Rebels, Misfits, and Troublemakers
Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes . . . the ones who see things differently—they’re not fond of rules. . . . You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things . . . they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world are the ones who do.
With the words of this 1997 TV commercial, “Think Different,” genius Steve Jobs initiated what would prove to be the turnaround of his then-floundering Apple Computer, Inc. Millions watched the original broadcasts of that commercial, which ran from 1997 to 2002, as actor Richard Dreyfus did the voice-over (originally it was to have been Jobs himself) and photographs of many of the iconic geniuses of the twentieth century appeared on the screen: Albert Einstein, Bob Dylan, Martin Luther King, Jr., John Lennon, Thomas Edison, Muhammad Ali, Mahatma Gandhi, Amelia Earhart, Martha Graham, Jim Henson, Pablo Picasso, and Frank Lloyd Wright. Accompanied by slow, quasi-religious music, the message sounds less like a sales pitch and more like a hymn to one of our most cherished beliefs: that the rebellious genius makes our world a better place. In this context, “crazy,” “troublemaker,” and “misfit” sound like compliments. These geniuses are our friends, our heroes, our contemporary deities.
As a culture, we honor the rebellious genius because he or she has the capacity to make us see the world differently. What conformists do we remember? Without rebellion against the status quo, there is no genius. Not every rebel is a genius, of course, because not every disruptive idea proves to be a bright one. The rebellious Icarus flew too close to the sun, and how well did that turn out? The genius, however, has a habit not only of rebelling but also of getting things right.
But the genius isn’t always universally beloved. Socrates was a man so dangerous that the citizens of Athens forced him to drink poison. Martin Luther and Galileo Galilei were subjected to house arrest. Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Mahatma Gandhi were imprisoned. Joan of Arc was burned at the stake. Even the benign Impressionist painters were at first reviled and exiled to a salon des refusés. According to the historian John Waller, Vincent van Gogh, Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, and Jesus Christ were just a few visionaries who experienced periods of public exile, real or figurative.1 Societal change requires time and a willingness to accept modification. Only over time can the crazy notion become the new norm.
Sometimes acceptance is long in coming. For millennia a few scientists at different times argued that the sun, not the earth, was the center of the galaxy; but only in 1820 did that belief become officially accepted by the Church of Rome.2 Around 1796, Edward Jenner took pus from cowpox-infected cows and injected it into humans; some families, including the Mozarts, refused to be vaccinated and suffered the consequences, but by 1980, smallpox had been eradicated. Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity was proved in 1919, but it took exactly a century before visual collaboration of a corollary of that theory was offered: the existence of black holes.3 By contrast, the ascension of Martin Luther King, Jr., from prisoner to civil rights icon on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., required mere decades. Why does it take so long? Because the rest of us don’t like disruptive ideas and the rebels who bring them.
“When a true genius appears in the world,” said Jonathan Swift in 1728, “you may know him by this sign: that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.”4 So why do we dunces all align against the genius, at least at first? It’s because geniuses are troublemakers, and troublemakers make things difficult for the rest of us. They make us uncomfortable. They force us to change. And change requires work. When offered a choice between a creative new idea and a practical old one, most people choose the practical old one, judging by the results of a test published in 2011 in Psychological Science.5 The status quo is our default mode. Even teachers professing a professional responsibility to urge students to be creative nonetheless find creative students a disruptive nuisance in the classroom.6 “Whatever else they may say,” wrote Amanda Ripley, the author of The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way, “most teachers do not in fact appreciate creativity and critical thinking in their own students. [There are legions of] stories of small geniuses being kicked out of places of learning.”7
IN 1632, GALILEO GALILEI CASTIGATED POPE URBAN VIII BY REPEATEDLY referring to him as “the Simpleton.”8 Urban couldn’t abide the radical notion that the earth revolved around the sun, and Galileo couldn’t abide Urban’s ignorance. But put yourself into Urban’s red shoes. All empirical evidence suggests that the sun rises in the east, moves across the sky, and sets in the west; indeed, the Bible affirms this in sixty-seven places.9 I don’t feel myself whizzing through space at 500,000 miles per hour, and neither did Pope Urban. Yet Galileo, using the new 30× magnification telescope he had invented, could see the planet Jupiter as well as four moons orbiting it. Then he thought analogously: If Jupiter spins around the sun with its four moons, might not earth with its single moon likewise be doing the same?
Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) had suggested as much but hedged his bet (and saved his life) by stating that his heliocentric worldview was only a conceptual model. He had reason to be cautious: the Inquisition was in full force, and it employed torture and execution to combat heresy. One of his disciples, the philosopher Giordano Bruno, was burned at the stake in 1600 for teaching Copernican unorthodoxy. Galileo, however, went further than Copernicus both in speech and in print: Copernican theory, he said, was more than mere hypothesis, it was reality. Appearing before the Inquisition in Rome in 1616, Galileo recanted—for a while. Then, in 1632, he published his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, which offered a full endorsement of the Copernican model supported by additional evidence. So again, in January 1633, Galileo went to Rome to explain himself before the Inquisition.
To us, this aspect of astrophysics might seem distant from daily life, but to the existing Church of Rome, the matter was deadly serious. In the premodern Christian view, earth was the center of the cosmos and Rome its spiritual epicenter. Above the earthly endpoint was Heaven with the saints and angels; below was Hell with sinners and devils. Galileo’s contention that the earth was flying through space and was in fact merely one among many planets, and the sun merely one among many stars, was blasphemy. Instead of occupying a central and immovable position in the cosmos, earth, the Church, and all Christian eschatology would now be relegated to a fast-moving sideshow. Instead of a divine plan, reality might be something closer to a mysterious accident. Revolutionary stuff, indeed!
Faced with the prospect of being burned at the stake for preaching false doctrine, Galileo cut a plea bargain with the Inquisition.10 He agreed to plead guilty to having unwittingly given the impression that his writings supported the notion of a heliocentric solar system, and Church authorities would subject him to no more than house arrest for the remainder of his life, which proved to be eight years. But as the rebel Galileo walked away from the bench at the end of his trial, he was said to have muttered, “E pur si muove”—“And yet (the earth) still moves.”
It sounds obvious enough today: the earth revolves around the sun. But even today some of us don’t seem to be willing to yield in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence. In 1953, the researcher Jonas Salk announced the development of a vaccine against polio, but some African countries are still reluctant to distribute it. In 1961, John Enders discovered a vaccination against measles, yet some people still refuse to accept it, just as they refuse to allow their children to be vaccinated against diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis, as well as human papillomavirus. A preponderance of scientists argues that both wildfires and ocean storms of ever-increasing intensity are linked to global warming, but climate change deniers gainsay a causal connection. Some world leaders initially denied the science pointing to a COVID-19 pandemic. What is it that all of us believe today that some genius will disprove tomorrow?
TODAY WE USE THE WORD “PROTESTANT” WITHOUT MUCH THOUGHT: “A Protestant is a Christian who is not Catholic,” one might very loosely say. But strictly speaking, the original Protestants, relying on written scripture, were those offering witness (pro + testamentum) in support of a rebellious notion: that religion could be structured according to a new system, one different from that of the Church of Rome. Similarly, we generally assume that a “protester” is an antagonist, someone marching and chanting to change the status quo, as the antiwar protesters did against the Vietnam War in the 1960s or as those protesting President Trump’s border wall and anti-immigrant policies are doing today. Martin Luther (1483–1546) was both a Protestant and a protester, professing a new religion and protesting against the old; and if there was ever a genius who wrought change, it was Luther.
By the end of his life, Martin Luther had created a new religion with its own theology and liturgy, instituted clerical marriage, set into motion the dissolution of monastic orders, made northern Europe financially independent from the south, and fostered an environment in which individualistic capitalism and the seeds of democracy could take root. The power structure that had run top down—from pope to prelate (episcopal) to presbyter (priest) to parishioner—was reversed, now bubbling up from parishioners to the leaders they chose. Arguably more than any other single individual, Martin Luther opened the door leading from theocracy to democracy and from the medieval world to the modern.
