Climate activist Greta Thunberg has been one of the biggest stories of the last few years. Sixteen at the time of her ascent, she had been diagnosed with autism, a condition often regarded as a disability. On her Twitter profile she describes herself as being Asperger’s, a closely related condition (and in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, Asperger’s has been rolled into the more general diagnosis of autism).
In 2019, Greta posted on her Twitter account a year-old photo of herself, sitting alone with a sign outside of the Swedish Parliament. In the photo, no one was paying attention, and she had a dejected look on her face. Yet within a year she became one of the best-known and most influential global celebrities, with 2.7 million Twitter followers and rising. She led a Global Climate Strike of over four million people in the fall of 2019, and she has been on the short list for the Nobel Peace Prize. She also was named Time magazine’s 2019 Person of the Year.
Even if you do not agree with everything she says or does, Greta Thunberg has been wildly successful in drawing attention to climate change. The story of how she did it reveals important lessons about how people with “disabilities” can be startlingly effective not because they “overcame” their disability but because of it. Many autistic people are considered to be especially blunt in their manner of expression, to be very interested or even obsessively interested in social justice, to be potentially single-minded in their avocations, and to have a strong dislike of hypocrisy. It is those very qualities that have helped magnify Greta’s appeal and drive much of her success.1
Greta also has an immediately recognizable speaking voice, which may be connected to the unusual prosody heard in the voices of many autistics. There isn’t any other well-known orator who comes across as Greta does. She gets to the point quickly, and her delivery is memorable. And it seems that is exactly what the climate change issue needed to become focal and emotionally salient to a larger audience.
There is yet another reason autism may be correlated with Greta’s success. Since many autistics have been socially marginalized or treated poorly, they may feel they have little to lose, and that can impel them to take more chances with their ideas and with their careers. They are some of the least likely people to be caught up in “establishment” or conformist modes of thinking. Furthermore, autism implies some different and unique modes of cognition, as we will see shortly.
Greta described herself as follows: “I see the world a bit different, from another perspective.… It’s very common that people on the autism spectrum have a special interest.… I can do the same thing for hours.”2
Peter Thiel also has suggested in numerous public talks that “being Aspergery” may be useful for insulating oneself from many social trends and thus for maintaining originality in one’s thinking. In Peter’s basic model of human behavior, influenced by his former Stanford professor René Girard, mimetic desire is strong—that is, human beings look to copy each other’s behavior and also to display signs of status. (His knowledge of Girard’s framework helped him see that Facebook would be a big success, since people would wish to signal their social rank and standing.) Yet if everyone is copying everyone else, who is left to be an original thinker? To the extent that autistic and Asperger’s individuals remain outside of the usual loops of social pressure and mimetic desire, they may retain strong capacities for original, non-conformist thought. Indeed, they are sometimes unable to conform, and that may encourage their thoughts to move in new and different directions. Many of you will know that Elon Musk, when he hosted Saturday Night Live on television in 2021, “came out” as being Asperger’s (or autistic, to use the now-preferred terminology).
You might think that Greta and Elon are just two examples, but they represent a broader trend—namely, that the world is mobilizing the talents of many more kinds of people than ever before. Greta is not only a woman and autistic, but at the time she came to public renown she was sixteen years old and was not living in a major media capital or political center. The question before us is pretty simple: Do you wish to be part of such trends for mobilizing the talents of strongly unique people, or are you going to let others eclipse you in the search for talent?
We’re going to focus on cognitive disabilities (or supposed disabilities, in some cases) in this chapter, but much of what we have to say applies to individuals with physical disabilities or, for that matter, individuals with no apparent disabilities at all. Whether you are interested in the particular topics we will cover here or in others, please think of these as further examples of how to look past the surfaces.
When it comes to talent search, we recommend having some understanding of various disabilities, why you might wish to hire individuals with these disabilities or promote their work, and why you might wish to hire them because of the disability. In fact, we are not entirely comfortable with the term “disability,” as not every disability ends up being a disadvantage in every regard. One possible definition of disability might be “human differences in range and/or type of abilities, which are currently judged to impair essential aspects of functioning, regardless of actual outcomes or achievements.”3
But please do not be offended or conclude that we are somehow trying to refute or deny your own personal experience with disabilities. Nor are we trying to diminish appreciation for those who have struggled with disabilities, whether their own or in their families. In our discussion we are not trying to give a complete picture of disabilities or consider all of their possible issues. Nor are we able to choose language that will accord with the wishes of every reader; for instance, some people prefer “person with autism” while others use “an autistic,” with bitter disputes and no agreement in sight.
