Elon Musk is not your ordinary guy. He has built and founded or co-founded multiple billion-dollar companies, including PayPal, SpaceX, and Tesla. He has a plan to give the entire world internet access with Starlink, and he provided the initial capital for SolarCity, a successful solar venture. He founded The Boring Company to build tunnels. He has gone to space and back. He is also a co-founder of Neuralink and OpenAI. At times he is the richest man in the world. He also smoked pot on Joe Rogan’s show (endangering his security clearance), tweeted what appeared to be obscenities at the Securities and Exchange Commission, and through shrewd publicity moves and tweets he took Dogecoin from a joke to (for a while) a highly valued crypto asset. You can’t quite say “he does whatever he wants,” but he probably comes closer to that designation than any other major player in the business world today. He also seems to have an extreme tolerance for risk.
Of course, most of the time you are not looking for the next Elon Musk, which is fortunate, because quite possibly there is no next Elon Musk. Nonetheless, he demonstrates the importance of personality in extending one’s reach and influence beyond what even a formidable intellect like his would have generated.
Which features of personality really matter in a given context, and which among them do people often overlook or fail to appreciate? What false assumptions do people hold about personality? This chapter will give our perspective on standard personality psychology and some of the most commonly discussed traits, whereas the next, more speculative, chapter will consider some more exotic and less well-tested personality concepts.
We’ll start by dissecting the so-called Five Factor personality model, often used by Silicon Valley venture capital firms in evaluating talent. We’ll then look at some of the buzzwords breathlessly cited in the media in describing traits necessary for workers of the future, who, we are told, have to be open, bold, and daring, or whatever else is the catchword of the day. Often those claims are correct to some degree, but only within a particular context. So one of the essential skills in thinking about personality is to be able to take a claim about personality and job and realize how that claim is context-dependent rather than universal.
We would put our view of the Five Factor model this way: if you’ve never heard of it or worked with it, it can teach you something, but at the same time, most of the practitioners who use or cite it tend to significantly overrate its effectiveness and overlook its limitations. To get this chapter written, Daniel and Tyler had to talk each other out of an extreme emphasis on the Five Factor model. In truth, both of us have ended up de-emphasizing the theory. Daniel benefited from having a sister who is a psychologist and understands the limits of predictive personality research. Tyler benefited from being an economist and knowing that economics is often more art than science, and that it typically fails to find universal predictive laws, including in the area of personality. After two years of debating the Five Factor model, this is what we ended up with.
Five Factor theory aims to boil down human personalities to their simplest and most intuitively understandable explanatory components. The dominant form of this theory, which is sometimes used to categorize potential hires, presents five major categories for understanding personality: neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. Those five factors are complex, and subject to much debate, but here are some shorthand definitions:
Neuroticism
A general tendency to experience negative emotions and negative affect, including fear, sadness, embarrassment, anger, guilt, and disgust.
Extraversion
High extraversion will be manifest in terms of an outgoing personality, friendliness and sociability, talkativeness, and a proactive desire to engage with other individuals.
Openness to Experience
This trait involves open-mindedness, a willingness to explore new and diverse ideas, an experimental bent, curiosity, and an active imagination looking to conceive of additional possibilities.
Agreeableness
High agreeableness means a desire to get along with others, to help them, to be sympathetic with them, and to cooperate. An individual low in agreeableness is more likely to be competitive and also contrarian.
Conscientiousness
High-conscientiousness individuals have high self-control, are very responsible, have a strong sense of duty, and usually are good at planning and organizing, due to their reliability.
Commonly, the very top venture capitalists, when seeking a hitherto undiscovered founder, will look for high disagreeableness and also high openness. The disagreeableness will motivate the individual to charge full steam ahead with a new idea, even when others are not convinced. The openness will make that person more of an innovator and more willing to accept feedback when needed.