It all began at the front door of the humble castle church in Wittenberg, Germany. There, on October 31, 1517, Martin Luther nailed his famous Ninety-Five Theses—ninety-five complaints about the actions of the pope generally and specifically about the papal practice of selling indulgences.11 “As soon as the coin in the coffer rings/The soul from purgatory springs”12 was the sales jingle used by collection agents sent from Rome to offer everlasting spiritual grace in exchange for German money. Thus Luther’s rebellion was as much economic as it was religious, and only because Luther was supported by a few German princes with similar beliefs was he able to escape an ecclesiastical court in 1518 and then a secular one in 1521.13 One papal emissary declared, “In three weeks I will throw the heretic into the fire!”14 Holy Roman Emperor Charles V ordered Luther’s arrest, but he slipped away. Luther would go on to spend the remaining years of his life in protective custody in pro-Lutheran towns and fortresses. He was driven by his conscience and a willingness to risk death to profess what he believed. At the end of the published account of his defense in Worms, Luther issued this famous declaration: “I cannot and will not retract anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience. I cannot do otherwise. Here I stand. God help me. Amen.”15
WHAT OTHER DISRUPTORS HAD THE COURAGE OF THEIR CONVICTIONS? When others doubted, Christopher Columbus sailed west to reach the Far East, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto, and Gustave Eiffel built his tower. Charles Darwin understood that man had not been created on the sixth day by God but had gradually descended from less developed primates; the Book of Genesis, he concluded, was at best a metaphor.16 Nikola Tesla came to America in 1884 to work for Thomas Edison but soon walked away from his boss because he believed that his own system of alternating current, not Edison’s direct current, would illuminate the world. In a radio broadcast in 1953, Albert Einstein thanked those who had given him an award for “nonconformity in scientific matters” with these words: “It gives me great pleasure to see the stubbornness of an incorrigible nonconformist warmly acclaimed.”17 Each of these geniuses rebelled against conventional wisdom. But what impulse causes such rebellion?
In a word: discontent. As previously noted, the genius sees things that others do not and becomes excited or alarmed, or both. Louis Pasteur was alarmed at the number of people dying from contaminated milk and developed the process of pasteurization to exterminate the germs. Tim Berners-Lee saw disjointed local networks and fashioned them into the World Wide Web. Jeff Bezos looked at user traffic data on that Web and became excited by the prospect of profitably disrupting traditional commerce. Steve Jobs was annoyed that all mainframe and home computers were in metal frames: “I got a bug up my rear that I wanted the computer in a plastic case,” he recalled in 1997.18 Elon Musk was alarmed by the dangers of fossil fuels and by global warming, and thus were born Tesla, SolarCity, and SpaceX.
Andy Warhol seemed discontented with just about everything. He rejected his birth name (changing it from Warhola to Warhol), the sexual preference his parents expected of him, his real hair (he wore a wig), and his nose (he had rhinoplasty). Leaving his native Pittsburgh in 1949, he moved to New York to work as a commercial graphic artist. There he experienced a disconnect between the “old masters” art that dominated the established museums and galleries of Manhattan and the blatantly commercial values that drove the business world.
Why did the visual arts have to be about context, symbolism, meaning, and painterly technique? Warhol asked. Those were all implicit issues of past art. Warhol changed the art world by putting his finger on the obsessions of modern society: its narcissism, exhibitionism, commercialism, and superficiality. Those mindsets he turned into visual images that could be immediately recognized and enjoyed for the moment. Everyday commercial objects, such as a Coke bottle, a Campbell’s soup can, and a Brillo box, as well as bankable celebrities, such as Marilyn Monroe, Marlon Brando, Mao Zedong, and Elvis Presley, might remind us of the vibrancy of the here and now. In the spirit of commercial industry, Warhol built an artistic studio he called “The Factory.” As the Factory became a mecca for the cultural elite during the 1960s, Warhol aggressively pushed to see, and be seen with, every avant-garde celebrity in New York, eventually garnering camp nicknames such as “the pope of pop” and “Drella,” a contraction of Dracula and Cinderella.19
But as with many troublemaking innovators, Warhol’s creative vision wasn’t immediately appreciated. At the 1964 New York World’s Fair, he caused a scandal when he installed a commissioned work in the New York State Pavilion: thirteen neatly arranged mug shots of America’s most wanted gangsters. Governor Nelson Rockefeller was irate; he ordered Warhol to remove the piece, and within days the criminals disappeared behind a coat of silver paint. In 1962, Warhol mounted his first exhibition, at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, and offered for sale images of thirty-two Campbell’s soup cans (one for each flavor) at the price of $300 each. None sold, so gallery owner Irving Blum bought all of them for $1,000 and then mounted them together. In 1996, Blum sold Warhol’s 32 Campbell’s Soup Cans to the Museum of Modern Art in New York for $15 million.20 In little more than thirty years, the son of an immigrant steelworker had gone from rebellious iconoclast to establishment icon, recognized as second only to Picasso among influential twentieth-century artists.21