Instead, we are trying to show you the more positive cognitive sides of some well-known disabilities so as to improve your ability to find talent. That means we are going to emphasize the positive on the disability issues we are covering, because often that is the part of the picture that most people have the greatest trouble understanding. So please put the terminology and the politics aside, and focus on the substance of what you can learn about talent search.
To structure the discussion, let’s begin by noting that disabilities can reflect or augment talent through at least three mechanisms:
1. Different focus and redirection of effort
2. Compensation and adaptation, or making up for an initial problem
3. “Superpowers,” or ways in which people with disabilities also can have superior abilities
We’ll consider each in turn.
Consider dyslexia, which is defined in terms of difficulties in learning to read or interpret words, letters, and other symbols, yet without a loss in general intelligence. A small research literature suggests that individuals with dyslexia are more likely to become successful entrepreneurs. We are not convinced this relationship is causal, or that it is entirely robust. Still, there is a good chance this is true, and it is something to keep your eye on. As is the case in many contexts, it doesn’t have to be a causal relationship to be a useful correlation for spotting potential entrepreneurial talent.
How might the potential entrepreneurial tendencies of dyslexics be an example of different focus and redirection of effort? Well, many dyslexic individuals cannot deal with each and every detail of a production process, in part because they have trouble reading all of the details or interpreting all of the relevant symbols with the required accuracy and speed. In response, they reallocate their efforts to the tasks they can perform successfully, including leadership roles. Sometimes that may be selecting talent and delegating authority, and so dyslexic individuals may learn to start their own enterprises and then delegate the tasks they are not good at. Again, this is a lesson in how apparent disabilities can be correlated with possible strengths on the job. Dyslexic individuals can face very real challenges reading, writing, and decoding information, but don’t stereotype dyslexic individuals as inferior performers.
And maybe many of the rest of us have a kind of status quo bias, or risk aversion, that keeps us from being entrepreneurial, whereas perhaps more of the dyslexic individuals are pushed into entrepreneurship by their (partial) disability. They have less of a future from deciding to “stay put” and settle into a boring, repetitive job. Thus, they may strike out in other, new directions, and end up as higher earners and more likely to change the world. Perhaps it is our complacency and risk aversion that should be called a disability too.
Richard Branson, British billionaire and the founder of Virgin Group, explained how his own dyslexia helped him in his career: “[My dyslexia] helped me think big but keep our messages simple. The business world often gets caught up in facts and figures—and while the details and data are important, the ability to dream, conceptualise, and innovate is what sets the successful and the unsuccessful apart.” In other words, an inability to focus on all of the details can, for some people, reallocate their attention toward a more important bigger picture.4
Branson also suggested that dyslexics will be well equipped to compete in the workplace of the future. That is very much a speculative opinion, but again, we are trying to open your mind to possibilities rather than to offer you a comprehensive account of dyslexia. If you understand why that claim might be true, it will be easier to spot the talents and virtues of others, including dyslexics. According to some estimates, there may be as many as 700 million dyslexics in the world. As a simple first step, you might consider thinking twice about individuals who appear to exhibit otherwise unreliable reading and spelling skills.5
This theme of redirecting effort is a general one. Just about any disability, by definition, implies that an individual is (at least initially) subpar at some set of skills. Many individuals respond to that initial deficiency by investing more in acquiring other, different skills. Disability is thus a potential marker for skill specialization, and skill specialization can be a very potent advantage, most of all in a world that is rapidly becoming more complex.
This second theme of compensation and adaptation is more counterintuitive than the point about redirection, yet it is an important theme when thinking about disability. Not only may individuals with disabilities be induced to excel in other areas unrelated to their disability, but they may be induced to excel in the area of initial disability itself. To see how that might be, let us consider an example.
