Management Perspectives

What distinguishes the great from the truly exceptional? After five years of writing The Profile, I have studied hundreds of successful people and examined how they reason their way through problems, unleash their creativity, navigate relationships, and perform under extreme pressure.

In my book, Hidden Genius, I try to dispel a number of myths that exist around what it means to be creative, original, and successful. Here are some of them:

MYTH 1: YOU NEED TO FEEL INSPIRED IN ORDER TO BE CREATIVE.

For centuries, we have mistakenly attributed creativity to factors outside of our control. You may hear it referred to as a talent, a gift, or some sort of inexplicable genius that few people possess.

But in reality, creativity is a skill. And like any other skill, it can be learned. In my years of studying people with creative minds, one name comes to mind: Grant Achatz.

Achatz is one of the most creative and cutting-edge chefs in America. As he pushed the boundaries of the culinary world, Alinea became recognized as the best restaurant in the world.

In 2008, Achatz was diagnosed with stage-four tongue cancer. Alinea’s genius chef had lost his ability to taste. “There was a light bulb that went off and said, ‘For the first time ever, I think I can be a chef without being able to taste.’ Because it’s up here,” he says, pointing to his head. “It’s not here,” he adds, pointing to his mouth.

Could that be true? Could it be that you can think your way to creativity? Without the ability to taste, Achatz had no choice but to test it out.

He came up with a technique called ‘flavour bouncing’. He takes a sheet of paper and draws a big circle around one central, thematic ingredient. He calls this the ‘focal ingredient’ that will set the tone for the entire dish. Then he bounces ‘satellite ingredients’ (or complementary ingredients) off the focal ingredient by drawing lines to each one.

His diagnosis forced him, to figure out new ways to keep Alinea at the forefront of culinary innovation. As someone who makes a living by creating a new tasting menu every couple of months, Achatz couldn’t wait for his muse to arrive.

In turn, he dismantles the notion that the greatest creators have an innate ‘gift’ for creativity. Creativity is less a fleeting moment of inspiration and more a muscle that can be trained through consistent exercise.

“People like to think the creative process is romantic,” Achatz says. “The artist drifts to sleep at night, to be awakened by the subliminal echoes of his or her next brilliant idea. The truth, for me at least, is that creativity is primarily the result of hard work and study.”

MYTH 2: SUCCESS BREEDS SUCCESS.

What if I told you that success doesn’t always breed success? Success sometimes breeds complacency.

Let us take a look at someone who revolutionised the animation industry.

Ed Catmull, who had a doctorate in computer technology, co-founded animation film studio Pixar alongside Steve Jobs and John Lasseter, and they began taking creative risks that shook up the entertainment world.

Catmull’s hidden genius lies in his ability to use both sides of his brain, the creative and the logical. In his five-decade career, Catmull helped bring to life a number of computer-animated hit films, including Toy Story, Finding Nemo, Ratatouille, and Wall-E. As a computer scientist, he also invented algorithms, made important discoveries in computer graphics, and helped pioneer digitally realistic films.

Catmull credits his success to his willingness to fail. When asked how Pixar’s animation units manage to pull off one hit after another, he says: “If something works, you shouldn’t do it again. We want to do something that is new, original—something where there’s a good chance of failure [each time].”

Original creators typically have three characteristics in common: They have a unique point of view on the world. They are confident they can achieve an ambitious goal. And finally, they are willing to fail spectacularly in the name of creating something revolutionary.

MYTH 3: CONSUMING A LARGE QUANTITY OF INFORMATION MAKES US WELL-INFORMED.

I have found a concept that is simple but overlooked: What you eat is who you are, and what you read is who you become. While most of us are willing to invest in our health, we often neglect our ‘content diet’, the information we feed our brains.

We may pride ourselves on consuming a lot of information, but if that information is not high-quality, the quantity does not matter. It is easy to fall into a spiral of consuming junk food content, sensationalist articles, and social media posts that plunge you into destructive thought patterns. So can we inch toward leading healthier lives by optimising what our bodies and our brains ingest? Start with conducting an honest content consumption audit.