IN AN ESSAY TITLED “WHY INDIVIDUALS REJECT CREATIVITY,” Berkeley psychologist Barry Staw provided a short list of character traits common to rebellious innovators. According to Staw, “Creatives are nonconformists. They are willing to defy convention and even authority to explore new ideas and to get to the truth. Creatives are persistent. They don’t give up when they get frustrated or rebuffed by a problem, they keep at it. Creatives are flexible. They are able to reformulate a problem when facing failure rather than just give up or continue down the same path.” But above all else, Staw emphasized, creative types are risk takers. “They are willing to take their chances on an unproven solution rather than go with the tried and true.”22
ALL GENIUSES TAKE RISKS. IN 1891, MARIE CURIE LEFT POLAND IN a fourth-class railroad car with little money and fewer prospects. Between 1927 and 1947, the revolutionary Mao Zedong fought the better equipped army of Nationalist general Chiang Kai-shek before achieving victory and establishing the People’s Republic of China. In 1988, the author Salman Rushdie published The Satanic Verses, knowing that it might be interpreted as blasphemy against Allah; the supreme leader of Iran placed a fatwa on Rushdie’s head, thereby encouraging Muslims worldwide to assassinate him. In 1994, Jeff Bezos quit his job, cashed in all he had, and borrowed from friends and family to start Amazon. Steve Jobs once said, “You’ve got to be willing to crash and burn.”23
If, in 1870, had you asked someone in the southern town of Cambridge, Maryland, “Is Harriet Tubman a genius?” the response would likely have been “No, she is a troublemaker and a rebel.” Tubman, who had been born a slave in Dorchester County, Maryland, and escaped to Philadelphia, had rebelled against the legal system of the rebels of the Confederacy during the Civil War.24 Again, most rebels are not geniuses, because ultimately their ideas prove useless to society. Had you asked the same question of northerners in 1870, most would likely have responded, “Who?” Few knew that the diminutive Tubman had helped build the Underground Railroad, leading thirteen rescue missions from Philadelphia into enemy territory in Maryland and liberating more than seventy slaves. She also served, gun in hand, as a leader of a successful military assault in South Carolina, freeing 750 additional slaves. When Tubman died at the age of ninety-one in 1913, one of the few mentions of her passing was an obituary in the New York Times, a mere four sentences in length.25
Times have changed. Since 1913, shifting societal values have elevated the rebel Tubman to the stature of American hero and genius, and she was most recently the subject of an acclaimed motion picture (Harriet, 2019). In 2016, the administration of President Barack Obama conceived a plan to replace Alexander Hamilton with Tubman on the ten-dollar bill.26 But the growing fame of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton had increased the recognition of the father of the Federal Reserve System, so Tubman was redeployed to replace the “populist” slaveholder President Andrew Jackson on the twenty-dollar bill. But then U.S. voters elected the “populist” Donald Trump president. Trump promptly put a portrait of Jackson next to him in the Oval Office and put the plan to place Tubman on the twenty-dollar bill on hold. As political winds shift and societal values change, just who merits the designation “genius” changes as well. Incessantly society moves the hidden target. The rebellious Tubman shot her arrows 160 years ago, but only gradually did the public begin to move the target (toward racial justice and gender equality) into a position that would allow her ultimately to score a bull’s-eye; only now do most Americans perceive her as a role model of courageous action in the face of overwhelming odds.
SOME GENIUSES TAKE SMALL RISKS TO PROVOKE US. ON SUNDAY, March 13, 2005, a hooded figure carrying a shopping bag walked into the Museum of Modern Art in New York, past sleepy guards, and up to the third floor where Andy Warhol’s iconic 32 Campbell’s Soup Cans is displayed. Removing from the bag a three-color image the same size and shape as one of Warhol’s cans, the outsider quickly affixed his own painting, Soup Can (Tesco Value Cream of Tomato Soup), to the wall. Three hours later, security guards arrived, but by then the vandal had slipped away, apparently exiting through the gift shop.27 It turned out that the drive-by installation had been perpetrated by the well-unknown street artist Banksy, who had pulled off similar capers elsewhere. In 2004, at the Museum of Natural History in New York, he disguised himself as a museum worker and placed on display a stuffed rat with the title Banksus Militus Ratus; and that same year at the Louvre, he installed his own reproduction of the Mona Lisa, her face replaced by a mysterious Mickey Mouse smile.28 We don’t know Banksy’s real name or much about his identity, though theories abound. The anonymous artist has made a name for himself as a “vandal” engaged in outsider street art, causing Time magazine to rank him, in 2010, among the world’s one hundred most influential people.