A disability may sometimes turn a person’s attention to the importance of a particular area. Darcey Steinke, writing in The New York Times, explained why her stutter in some ways turned out to be a blessing: “The central irony of my life remains that my stutter, which at times caused so much suffering, is also responsible for my obsession with language. Without it I would not have been driven to write, to create rhythmic sentences easier to speak and to read. A fascination with words thrust me into a vocation that has kept me aflame with a desire to communicate.”6
Or consider the disability of aphantasia, the inability to visualize images in one’s mind. That means you can’t use your mind’s eye to summon up visual images at will. Many individuals, possibly 2 percent of the population, have aphantasia but don’t even know it, often because they don’t have an intuitive sense of how other people can perform this function, and thus, they do not know what they are missing. You might think that aphantasia rules out an individual from working in visually oriented professions, as those individuals would seem to be at an extreme disadvantage. Yet that is not the case. For instance, it is reported that quite a few people working in computer graphics have aphantasia. One example would be Ed Catmull, former president of Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios; another would be Glen Keane, an Oscar winner who created Ariel from The Little Mermaid.7
We’re not sure why such a connection might exist. Does the inability to see images in one’s mind motivate a person to create such graphic images for a more public medium? Or are the mechanical techniques for making such images intrinsically more interesting for those with aphantasia? Perhaps the “marvel of visual image creation” is all the more splendid and enthralling for those with aphantasia. Or maybe they think more readily in terms of interesting narrative because their minds are not filled up with images. Or it could be that aphantasia is correlated with some other difference in the brain, and that difference brings some cognitive advantages. Whatever the reason might be, aphantasia might be a reason to hire someone for the task of visual image creation, not a reason to stay away.
The famous geneticist Craig Venter is considered to have aphantasia (or to be aphantasiac). His main contribution has been to lead the first team to sequence the human genome and to first transfect a cell with a synthetic chromosome. Genetics is a field full of mappings and visual analogies, and the core facts about DNA are very often presented in visual form, such as intricate spirals. How is it that an aphantasiac might have ended up as the major leader in such a field? Might the aphantasiac have been induced to construct a compensating analytical framework, in lieu of the usual visual images, and perhaps that non-visual framework was highly conducive to further intellectual progress? Again, we don’t know, but the point is that you should not use a superficial understanding of disability to dismiss the possibility that someone might be a top talent in an area closely related to their disability.
Another example would be blind lawyers. You might think they would struggle to read and digest the relevant laws and court documents. But there are many workarounds, one of them being text-recognition software that converts the written word to speech. Alternatively, many blind lawyers might remember the law better, knowing it is probably harder for them to look things up. There is, in fact, a National Association of Blind Lawyers with several hundred members, and the former lieutenant governor of Washington State, Cyrus Habib, is a blind lawyer. The point is not that every blind person can or should be a lawyer, only that what we perceive as weaknesses or disabilities can sometimes be beaten or transcended.
Let’s take a look at one of the most common disabilities, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The stereotypical picture of an ADHD individual is someone who can’t pay attention to any single topic for very long and who flits from one thing to the next, perhaps flunking out of school or losing a job in the process. That might explain some facets of the ADHD experience, including a possible reliance on appropriate medication. We have noticed, in contrast, that a pretty high proportion of successful individuals seem to be ADHD in some manner, even though they usually have not been formally diagnosed. Rather than being distracted to the point of chaotic ineffectiveness, they have learned to redirect their cognitive impatience as a force that propels them through an enormous amount of work and learning.
For instance, accept for just a moment the oversimplified popular caricature of ADHD and assume it impels individuals to be switching their attention all the time. Well, being impelled to do anything is actually a great potential motivator. If need be, just set up your two projects next to each other, and keep on switching from one to the other, whenever your attention is distracted from the one you are working on at the moment. It is so often the workers who are not impelled to do much of anything at all who are the problem. Have you ever wondered how so many people can just sit there in the airport waiting for their flights, doing nothing? It astonishes us, and it is also a loss of productivity.
Or let’s say you have ADHD and wish to read a long book. Is that impossible? Well, no. You might find a way to treat the next, forthcoming page as a “distraction” from the previous page, and that will keep you reading. When compensatory mechanisms are in place, an apparent disability doesn’t have to be a disability but can become an advantage. The reality is that a lot of ADHD individuals seem to develop mechanisms that allow them to take in enormous amounts of information while staying motivated the whole way through, or perhaps being super-motivated.