In 2019, I made a conscious decision to elevate the information I was consuming, and it had a tremendous effect on my mental state. First, I conducted a content audit: What do I read, watch, and listen to? Who do I hang out with? Then, I made a few rules: I would read fewer surface-level news articles and more long-form profiles, I would watch less reality TV and more documentaries, and I would limit my conversations to 10 per cent small talk and 90 per cent substance.

Finally came the practical part. I deleted a few social media apps from my phone and I stopped mindlessly scrolling. I used Pocket and Notion to save interesting articles, podcasts, and video interviews I wanted to watch, and I joined communities and engaged with people who enjoyed brainstorming and debating new ideas. I listened to high-quality podcasts during my runs and I launched The Profile Dossier, a weekly deep-dive that allowed me to take a closer look at a person whose life path I found interesting. Finally, I started conducting interviews to have more compelling conversations. If you go about your day without a content strategy, you run the risk of falling into an echo chamber full of one-sided opinions. When it comes to your brain, you need to get off autopilot.

MYTH 4: A LEADER SITS AT THE TOP OF THE PYRAMID.

Many leaders think of themselves at the top of a pyramid and, employ a top-down approach at their organisations. But what if there was a more efficient and innovative way to manage a team?

Over the last decade, Spotify founder Daniel Ek has developed a non-conventional leadership playbook at the music-streaming behemoth. Ek, who is personally reserved but professionally ruthless, employs a fresh approach to creativity and leadership.

Ek once heard the CEO of Scandinavian Airlines say that the right way to think about leadership is to flip the top-down model. “You should invert the pyramid and envision yourself as the person at the bottom,” Ek says. “You are there to enable all the work being done. That’s my mental image of what I’m here to do at Spotify.”

In a bottom-up management approach, the ideas, values, and strategies come mostly from the employees who are the lifeblood of the company, while the C-suite executives offer support and resources to help the team execute plans quickly.

Ek was originally against a product team’s idea to roll out Discover Weekly, a personalised playlist that updates weekly for each user. He questioned them multiple times and asked why they were spending time and energy working on the feature. “I would have killed that if it was just me, 100 per cent,” he told Fast Company in 2018. “I never really saw the beauty of it.”

The team continued working on it despite Ek’s lack of enthusiasm. And then suddenly, they launched it to the public. “I remember reading about it in the press,” Ek said. “I thought, Oh, this is going to be a disaster.”

Discover Weekly became one of Spotify’s most loved product features.

Ek says, his role in the inverted pyramid structure is to empower internal leaders and direct the necessary resources so they can execute their ideas. “I’ll provide people a rough direction,” he explains. “I won’t provide them all of the things that they need in order to get there.”

MYTH 5: SUCCESS IS AN EXTERNAL MEASURE OF CAREER, STATUS, OR WEALTH.

I once asked myself, “How do I define success?” This question changed the trajectory of my life.

In January 2020, I read this Anna Quindlen quote: “If your success is not on your own terms, if it looks good to the world but does not feel good in your heart, it is not success at all.” The truth was that I didn’t feel successful on my own terms. I still saw success as a measure of status, money, and achievement. I did not realise that the universal hidden genius across many of the exceptional people I had studied was this: Success is personal.

Comedian Jerry Seinfeld describes success as the endless process of tinkering until you get as close as you can to perfection: “Solitude and precision, refining a tiny thing for the sake of it.” Melinda Gates, on the other hand, says her definition of success was shaped by this Ralph Waldo Emerson quote: “To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.” In her case, as one of the richest women on the planet, she has used her capital to back global health initiatives and support female-led businesses.

After studying and interviewing so many remarkable figures, I don’t envy or hero[1]worship any of them. I have seen that success does not exist in a vacuum; people are dealing with drama and all sorts of human messiness on a daily basis. So, how do you define success?