others he deemed Untermenschen (“subhumans”). The Khmer Rouge’s communist ideals and a belief in the superiority of an agrarian society led to the Cambodian genocide, whose death toll has been estimated in the vicinity of two to three million.54 It should thus be clear that idealism is very powerful, but like many powerful things, it can be used for both good and evil. In fact, good and evil, many would argue, are in the eye of the beholder. Idealism, if nurtured, must be nurtured with great care.
5
“Work made the Earth a paradise for me.”
Driven to Work
Whereas idealism helped fuel the vigorous effort and persistence of breakthrough innovators such as Benjamin Franklin, Nikola Tesla, Elon Musk, and Marie Curie, there were no outward signs that Thomas Edison was pursuing some idealistic superordinate goal. Once when asked “What is life?” by a newspaper reporter, Edison responded, “My mind is not of a speculative order. It is essentially practical, and when I am making an experiment I think only of getting something useful, of making electricity perform work. I don’t soar. I keep down pretty close to the earth. Of course, there are problems in life I can’t help thinking about, but I don’t try to study them out. It is necessary that they should be studied, and men fitted for that work are doing it. I am not fitted for it.”1 As biographer Randall Stross notes, Edison did not “see his work as a noble enterprise in service of humanity”; rather, his point of view was “unabashedly commercial.”2
Although Edison was not driven by idealistic goals, he was driven—in fact, he was known for working so hard that those around him could barely fathom it. For example, one of Edison’s assistants at the laboratory, Francis Upton (whom Edison affectionately nicknamed “Culture” because of his introspective nature and talent at playing the piano), once noted, “I have often felt that Mr. Edison never could comprehend the limitations of the strength of other men, as his own physical and mental strength have always seemed to be without limit.”3 Rather than idealism, Edison’s vigorous effort and persistence were fueled by different motivators: a very high need for achievement and a pleasure derived from the process of work itself (or what Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi would call “flow,” as I’ll discuss in greater detail later in the chapter). Edison loved to work hard. He hammered away at problems until they bent to his will. He was relentless, and he enjoyed the challenge of a tough problem because it was all the more satisfying when it eventually succumbed to his effort.
Thomas Alva Edison (known as “Al” as a child) was born on February 11, 1847, in Milan, Ohio. His mother, Nancy, was an attractive and highly educated woman who had taught high school before marrying. His father, Samuel, was an innkeeper by trade in Canada, but after supporting a failed uprising against the Ontario provincial government, he had to flee to the United States, arriving in the canal town of Milan two years before Thomas was born. Known for having a mercurial and restless nature, Samuel dabbled in wood shingle manufacturing, land speculation, and truck farming. He prospered as regional trade grew and then lost nearly everything when railroads took away most of the canal trade.4 He moved the family to Port Huron, Michigan, in 1854, where he earned a living lumbering, investing in land, and carpentry.
Thomas Edison was the youngest of seven children in his family, although only three of his siblings survived beyond age six. Edison was considered a fragile child. He was often sick, and he had an “abnormally large though well-shaped head”5 that prompted doctors to fear that he might have so
me type of problem with his brain. Because of his presumed delicacy, he was not initially sent to school, and when at age seven he was permitted to attend grammar school, he was hyperactive and highly distractible. One day Edison heard his teacher refer to him as “addled” (an expression meaning that he was incapable of thinking clearly), and he burst into tears. When his mother learned what had happened, she marched indignantly to the school and informed the teacher that her son “had more brains than he himself.”6 She promptly took him out of school, ending his grand total of three months of formal education. Loving, ambitious, and highly capable, she began homeschooling him.7
Nancy Edison avoided the authoritarian style and rote memorization used at the grammar school and instead made an effort to engage her son’s interest by exposing him to great books. Observing his keen interest in physical phenomena, she brought him R. G. Parker’s School of Natural Philosophy, which carefully explained how to perform chemistry experiments at home. Edison delighted in this book, later recalling that it made learning fun and that he had performed every experiment in the book. His father also encouraged him to read the classics and rewarded the young boy ten cents for each that he completed. Edison became a voracious reader, and by the age of twelve, with his mother’s help, he had read Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Hume’s History of England, Sears’s History of the World, Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, and the Dictionary of Sciences.8 He also had an extraordinarily retentive memory and could remember the exact page and position of facts or passages he had found interesting. He asked questions incessantly about how things worked, wearing his father down to exhaustion. Although some attributed his multitude of questions to a dullness of intelligence, his mother knew this was not the case. He famously stated later, “My mother was the making of me. She was so true, so sure of me; and I felt I had something to live for, someone I must not disappoint.”9
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