It is also worth understanding how the ADHD individuals in your workplace, whether they are diagnosed or not, will have different skills and inclinations than your other workers. For instance, they may have a higher demand for novelty and constantly be looking for the stimulus of new problems to solve. Other workers may find such a “diet” to be disorienting, and instead prefer to apply known methods to known problems and feel in control the whole way through a large volume of work. We’re not suggesting that any generalization will cover everyone, only that you should be aware of the heterogeneities in play here and understand human cognition as truly diverse.
Autistic individuals also provide numerous examples of how what might seem to be initial disabilities can be converted to strengths or at least partial strengths. By now it is well known that many autistic individuals are highly skilled at programming, mathematics, and other technical subjects; this has virtually become a cliché. There are whole companies, typically in the tech area, that specialize in hiring autistic people for jobs of this kind. That’s great, but the next step is to broaden your understanding of how autism might fit into other roles too.8
For instance, autism therapist Tony Atwood has suggested, based on his professional experience, that autistics may be overrepresented in the acting profession, of all places. If some of their social instincts are less developed in the first place, they may have to learn the skill of acting throughout their entire lives from young ages. That might make them skilled at professional acting later on. Again, don’t be captured by the cliché, but keep your mind open toward the various surprising possibilities in play.9
It is a common misconception that autistics lack social intelligence, and some definitions of autism make deficits in social intelligence core aspects of the condition. It is more insightful to think of autistics as having a high variance in social intelligence, noting that they are often not well in sync with social conventions. But that helps them to see many social foibles with special perspicacity or to understand situations in new and novel lights. For instance, the absurdity of rituals at cocktail parties or in higher education may be two of many areas where many autistics see through to the underlying reality more quickly. More generally, when autistics encounter social situations, very often they are absorbing too much social information and don’t know how to order or process it, which may confuse them. Yes, that can be a practical problem, it is a disability, and it reflects some problems with the ordering principles behind autistic cognition. Still, the point remains that the autistics are processing huge amounts of social information—above-average amounts, sometimes extraordinary amounts. If autistics learn to order it properly, through study and practice, they can be extremely insightful about social situations, even if they do not grasp all of the ordinary angles that non-autistics are likely to understand rather more readily.10
Tyler attributes a lot of his own success to his hyperlexia—his ability from a very young age to read much faster than other people and to absorb that information very readily. Hyperlexia is often connected to autism and its information-gathering proclivities, although Tyler does not think of himself as having low social intelligence or disabilities in communication skills, the latter being part of the formal clinical definition of autism.11
Another common misconception about autism is that autistics are always introverts and thus ill-suited for jobs that require a lot of extraversion. That view confuses autism, which is largely a cognitive category, with notions of personality. In reality, many autistics are quite extroverted and very happy to be forward and outgoing in their dealings with others; some autistics may possibly be too extroverted when it comes to sharing or talking about their particular special interests. Other autistics do in fact behave in an introverted manner, in part because they feel discouraged by how they are treated in various social situations. But that doesn’t mean they have the natural personality inclination to be an introvert. It is still unclear whether autistics, on average, are intrinsically more introverted, whether they simply act more introverted because they may understand some social situations poorly, or whether there is no correlation at all. In any case, don’t leap to a hasty conclusion on this one. If you equate autistics with “introverted, nerdy guys,” you are confusing different categories, and you will end up missing a lot of the talented autistics you might otherwise be trying to hire.12
Microsoft, for instance, found that “candidates with autism [often] don’t get through the initial phone screen because they may have yes or no answers or they may not elaborate on other skills.” In response to this dilemma, Microsoft adapted its hiring process to allow email to replace the phone call, gave individuals the chance to do a practice interview first, and gave individuals the option to code using their own laptops instead of having to do whiteboard work in front of other individuals. The company believes this allowed them to hire a greater number of talented autistic individuals.13
Also keep in mind that the generalizations about personality psychology are less likely to apply to autistics. For instance, it was already a weakness of personality psychology that categories such as “conscientiousness” might not be fully general but rather would depend on the degree of motivation in a particular area. This is likely all the more true for autistics, who typically have strongly “preferred interests” in specific topic areas. Do not, in general, expect to know when you are interviewing or reviewing autistics; nonetheless, especially when you are aware of it, look less for signs of conscientiousness in general and more for signs of conscientiousness (or not) in particular areas of relevance. For the interview process, bear in mind that autistics find “thinking in terms of stories” less automatic and perhaps less appealing as well, so if you try to engage them in the storytelling mode it may go poorly. Again, you can’t hope to be diagnosing interview subjects as you are proceeding, but do keep in mind that human beings have a wide variety of means of organizing information in response to a question.