Thirteen years after the soup can prank, on October 5, 2018, an auctioneer at Sotheby’s in London banged down a gavel to signal the final bid on a copy of Banksy’s most famous work, Girl with a Balloon; the price, $1.04 million. Rebellious street art had been co-opted and tamed by the establishment, or so it seemed. After the sale, as the painting was being removed from the wall, it self-destructed. Banksy had rigged the frame to shred the work on signal. The $1.04 million was reduced to zero, a real discount. Andy Warhol did the unconventional to make art the equivalent of commerce. Banksy takes risks to reveal the truth as it appears to him: much of modern art is worthless—or shouldn’t have a price.
TOLERANCE OF RISK IS A HABIT OF GENIUS, AND SO IS RESILIENCE. Consider Frida Kahlo’s 1944 painting The Broken Column (Figure 8.1). It shows a woman (Kahlo herself) wearing a medical corset of the sort used to hold a spine together. In the painting a broken Ionic column represents a fractured spinal cord, and the fissures in the desolate landscape suggest a broken, lonely world. Across the woman’s body are affixed nails of the sort used to symbolize the passion and pain of Jesus; they extend down through her right leg but not the left. Tears stream from her eyes, but her face shows resoluteness, even defiance.
At age six, Frida Kahlo contracted polio, leaving her with a shortened right leg and eventual scoliosis. At age eighteen, she was riding in a bus that was struck by a streetcar. Several people were killed, and Kahlo was left with broken ribs, two broken legs, a broken collarbone, and an iron handrail protruding from her pelvis.29 She spent three months in bed recovering, and for the rest of her life she had to wear medical corsets of various kinds: plaster, metal, and leather, the last depicted in The Broken Column. During her forced immobility, Kahlo changed from occasional sketch artist to serious painter, reaching up to an easel that her father had constructed above her bed. By the 1940s, she could neither stand nor sit without pain, and a series of spinal fusions and grafts was undertaken, with limited success, in hospitals in New York and Mexico City. In August 1953, the pain in her right leg became so unbearable that her leg had to be amputated below the knee.30 But she persevered, sometimes from a wheelchair and sometimes from a hospital bed.31 “The pain is not part of the life but can be converted into life itself,” she said.32 Other geniuses—Chuck Close (spinal artery collapse), John Milton (blindness), Beethoven (deafness), and Stephen Hawking (ALS), for example—persevered in the face of physical obstacles, but perhaps none showed resilience of this magnitude. Said Kahlo, “I am not sick. I am broken. But I am happy to be alive as long as I can paint.”33
FIGURE 8.1: The Broken Column (1944) depicts the physical and psychological pain through which the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo persevered (Museo Dolores Olmedo, Mexico City).
The Archives: Alamy Stock Photo
ADVERSITY CAN STIFFEN RESOLVE, AND FAILURE CAN BECOME OPPORTUNITY. As Oprah Winfrey said in a Harvard commencement speech in 2013, “There is no such thing as failure. Failure is just life trying to move us in another direction.”34 Geniuses don’t set out to fail, but most do at some point, some spectacularly. In 1891, Thomas Edison tried to mine and process high-grade iron ore in New Jersey and to that end built a processing plant; when cheap ore was discovered in Minnesota, the plant was torn down. When Edison was working to devise a better telephone transmitter, he needed just the right material in the diaphragm to convert sound waves into electric impulses. The list of candidates he tried included glass, mica, hard rubber, aluminum foil, parchment, pitch, leather, chamois, cloth, silk, gelatin, ivory, birch bark, rawhide, pig’s bladder, fish guts, and a $5 bill.35 “Negative results are just what I want,” he said. “They are just as valuable to me as positive results.”36 In 1901, Nikola Tesla thought he could beam pure electricity from his broadcast tower in Wardenclyffe, NY; he couldn’t, and in 1917 the tower was sold for scrap. George Balanchine needed four attempts to launch a successful ballet company in New York, and Elon Musk needed five to launch a rocket from earth and safely return it. “If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough,” he said in 2015.37 Jeff Bezos seems to invite failure at Amazon; as he wrote to shareholders in 2019, “Amazon will be experimenting at the right scale for a company of our size if we occasionally have multibillion-dollar failures.”38 Steve Jobs failed colossally in 2004. “I’m the only person I know,” he said, “to have lost a quarter of a billion dollars in one year. . . . It’s very character-building.”39
THE WRITER J. K. ROWLING KNOWS FAILURE FIRSTHAND. “A MERE seven years after my graduation day,” she wrote in 2008, “I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears that my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.”40 Ironically, in Rowling’s eyes a modicum of success would have worked against her genius. “Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena where I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realized, and I was still alive. . . . And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life. . . . The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity.”41
Stephen King’s novel Carrie, the first of his books to be published, was rejected by thirty publishers before finally being acquired by Doubleday for an advance of $2,500. As of 2018, King had published eighty-three novels with a total of 350 million copies sold, and from them he earns approximately $40 million annually in royalties. Theodor Seuss Geisel similarly experienced approximately thirty “no’s” for his first children’s book, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street. A chance encounter with a Dartmouth classmate brought about its publication in 1937, and thereafter followed sales of approximately 600 million books by “Dr. Seuss.” Rowling’s first Harry Potter novel was rejected by a dozen publishers before being picked up by Bloomsbury in London for an advance of ₤1,500 ($2,200) in 1996. Rowling’s books have gone on to sell more than 500 million copies. Yet even Bloomsbury editor Barry Cunningham had his doubts, saying to Rowling at the time, “You’ll never make any money out of children’s books, Jo.”42
Add to that these excerpts from rejection letters sent to the following now-famous American writers:43
To Herman Melville, regarding Moby-Dick (1851): “First we must ask, does it have to be about a whale?”
