In his fascinating book ‘Faster, Higher, Stronger’ Mark McClusky (editor of Wired.com) references research suggesting that childhood trauma plays a big part in shaping the extraordinary ability of some of the greatest athletes. The conclusion of the research done by Alan St. Clair Gibson is that Lebron James would not be King James without the experience of being born to a 16 year old mother who moved him from home to home and was on welfare at some point. That Lance Armstrong, even with the doping, would not have achieved the infamy of multiple Tour de France wins if he had known his father (and yes, you and I would still not have won if we’d doped as much as Lance did).
It’s probably untrue but we’ve always ascribed genius to madness in the purely creative arts of music and the arts. If not mad we call the genius musicians eccentric. It’s what we call Prince. It’s how we think about Brian Wilson. It’s how we justify Kanye West.
So why don’t we make more of this trauma/madness/genius association in entrepreneurship? Especially technology entrepreneurship? How do we explain the eccentricities of Elon Musk? Or the tone deafness of Peter Thiel? More importantly though, even though we mostly aspire to the success of these folk what are we willing to go through to taste that success?
It’s uncomfortable to accept, but it might be true, that it’s not totally normal to do what it takes to get to that level of success.
Or maybe you just need to redefine success for yourself…