To be clear, you should put aside knee-jerk judgments about which of these personality features might be “good” or “bad.” Neuroticism may sound bad to you, and in some circumstances it is—but not unconditionally. If you are looking to hire a crusader on behalf of a social justice cause, someone who will notice injustices and then complain about them, neuroticism might be a desirable trait. Many of history’s most important social movements were led by people who might count as highly neurotic in terms of Five Factor theory. We don’t have formal information on how to classify, say, Joan of Arc, John Calvin, or Gandhi in terms of their personalities, but it does seem they were commonly regarded as pests or as prickly individuals. Again, context matters. Similarly, too much openness can suggest a lack of ability to distinguish between useful efforts and those that are not useful, agreeableness can suggest a lack of depth, and extraversion at the extreme can quickly become annoying … or not. You may need to end up with a judgment as to whether a particular set of qualities is desirable for a particular job, but you will handicap yourself intellectually if you start with a preordained take on whether these personality qualities are good or bad.
Furthermore, note that Five Factor theory de-emphasizes questions of motivation. Maybe you know people who are very conscientious when doing what they wish to do, but are otherwise pretty slack and unreliable. In fact, maybe that is you. (Or us? Tyler is highly motivated to seek out Indian classical music concerts, but not to clean up his office. Daniel is keen to run marathons, but less interested in waiting in line to buy concert tickets.) So again, Five Factor theory is just a starting point, and you will need to refer back to context. One of the most important questions about an individual is how that person’s behavior varies across different contexts, and if anything, Five Factor theory discourages you from looking too closely into that matter.
As for how well Five Factor personality theory predicts earnings, one commonly accepted answer is that if you take fairly accurate readings of an individual’s five personality factors, you can predict about 30 percent of the variation in earnings across individuals. In one of the highest-quality and best-known papers in this literature, the Big Five personality traits, taken together, predicted about 32 percent of the variation in career success as measured in terms of income.1
To make that statistical concept clear, if one variable fully explains another (for example, height measured in inches predicts height measured in centimeters very well), that variable would have 100 percent predictive power. Similarly, if one variable has nothing to do with another, it would have zero predictive power and thus explain none of the variation in the second variable (an example is that one flip of a fair coin does not predict the next flip at all). So predicting 32 percent of the variation in earnings is between those two performances, but it is not close to 100 percent.
Another of the sounder papers in this area considers data from the Netherlands and uses a different combination of five personality factors: extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, and autonomy. That work is able to explain about 15 percent of the variation in earnings, so the 32 percent estimate is probably an upper bound, at least for the time being.2
One way to test these correlates between personality and earnings is to see if personality has a comparable impact on other measures of achievement—for instance, eminence in science. In one study of scientists, personality variables explained up to 20 percent of the variance in achievement, after adjusting for scientific potential and intelligence. That’s not proof of how well personality variables predict wages, but it does show a broadly consistent picture regarding how much personality correlates with human success in mastering and climbing external hierarchies, whether those hierarchies concern pay or scientific recognition.3
Considering Five Factor theory as a whole, is explaining 15 to 32 percent of the variation in observed earnings a lot or a little? Does that make Five Factor theory strong or weak? Furthermore, remember that you are looking to fill a specific job, not just hiring a generic person for a generic job. For a specific job, personality could explain earnings by either more or less. Overall, you should not obsess over Five Factor theory, even though it is marginally useful.
For some further relevant results, you might consider a recent research paper based on Canadian wage data. Of the five factors, only conscientiousness and neuroticism are statistically significant for predicting wages. A one-standard-deviation increase in conscientiousness is associated with a 7.2 percent wage boost, and a one-standard-deviation increase in neuroticism is associated with 3.6 percent lower wages (again, standard deviation is a measure of statistical variance; refer back to Chapter 4 or see Google for an explanation). In our view, those results hardly show an overwhelming performance for the personality variables. We are back again to talent selection being an art at least as much as a science.4
As for the reliability of this work: the studies on personality traits and life outcomes do replicate to a reasonable degree (that is, redoing the studies yields roughly the same answers—something that is unfortunately not always the case with academic research). A study by psychologist Christopher J. Soto, of Colby College, found that “87% of the replication attempts were statistically significant in the expected direction.” Furthermore, the results about personality and earnings discussed throughout this chapter have been replicated in laboratory experiments where people play games for cash prizes. In that setting, neuroticism is associated with lower earnings and conscientiousness with higher earnings—both outcomes that are consistent with the results from labor market data. The main difference in results is that in an experimental setting, openness is no longer correlated with earnings.5
One nice feature of this topic is that you don’t have to obsess too much as to whether correlation implies causality. Let’s say that everyone who showed up for an interview wearing pointed shoes was a highly productive candidate. You can just hire them! You don’t need to worry about whether pointed shoes cause productivity, productivity induces people to put on pointed shoes, or other variables that have an effect on the relationship (perhaps smart parents both send their kids to good schools and buy them pointed shoes). For our purposes, the causal story, or lack thereof, very often is not of first-order importance. Our main enterprise is prediction of talent, and in that sense we can learn something from correlations without always understanding the underlying causal processes.
