A Kick in the Career: You Don’t Have to Be Crazy to Work Here. Or Maybe You Do

Are all visionaries nuts? Do all highly successful people have a screw loose? Is the derangement that goes with thinking way outside box the same thing that creates a windfall for the shareholders?

One thing is for sure: not everybody who’s nuts is a genius. Some people are just plain bananas. We might be hanging onto a romantic notion that all out-of-the-blue success stories are the products of tenacious crazy people who push their vision through even if their toxic or anti-social behavior drives everyone around them bonkers. It’s all part of the deal when it comes to making it in business, right? Troubling, perhaps, but it will help me market my new book series Ayn Rand, Vampire Hunter.

Maybe this stereotype is kept alive by the business community in order to maintain an illusion that success is a corrupting influence. After all, nothing thins the herd of competition like a belief that getting to the top isn’t worth it. Or maybe we are strangely hard-wired to respect and respond to a certain level of insanity. In the public imagination, genius typically comes with a personality somewhere between Joseph Stalin and the dude from A Beautiful Mind. Just ask any movie actor who has been put through seventy-two punishing takes by a visionary cinematic despot: it is exhausting, but it’s part of working with Orson Welles or Stanley Kubrick.

Are there no even-tempered geniuses out there? Surely we all have had great bosses who could have made the choice to be nasty, but instead took the time to relate to their employees on a human level. Clint Eastwood, by all accounts, runs the quietest, most respectful movie set in the business, albeit at gunpoint. (Kidding, Clint, kidding!). Countless people have gotten very, very rich while at the same time being as even keeled as they can be. It’s just that they don’t make good copy. People who got where they are by hard work and forgetting to take their medication are just more interesting.

I'll say it again. There are plenty of crazy people whose ideas are just crazy. It seems reasonable to assume that nutcases with delusional visions of grandeur exist in equal numbers to geniuses. Institutions and sidewalks are full of unfortunates who claim to have developed a way to communicate with an alien species through their fillings. Actually, this might be their time. I’ll bet people on Kickstarter would shell out to see the beta testing on that prototype.  Crazy as it sounds.