One good framework for understanding the role of compensation in disability comes from economics, and it is best outlined in a 1987 article by David Friedman, “Cold Houses in Warm Climates and Vice Versa: A Paradox of Rational Heating.” The basic point of Friedman’s article, although he does not express it as such, is that compensation for an initial disadvantage can lead to a higher level of skill or achievement. To cite Friedman’s example, if you live in a cold climate, you might invest in a lot of home insulation and thereby end up warmer. Alternatively, if you grow up where the weather is usually sixty degrees, you might not have central heating at all, and thus, you can end up feeling pretty chilly at night.14
All this ties back to human disabilities. If you have a disability of some kind, you may need to work all the harder in that area and make a big adjustment. While that is a burden, and it will hinder or discourage many individuals, others will ultimately end up with superior performance. Just remember how Darcey Steinke’s stutter made her more aware of words and thus a better writer, as discussed earlier.
The core truth is this: even if you think disabilities are disadvantages on net, many of them come with offsetting advantages in the overall package. And sometimes those advantages can be very impressive.
We draw the term “superpowers” from the story of cartoonist Dav Pilkey, a bestselling children’s author who has sold millions of books, most of all from his Dog Man franchise. Pilkey is open about his dyslexia and ADHD, and often when he makes public appearances children with dyslexia and ADHD come to meet him and express their solidarity with signs. Pilkey once stated in an interview: “I don’t call it Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. I call it Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Delightfulness. I want kids to know that there’s nothing wrong with you. You just think differently, and that’s a good thing. It’s good to think differently. This world needs people who think differently; it’s your superpower.”15
Another part of the interview went like this:
Q: And you had to sit in the hall in elementary school?
A: So little was known about those conditions back in those days, and I think it was just seen as I was distracting everyone in the class with my silliness. I couldn’t stay in my chair and keep my mouth shut. So the teachers from second to fifth grade just put me in the hall. It ended up being kind of a blessing for me, too, because it gave me time to draw and to create stories and comics. I guess I made lemonade out of it.
Cognitive advantages can benefit autistic individuals as well. Among the cognitive strengths of autistics, catalogued and replicated in the research literature, are the following:
The claim is not that all autistics have all of these abilities, but rather that autistics have strong skills in those areas at higher rates than do non-autistics. There is also good evidence that autistics have strong performance on Ravens IQ tests (the Ravens Progressive Matrices test measures fluid intelligence and the ability to pick up skills such as spatial visualizing, inferring rules, and engaging in high-level abstraction). The scores of the autistics were, on average, 30 percentile points higher on the Ravens test, and sometimes more than 70 percentile points higher, compared to Wechsler scales of intelligence, which place greater stress on linguistic and cultural forms of knowledge. A third of the tested autistic children scored at or higher than the 90th percentile for the Ravens test. More generally, other studies find that higher genetic risk for autism correlates with higher IQ.16
Most generally, autistics may have higher rates of de novo genetic mutations than do non-autistics. That means autism may be correlated with a large number of other, different conditions, due to the higher general propensity for mutations, even if those conditions are not themselves “part of the autism.” That will make autistics “more unusual,” and in ways that could either boost or harm productivity.17
In 2001–2002, Tyler played a critical role in hiring Vernon Smith and his experimental economics team to George Mason University; several years later Vernon won a Nobel Prize, and his colleagues also did impressive work, so that was obviously a very good hire. Vernon is well known as an “Asperger’s autistic” and has written and spoken extensively on this, as he credits his extreme focus and work ethic to his autistic traits. For all of Vernon’s virtues, which include an extreme good-naturedness, it was not the easiest recruiting process. Vernon has an auditory processing disorder (a trait correlated with autism), and so he did not always register verbal agreements made in the room. Someone in an intermediary role had to figure that out, and that person turned out to be Tyler. Furthermore, when Vernon was considering coming to George Mason, money was not his number one consideration; rather, it was the freedom to work on his own projects with an extreme degree of autonomy. The offer was structured accordingly, and Vernon accepted even though he and his team could have earned higher salaries at a number of other schools.18