Another problem is that personality traits are difficult to measure. One sorry truth about personality psychology is just how much the key variables usually are measured simply by asking people about themselves. A variable such as conscientiousness, for instance, actually is referring to how conscientious a person claims to be when asked on a questionnaire. In that sense, a great deal of personality psychology is built on relatively thin foundations. Very often there is no better way to proceed, as the researchers will tell you, but this gives additional reason to take the results of personality psychology with a grain of salt.
Furthermore, even well-trained interviewers cannot always divine personality traits from interviews. So however much you might be skeptical of the methods used in personality psychology, you yourself may not be outperforming those same flawed methods. In one study, there was a modest correlation between interviewer assessments and self-assessments of the candidates (0.28), though the interviewers could not evaluate the candidates as well as their close friends could—again, measuring both against the person’s self-assessment. Interestingly, the two traits hardest for the interviewers to assess were conscientiousness and emotional stability, most likely because candidates actively manage those impressions during the interview process itself. Faking behavior in interviews is frequent and usually undetected.6
In particular, just about everyone knows they ought to be trying to fake conscientiousness, so that is one reason to be wary of your interview impressions. Unless you devote serious time to interviewing references, often you don’t have a good sense of conscientiousness in advance; it’s something you learn about after the hire is made. For this reason, we view “looking for conscientiousness” as overrated in the hiring process, even when conscientiousness is important for the job. Or when conscientiousness truly does matter, make sure you interview the person’s references as well, a topic we cover in more detail later.
By the way, before we move on, you might be wondering why we should bother with all these personality categories and how they’re measured. Can’t we go right to the human genome instead and scientifically determine from it what a person “is really like”? Well, some researchers have been trying to do just that, and to date, they have been unsuccessful. One recent study concluded: “The attempts to identify specific genetic variants underlying the heritable variation in entrepreneurship have until now been unsuccessful.” Someday that may change, but for the foreseeable future, genetic shortcuts are not available to us, and that makes the art of talent selection all the more important.7
Personality, such as the traits specified by Five Factor theory, probably matters most when you consider founders and entrepreneurs, individuals tasked with creating an enterprise and seeing it through to some level of maturity. The stakes are higher in the first place, and the high rates of start-up failure suggest that not everybody is good at these jobs. Those individuals must show initiative and daring, and they must wish to impose their will on the world in some way. At the same time, they will be called upon to perform many different duties and take on many different roles, often with no advance warning. They must be flexible and resourceful at a very deep level, open in some critical ways, yet stubborn and unyielding too, with high levels of discipline when needed.
Perhaps the most underrated challenge of being a founder comes from having “hung their name on the door.” Unlike an employee, the founder often derives their sense of personal self-worth from the success of their venture. Failures and setbacks hit particularly hard when there’s nobody else to blame. Great founders productively gain knowledge and momentum from their experiences, even the failures, and that requires a great degree of energy, curiosity, and power. Those are some pretty complex personality characteristics—they are not always easy to spot, and they can be very hard to find in the first place. Sam Altman, the former head of the venture capital firm Y Combinator, offers his own take on the idiosyncrasies of founders:8
I look for founders who are scrappy and formidable at the same time (a rarer combination than it sounds); mission-oriented, obsessed with their companies, relentless, and determined; extremely smart (necessary but certainly not sufficient); decisive, fast-moving, and willful; courageous, high-conviction, and willing to be misunderstood; strong communicators and infectious evangelists; and capable of becoming tough and ambitious.