To Louisa May Alcott, regarding Little Women (1868–1869): “Stick to teaching.”
To Joseph Heller, who named his book Catch-22 (1961) after receiving twenty-two rejections: “Apparently the author intends it to be funny.”
To Ernest Hemingway, regarding The Sun Also Rises (1926): “I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that you had penned this entire story locked up at the club, ink in one hand, brandy in the other. Your bombastic, dipsomaniac, where-to-now characters had me reaching for my own glass of brandy.”
And finally, to F. Scott Fitzgerald, regarding The Great Gatsby (1925): “You’d have a decent book if you would get rid of that Gatsby character.”
As can be seen by the subsequent publication dates for each of these works, those brilliant authors were resilient and self-confident. Follow their lead. If you are a creative type or an entrepreneur bent on change, develop a thick skin, understand that rejection is part of the process, and be prepared to be misunderstood for a long time. Relish the outsider status that attends contrarian thinking, as did Galileo, Warhol, and Banksy. Finally, remember the fierce determination of Vincent van Gogh: in January 1886, the director of the Antwerp Academy of Art, Karel Verlat, gazed upon van Gogh’s unconventional work and judged it “putrefaction,” sending the pupil back to the beginning class.44 Van Gogh ignored Director Verlat’s rules and went on to paint now-iconic, paradigm-shifting works such as Sunflowers and The Starry Night. The genius meets any setback with disbelief: surely the judge, the critic, or the evidence is wrong; surely the solution is just around the corner.
AS A CHILD GROWING UP IN POST−WORLD WAR II AMERICA, I spent my days building tree forts, exploring sewers, and teaching myself to ride a bike that another kid had left in the street—all of that unsupervised. Today things are different. Modern terms abound to describe the current trend toward parental overinvolvement, including “helicopter mom,” “snowplow dad,” and “bubble-wrapped kid.”45 The social environment has shifted from laissez-faire parenting to intense parental control. In 2019, the aforementioned college admissions scandal known as “Operation Varsity Blues” revealed that thirty-three parents, including prominent businesspeople and well-known actors, had been charged with bribing college officials, often to inflate their kids’ entrance exam scores and help them gain admission to prestigious colleges. Not genius. Those parents viewed exposing their children to risk and failure as a hardship to be avoided, rather than seeing them as life experiences from which much can be learned and resilience born.
How do we reconcile the images of fearless, independent-thinking, risk-taking, resilient heroes in this chapter with the way we are rearing our children today? We can’t. Statistics show that children and college students are becoming more anxious, fearful, and risk averse,46 even though our city streets, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, are much safer than they were thirty years ago.47 Parents and “concerned citizens” are more inclined to hover, and parents are being arrested for letting their children walk to the park alone.48 A 2019 study in the journal Nature Human Behaviour suggested the downside of such overregulation: put a rat into a maze and give it an electric shock along one path; eventually the rat will find a safe path through the maze and always adhere to it, thereafter exploring no other; but it will never learn whether the risk taking is still there or how to cope.49 Fortunately, a few educators and parents are pushing back with “dangerous” playgrounds that encourage creativity and risk and the “free-range parenting” movement.50 Want to raise a bold, brilliant, original thinker? Permit your children to explore alone, take risks, and experience failure. Let them have fun and break the rules once in a while. It’s more work, worry, and pain for parents, yes, but the ultimate outcome will be better. As Steve Jobs once wondered, “Why join the navy when you can be a pirate?”