Temple Grandin, one of the most famous and visible autistic individuals, has stressed her strengths in visual thinking and thinking in terms of images. She has written, “When I first started my career as a designer of cattle handling systems in the 1970s, I believed everybody thought in pictures the same way I did. Before I drew the plans for a steel and concrete structure, I saw the finished structure. But that’s not how most plans are designed, I now know. Today, facilities and equipment I have designed are in almost all of the large beef processing plants. The visual thinkers, similar to me, have invented and created much of the really clever equipment used today such as intricate conveyor systems and ingenious packaging rigs.” Grandin also has written extensively on autism, and not surprisingly, the work focuses on visual thinking as one possible autistic cognitive strength.19
Or consider José Valdes Rodriguez, ten years old when he was the subject of a newspaper article in 2019. Diagnosed with autism, he speaks four languages, has memorized the value of pi to two hundred places, and at the age of ten was taking pre-calculus math in Victoria, Canada. He aspires to be a professional astronomer. Will José Valdes be a good hire someday, maybe even relatively soon? Possibly so, but we don’t yet know. Should you in any case give him a close look? Absolutely.20
We’ve only covered a few disabilities in this chapter, but you might be wondering about schizophrenics, or more broadly schizotypy, referring to a continuous spectrum of traits related to schizophrenia and psychosis. Might those individuals possibly have advantages, if only partial advantages, for some kinds of jobs?
The answer probably is yes. To be clear, we have found the literature on schizotypy and also on bipolar individuals difficult to interpret, in part because many of the papers seem to have low-quality data and also relatively few data points. Nonetheless, there are numerous accounts of how schizotypic individuals may suffer from local processing deficits (that is, they move too rapidly and too indiscriminately to global processing), working memory defects, an inability to maintain attention, disorganized behavior, hypo- and hyperexcitability, excessive speculative ideation, excess receptivity to information from the right hemisphere of the brain, delusions, and other problems. We do not contest this evidence or the very real human costs that may arise as a result.21
Nonetheless, we are struck by the large number of research papers that find a connection between schizotypy (and sometimes bipolar disorder) and artistic creativity. That indicates that schizotypy might boost particular kinds of insights.
Among the famous creative figures who have been labeled schizophrenic or possibly bipolar are Vincent van Gogh, Jack Kerouac, John Nash, Brian Wilson, Agnes Martin, Bud Powell, Camille Claudel, Edvard Munch, and Vaslav Nijinsky, among many others, to the point where this has become a cliché of art house cinema. Less anecdotally, some research papers suggest a more systematic positive relationship between artistic creativity and schizotypy. For instance, schizotypy is often associated with “the increased availability of distant or less common semantic associations,” possibly connected with “a relative weakening of left hemisphere dominance and strengthening of availability of right hemisphere processing.” Metrics for schizotypy correlate with metrics for creativity, including in relatives, and furthermore, polygenic risk scores for both schizophrenia and bipolar disorder appear to predict creativity. There is also genetic evidence showing that schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and other mental health problems are correlated with other genetic factors associated with higher levels of education.22
Kanye West, one of the leading musical creators of our time, renowned for his generativity and versatility, is one recent artist who has come out as having a bipolar diagnosis. On one of his songs he rapped: “See, that’s my third person. That’s my bipolar shit.… [T]hat’s my superpower, ain’t no disability, I am a superhero!”23 As you might expect, this was controversial, as Kanye came under fire for glamorizing what can be a major problem for many individuals. It can be dangerous to view it as a superpower and not to exercise sufficient caution. Still, the notion that bipolar and schizophrenic tendencies are related to creativity in some positive way simply does not go away.24