Some of these characteristics seem to be easier to change than others; for example, I have noticed that people can become much tougher and more ambitious rapidly, but people tend to be either slow movers or fast movers and that seems harder to change. Being a fast mover is a big thing; a somewhat trivial example is that I have almost never made money investing in founders who do not respond quickly to important emails.
Also, it sounds obvious, but the successful founders I’ve funded believe they are eventually certain to be successful.
Of course, we must look beyond founders, and then we may see that a single dimension of personality is much more important than the others in certain contexts. If you are hiring a cashier, the conscientiousness of that person probably is more important than their curiosity or openness to new ideas. (In fact, the person who is very open to new ideas might be bored more quickly by that job and thus be a worse candidate.) You don’t need a complete personality profile if you’re hiring a cashier, but you do need to know if they will show up and do the job properly with a good attitude. On the other hand, elite fighter pilots may need a certain amount of daring and bravado. Tom Wolfe, in his study of such pilots, The Right Stuff, cited this view: “Hell, we wouldn’t give you a nickel for a pilot who hasn’t done some crazy rat-racing [informal drag races] like that. It’s all part of the right stuff.” You want those individuals to show up for battle in perfect shape, but in some regards they will deviate significantly from the classical understanding of conscientiousness.9
Perhaps the best and most accurate study we have for personality psychology and earnings focuses on the very top of the IQ distribution, but the data and methods are good, so let’s take another look at a study we already mentioned in the intelligence chapter. Miriam Gensowski, at the University of Copenhagen, revisited a data set chosen from California students in grades 1–8 in 1921–22, covering students from the top 0.5 percent of the IQ distribution (then scores of 140 or higher, covering 856 men and 672 women). The students also were rated on their personality traits, along lines similar to those of Five Factor theory, such as openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Yes, 1921–22 was a long time ago, but that means we have very good data on final career outcomes, running through 1991 (it also means we focus on men, because labor markets for women have changed so much in terms of opportunity and discrimination).10
One prominent result in this data set was that conscientiousness really mattered for earnings. The men who measured as one standard deviation higher on conscientiousness on average earned $567,000 more over their careers, which measures as 16.7 percent higher average lifetime earnings (though again, we cannot be sure this is a causal relationship).
Extraversion also is correlated with higher earnings. Those men who were higher in extraversion by one standard deviation earned, over their careers, $491,100 more. Furthermore, the earnings premium from extraversion was the highest for the most highly educated of the men.
As for agreeableness, it turns out that the more agreeable men in this data pool earned significantly less. Being one standard deviation higher on agreeableness is correlated with a reduction in lifetime earnings of about 8 percent, or $267,600. While that result is confirmed only for high-IQ individuals in California for a particular span of the twentieth century, it is broadly consistent with the results of other studies, some of which have been cited here already. These people might just not be aggressive enough in pushing their own case forward, instead preferring to go with the flow.
Furthermore, a systematic study of venture capital pitches yielded some broadly similar results about agreeableness. The study looked at 1,139 venture capital pitches from 2010 to 2019, using machine-learning techniques to categorize the styles of the pitches. The main result was that venture capitalists like to hear very positive, optimistic pitches, but the people making those pitches underperform when it comes to actual results. So don’t be too swayed by agreeableness, because very often it doesn’t deliver on its promises. The disagreeable founders, who will tell you that you have it all wrong and that the world is badly screwed up and on the wrong track, may end up doing better.11
These data show another interesting feature: when personality matters (in terms of correlates) and when it does not. Personality traits correlate more strongly with income beginning when workers are in their early thirties, and the correlations peak in strength between the ages of forty and sixty, after which the correlations dwindle considerably. We are not sure how to interpret those results, but one speculation is that it takes a while for your most distinctive personality traits to fully blossom (or fester?), and also that there is an eventual evening-out of personality with extreme maturity.
Since Gensowski’s study focuses only on high-IQ individuals, it is worth considering some other results to see if they are broadly consistent. For instance, one well-known study of Finnish identical twins finds that the more extroverted or the more conscientious of a pair of twins tends to earn more—roughly about 8 percent more for an increase of one standard deviation in those personality traits. Furthermore, the more neurotic of the two twins tends to earn less. Neuroticism harms earnings in part because the more neurotic individuals seem to have a tougher time staying with the same job long enough to acquire seniority and climb the ladder. A one-standard-deviation difference in the neuroticism score tends to lower expected earnings by about 8 percent.12
Those results are broadly consistent with the literature as a whole. It is a common result, for instance, that high conscientiousness predicts career success, as do low neuroticism, low agreeableness, and high extraversion. But again, keep in mind that context matters when it comes to most hiring decisions. It is unlikely, for instance, that low agreeableness is a positive for all jobs, and perhaps it is not a positive for most jobs.13
The research on personality has produced some incomplete results regarding which personality factors are most useful for which particular kinds of jobs. These correlations have not, in general, been confirmed through reliable replication, but they are interesting as partial results or speculations. In one study, for instance, the researchers looked at West Point cadets and found that grade point average predicts early promotion better than cognitive ability does. This holds over a sixteen-year time horizon.14
The researchers sum up some additional results as follows:15
For professionals, only Conscientiousness scales appear to be predictive of overall job performance. Similarly, for sales jobs, only Conscientiousness and its facets of achievement, dependability, and order predict overall performance well. For skilled and semi-skilled jobs, in addition to Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability appears to predict performance. For police and law enforcement jobs, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability, and Agreeableness are useful personal characteristics. In customer service jobs, all the Big Five dimensions predict overall job performance. Finally, for managers, the Extraversion facets dominance and energy, and the Conscientiousness facets achievement and dependability, are predictive. Thus, different sets of personality variables are useful in predicting job performance for different occupational groups.
There is yet another specific result that is easy to believe: that charisma is important for CEOs but not for CFOs, with COOs falling in as an intermediate case between the two. Yet another paper compared GitHub contributors with tennis players, using linguistic analysis. (GitHub is an institution, now part of Microsoft, that allows individuals to post a kind of resume of their programming achievements). It turns out that GitHub contributors are high in openness and low on conscientiousness, agreeableness, and extraversion, while the successful tennis players were the exact opposite for each trait. One look at the literature on emergency personnel and high-reliability occupations (e.g., airline pilot, military) recommends high extraversion, high conscientiousness, and low neuroticism for those jobs.16
As for what predicts success in science, as measured by publications and citations (and distinct from earnings), scientists as a whole are conscientious, achievement-oriented, emotionally stable, and low in neuroticism compared to the general population. None of that comes as a huge surprise. Interestingly, eminent scientists are more likely to be dominant, arrogant, hostile, and self-confident compared to scientists as a whole. They are also more flexible in thought and behavior than scientists of lesser laurels. That is consistent with our more general view (presented in more detail shortly) that conscientiousness may be more important for tasks of lesser import and less important for leadership positions.17
Caveat emptor, of course, but still, those are starting points for your own pondering and talent search. Finally, before moving on, we would like to stress one very basic point about the importance of good ethics and honesty. We can go back to Marc Andreessen, who offers one of the best and least contingent good pieces of hiring advice you can find:
Ethics are hard to test for.
But watch for any whiff of less than stellar ethics in any candidate’s background or references.
And avoid, avoid, avoid.
Unethical people are unethical by nature, and the odds of a metaphorical jailhouse conversion are quite low.
This advice is so universal because bad ethics in a workplace can spread like cancer. Your ethical people will be repulsed by the behavior of the bad-ethics hire. And the bad-ethics people you have around—probably you have hired some—will find reason to behave worse and worse. There is little upside to hiring an unethical person, and the more talented that person is, the more trouble he or she may end up bringing (with an incompetent unethical person, perhaps the discontent will spread less far).