There also seems to be a connection between schizophrenia and a sensitivity to at least some kinds of social information. If, for instance, the information coming from the right hemisphere is filtered in a less disciplined or stringent manner, individuals with schizotypy can be extremely perceptive, perhaps in some circumstances too perceptive. Such individuals are often able to pick up on otherwise unperceived social associations or subtle social cues, or to imagine possibilities that others cannot see. They have extreme openness along some dimensions, and they can embody the opposite of extreme literalness, which may account for some of the correlation with creativity. They take leaps of faith, often without justification. For that reason, individuals with schizotypy may have tendencies toward paranoia or believing in a lot of social facts that are not true or even close to true. There is also a tendency to overreact to the gaze of others and to infer intentionality when no intentionality is present. There is a high level of distractibility and a relatively loose association between the nature of stimuli and resulting thoughts and feelings, which, again, can bring hallucinations and delusions. There can be an exaggerated sense of self-consciousness and an excessive concern with one’s position in the social order.25
That is a complicated set of traits, but the point is that many of these individuals may have superior creativity and also superior powers of discernment for some situations. They may be highly generative and a source of many new ideas. They also may have social insights and perceive social truths that others do not, even if their judgment is less than totally reliable, as reflected by the defects of many schizophrenics when it comes to “theory of mind.” So if you would like some insight into a social situation or to hear a new creative option, consider asking a schizophrenic, or an individual with tendencies toward schizophrenia, for advice. After you are done asking the autistic, that is.26
You might object that schizophrenic individuals, or even those with schizotypy or perhaps bipolar disorder, will prove disruptive in the workplace. This is not the time or place to debate the effectiveness of medication and how much the negative characteristics of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder can be controlled. If nothing else, please recall that this is a book about talent search, not just a book about hiring. So if you meet a highly talented but potentially disruptive individual, schizophrenic or not, well, maybe you shouldn’t hire that person into a full-time, on-site job. But consider some other possible roles, including telecommuting (with pay based on output), part-time consulting, buying their artworks or a share in their future income stream, or using the person as an advisor or a source of generative ideas.
Again, our goal here is not to present you with a definitive scientific understanding of schizophrenia, schizotypy, or bipolar disorder. Instead, we seek to open your mind to alternative possibilities for how you might spot talent in others, schizophrenic or not.
At the very least, please consider and internalize the general lesson that you should not let stereotypes dominate your thinking. Again, we are not saying the positive outcomes are the reality for all or even most individuals with disabilities, nor are we denying the very real possible hardships involved, even for successful individuals. We are saying that commonly labeled disabilities are complex phenomena, and they can have possible upsides, sometimes significant ones. You, as a searcher for talent, need to see as many sides of the picture as is possible and to spot the talent that other people are missing. Often that means understanding that apparent disabilities are by no means always disadvantages at the job.
In this chapter we have focused mostly on what might be called cognitive disabilities, but physical disabilities are relevant too. Many individuals have movement impairments, facial differences, or skin disorders; in your search for talent you are likely to encounter many other possible conditions. We will not list and consider them exhaustively. Rather, the general point is this: contemporary society still too often suffers from “lookism,” which is expecting smart and “able” people to fit a very particular physical picture of how to move and act and sound. To whatever extent possible, try to liberate yourself from those biases. No matter how open-minded you may be in some regards, or no matter how much you may have overcome racism or sexism, you are still probably somewhat of a captive of lookism, which hardly ever receives media attention. Look past looks, so to speak.
As already mentioned, we do not find the word “disability” entirely appropriate. Very often disabilities are paired with corresponding abilities, but still “disability” is the word in general use. In our context, that of finding talent, the word “disability” still might be useful for its shock value. “Often you want to hire people with disabilities” is perhaps a more memorable catchphrase, especially for your team, than the probably more accurate “What are called disabilities often signal a complex mix of skills and deficiencies, and perhaps those are the overlooked individuals in labor markets.” In any case, disability is a highly complex notion and by no means always negative on the whole, especially if your talent search is looking for the special cases and the outliers.
We don’t expect you to be able to sort this all out, least of all on the spot. Just keep in mind that disability is a complex concept, the label probably is a bad one, and apparent disabilities can be correlated with some really good hires. Keep an open mind.