One study of the matter considered 58,542 workers and found that about one in twenty workers eventually is terminated for being a “toxic worker.” Toxicity is defined in terms of behaviors such as sexual harassment, workplace violence, falsifying documents, fraud, and other “egregious” instances of misbehavior on the job. Unfortunately, toxic workers encourage others to be toxic as well. In part because of the contagion effect, it seems that the costs of having a single toxic worker are greater than the benefits of replacing an average worker with a superstar worker. Of course, talent search isn’t just about finding the stars; it is also about avoiding the lemons.18
The main scenario in which hiring an unethical person makes sense is when you yourself have a fundamentally unethical business model. But then we don’t really wish to give you advice at all.
Conscientiousness is, of the five factors, the single best predictor of overall job performance.19 Nonetheless, there are some reasons you should be suspicious of conscientiousness as an end-all and be-all for job search.
First, as we discussed in the chapter on intelligence, non-cognitive skills tend to matter more for lower earners. In essence, it seems that conscientiousness is correlated with people being employed, which is good, but it doesn’t do so much to boost their prospects of rising into the higher echelons of earnings. As we’ve noted, in the bottom tenth of earners, non-cognitive skills matter two and a half to four times more than do cognitive skills, but for the population in general (based on data from Sweden), a boost of one standard deviation in cognitive ability is associated with a larger wage gain than is a one-standard-deviation rise in non-cognitive skills. At higher levels of earnings, the relationship between cognitive ability and wages becomes increasingly significant.20
Second, conscientiousness can end up distributed in the wrong places, or at least in places where you as an employer may not want it, just as we earlier mentioned with the issue of motivation. A new hire may be very conscientious with respect to assembling his manga collection, or attending every local electronica concert, or swimming for two hours every day. The novelist Vikram Seth has said that he ended up writing his masterpiece, A Suitable Boy, because he did not have enough conscientiousness to finish his economics Ph.D. at Stanford. But that points out the need to ask the question “Conscientiousness for what?” He did finish a very long novel (and subsequent works) and work very hard on its quality, and the book went on to be a bestseller and also a literary classic. As Seth said: “Obsession keeps me going.” He eventually developed the right obsession and piled hard work on top of that.21
It is a sorry truth that work responsibilities and family responsibilities may conflict. Arguably many performers at the very top neglect their families or are somewhat estranged from them. As a boss or talent selector, what exactly are you looking for? We can’t presume to offer up the correct ethical judgment here, but conscientiousness does not always operate in your commercial favor, and it does not always boost extreme talent at the very top levels of performance.
Another possible downside is that some conscientious people stick to the job because they enjoy the familiar work process for its own sake. That keeps them on track and has some upside, but some of them end up piling on work for its own sake and taking delight in the satisfaction of process per se. Tasks end up taking more time rather than less, even though you observe the person working diligently the whole time. In the longer run, your organization can become less dynamic and more bureaucratic, in part because the people are doing exactly as they have been told.
The concept of “externalizing behavior”—that is, directing emotions and motivations outward—is linked to aggression and hyperactivity, and it is very often a bad thing. Nonetheless, for many individuals, especially for many men, such externalizing behavior predicts higher earnings, and you can think of this point as related to the virtues of disagreeableness. For these men, the externalizing behavior predicts both lower educational attainment and higher earnings; in other words, don’t always look for superior performance in school. John Lennon was a talented writer as well as a brilliant musician, and effective as a marketer and media celebrity, but also, in his youth, he was an aggressive, drunken brawler. It is no accident that after the Beatles split up he wrote the song “How Do You Sleep?” eviscerating his former bandmate and collaborator Paul McCartney. And yet Lennon was one of the most successful musical stars of the twentieth century.22
The search for a rebellious, disagreeable outsider is common in venture firms too. Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz looks for similar traits, though with an outsider flair of his own. Andreessen’s utensil is a little bit more dopaminergic. A famous night owl, he is someone who speaks quickly, eats quickly, and attempts to tug on the strings of reality faster than the universe will permit. He is equal parts cheery and angry at the same time, embodying contradictions in a manner that seems common among the top talent in venture capital. Note that Marc is paired with Ben Horowitz in the firm Andreessen Horowitz. Whereas Marc is bubbly and exuberant, Ben comes across as quieter, more establishment, and more corporate in his orientation. The mix works, in part because they trust each other so intensely, and they can read each other’s signals in a millisecond. The normal, conscientious person is not exactly their typical pick for success; instead, they are looking for people who are true outliers.23
Note also that the connection between conscientiousness and cooperation seems to be low or maybe zero in some data sets, as we discussed in Chapter 4. If in a team endeavor conscientiousness does not feed into cooperation, it may be of less value than you thought. The conscientious worker still might show up on time and perform some basic duties, but the upside of the resulting teamwork will be limited. One reason conscientiousness might perform so poorly in predicting cooperation is that conscientiousness has numerous facets, and one of those facets is a kind of cautiousness. In some settings, cautiousness may induce individuals to cooperate less rather than more, for fear that others will not cooperate in turn, or perhaps because the cooperative act is a deviation from a set, known program. Many real-world instantiations of cooperation require some proactive behavior and indeed boldness, and the conscientious person is not always the bold one.
Here is a useful comparison to shake up your thinking about conscientiousness. Are you familiar with the hardworking nation of South Korea, which rose from poverty to wealth in less than two generations? Yet if you rank workers, nation by nation, according to their reported conscientiousness, South Korea—surprisingly, to many people—comes in second to last. Nonetheless, if you rank nations by work hours, South Korea comes in first. What does that mean? Are the metrics worthless? Or maybe South Koreans work hard because of money and social pressures and not because of innate characteristics? More generally, if you look at the rank-ordering table of all measured nations, there is no positive correlation between conscientiousness and hours worked; in fact, there is a (statistically insignificant) negative correlation. Again, that may mean conscientiousness is not as useful as you might have thought. Perhaps you want some workers who are not so conscientious but who respond readily to incentives and will end up doing what you tell them to. If the non-conscientious can mimic the behavior of the conscientious, at least under the right circumstances, perhaps conscientiousness is not always the best variable to look for. It may even embody a certain lack of flexibility.24
To push your skepticism further, another recent study found no connection between conscientiousness and the practice of mask-wearing during the coronavirus pandemic in Spain. Maybe there is something wrong with these studies, but an alternative possibility is that the research concept of conscientiousness has been so finely honed that it is replicable across time and across different methods of evaluation, but in the process it has become somewhat disconnected from the commonsense understanding of that term.25
Sometimes leaders of organizations can have too much rather than too little conscientiousness. We are not saying that all of these leaders need to be crooks, but leadership skills often involve a mix of creativity and daring and ability to reimagine the risky future, and those are not necessarily the traits found in the people who punch the time clock promptly every day. Elon Musk would have gotten in less trouble had he not smoked a joint on the live video stream of Joe Rogan’s podcast, but a more sedate Elon Musk probably would not have built SpaceX and Tesla with the same fervor. Sometimes the leaders are the ones who need to decide when the rules can be broken, or at least bent. Consistent with that view, meta-studies suggest that conscientiousness is less important as a predictor of job success for more complex tasks and for higher-level positions. We wonder if conscientiousness is somewhat overrated for leaders and creators, and perhaps a degree of neuroticism is somewhat underrated as a correlate with job performance. It is a recurring theme of this book that what predicts well for the median worker is not always what predicts well for the top performers and the stars.26
Finally and perhaps most importantly, as a potential employer, you are not necessarily wanting to predict an individual’s wage per se, for reasons we explained in the previous chapter. Let’s say, for instance, that being conscientious explains a good deal of the wage in your particular sector, and that you know this for sure. But it is still the case that you, as an employer, don’t necessarily want to hire high-wage individuals per se; rather, you wish to hire undervalued individuals. And there is not much serious research in Five Factor theory to help you identify those individuals, in part because it is hard to measure an individual’s true net contribution to profits, that being relative to the wage you must pay. Most of all, the idea of hiring conscientious or hardworking individuals is hardly a novel one, so if there are any qualities that are reflected in the going market wage for an individual, you would expect conscientiousness and being a hard worker to be among them. Conscientiousness, in essence, is too easily and uniformly valued in the marketplace.
We find it useful to contrast the concepts of conscientiousness, grit, and what we call stamina. We see stamina as one of the great underrated concepts for talent search, especially when you are looking for top performers and leaders and major achievers.
On stamina, economist Robin Hanson wrote: “It wasn’t until my mid-30s that I finally got to see some very successful people up close for long enough to notice a strong pattern: the most successful have a lot more energy and stamina than do others.… I think this helps explain many cases of ‘why didn’t this brilliant young prodigy succeed?’ Often they didn’t have the stamina, or the will, to apply it. I’ve known many such people.”27
Robin also points out that many high-status professions, such as medicine, law, and academia, put younger performers through some pretty brutal stamina tests in the early years of their career. In essence, they are testing to see who has the requisite stamina for subsequent achievement. (You might feel those tests are wasteful in some way, but still, those tests seem to survive in some very competitive settings.) Successful politicians are another group who seem to exhibit very high stamina levels—many of them seem to never tire of shaking hands, meeting new people, and promoting their candidacies. So if we meet an individual who exhibits stamina, we immediately upgrade the chance of that person having a major impact, and that the individual will be able to invest in compound returns to learning and improvement over time.
Bob Dylan is a good example of a famous individual who has incredible stamina. He has studied folk and blues music obsessively since he was a teenager, and he has put out dozens of albums over a period now stretching almost sixty years, mastering both folk guitar and lyrics, and experimenting with a variety of styles ranging from folk to rock to pop to gospel to blues and American popular standards. He has starred or played in several movies, worked as a DJ for satellite radio (picking excellent material), written a compelling memoir, won a Nobel Prize for literature, published eight books of drawings and paintings and had exhibits in major art galleries, and it seems he has been on tour constantly for decades (the “Never Ending Tour”), in the 1990s and 2000s often playing a hundred or more dates a year. He continues to give concerts (at least pre-COVID), even though he is eighty years old as of late 2021. You may or may not love his work, but there is a guy who’s got stamina, and he has made a major impact on both music and the broader world.
Or consider John le Carré, the spy thriller author. Washington Post reporter John Leen spent two weeks with him in Miami, investigating the local crime scene with le Carré’s assistance. At the end of that temporary partnership he wrote: “I was astonished by his energy, his drive, his ability to go out there every day and trundle through the hours of interviews, lunches, dinners. I was a little more than half his age and I was exhausted. He never appeared tired, never was less than sharp and penetrating. He already had half a dozen No. 1 bestsellers and more money than he could ever spend. Why did he want or need another one? What kept him out there, what was the engine that drove it all?”28
Sometimes the literature speaks of “grit,” but we find “stamina” to be a more accurate term. Grit is sometimes defined as “passion and perseverance for long-term goals of personal significance,” but that involves two dimensions, the passion and the perseverance. Furthermore, it turns out that grit is strongly correlated with conscientiousness. The one feature of grit that still seems to matter statistically, after adjusting for conscientiousness, is perseverance of effort, not passion. That result is close to what we are calling stamina, and so the stamina concept seems to transcend conscientiousness and to be the more relevant portion of grit. Ideally, what you want is a kind of conscientiousness directed at the kind of focused practice and thus compound learning that will boost intelligence on the job.29
Even for what are supposedly “unskilled” jobs (not a term we would in general endorse) stamina really can matter. Consider Dworsky, a sales guy from another company at Daniel’s pre-pandemic San Francisco office. During the lockdown, a colleague asked Dworsky to take care of a plant; he responded by watering all sixty plants in the office every morning. In secret. It was just the sort of thing he felt compelled to do, for reasons that had to do with his intrinsic motivation. The people at Pioneer call this “Dworsky strength” because the default musculature is so strong, you do a lot without realizing it is a lot. In this case, all of those plants ended up being watered. No matter what the level of the hire, look for Dworsky strength.
Because stamina can matter a good deal, and because stamina can be so hard to read in a short interaction, this is yet another reason to interview a person’s references. Remember our saying “Personality is revealed on weekends”? Well, a person’s references often have a pretty good idea of what that individual is up to on weekends, or weekdays for that matter. A judgment of stamina in particular may require observation over longer periods of time, and so your skills as an interviewer need to be multifaceted and directed toward the references as well.