This Rare Mental Illness Can Make You Wildly Successful

“I have nothing against Starbucks. At different times, I’ve owned the company’s stock. If I’m at the mall, I might stop in for a cup. But the person who stops there every morning easily surrenders at least a half-hour every day, 110 hours per work year; about two full work weeks to parking and standing in line.

At the $340.92 number [price of one’s time], $37,501.20 has been spent plus the price of the coffee! Get a Keurig and buy Starbucks K-cups, and do something more valuable with those two weeks! Heck, even take a two-week vacation. Almost anything beats this very expensive Starbucks habit.”

“If there is any one trait that distinguishes highly successful people, it is that they are, by temperament, highly motivated.

From our studies of the brain we now know that mood is an intrinsic part of the apparatus that controls motivation.

Mood is meant either to facilitate or inhibit action. When someone is depressed, he has no motivation to act. What’s the point? Nothing seems worth doing, he has no energy to do it, and it probably won’t work anyway.

Hypomania is the polar opposite. The drives that motivate behavior surge to a screaming pitch, making the urgency of action irresistible. There isn’t a minute to waste - this is going to be huge - just do it!

This pressure to act creates overachievers, but it also leads to impulsive behavior (ready, shoot, aim) and confident leaders who glibly take their followers over a cliff.

Depending on how you look at it, the Internet phenomenon was either an exciting breakthrough of human ingenuity or a colossal error in judgement that forces us to ask: What were we thinking? In truth, it was both.

The paradox of the hypomanic edge is that it is a double-edged sword.”

“The importance of this point is hard to overstate. Virtually every new movement in human history - religious, political, intellectual, and economic - has been led by a charismatic leader. Hypomania is the common thread that connects these world changers, a thread as invisible, as powerful, and stretching back as far in time as a strand of DNA.”

“Hypomanics are brimming with infectious energy, irrational confidence, and really big ideas. They think, talk, move, and make decisions quickly. Anyone who slows them down with questions ‘just doesn’t get it.’ Hypomanics are not crazy, but ‘normal’ is not the first word that comes to mind when describing them. Hypomanics live on the edge, between normal and abnormal.”

“The things most likely to make them depressed are failure, loss, or anything that prevents them from continuing at their preferred breakneck pace.”

“If a scientist wanted to design a giant petri dish with all the right nutrients to make hypomanic genius flourish, he would be hard-pressed to imagine a better natural experiment than America. A ‘nation of immigrants’ represents a highly skewed and unusual ‘self-selected’ population. Do men and women who risk everything to leap into a new world differ temperamentally from those who stay home? It would be surprising if they didn’t.”

“Hypomanics are ideally suited by temperament to become immigrants. If you are an impulsive, optimistic, high-energy risk taker, you are more likely to undertake a project that requires a lot of energy, entails a lot of risk, and might seem daunting if you thought about it too much.

America has drawn hypomanics like a magnet. This wide-open land with seemingly infinite horizons has been a giant Rorschach on which they could project their oversized fantasies of success, an irresistible attraction for restless, ambitious people feeling hemmed in by native lands with comparatively fewer opportunities.”

“It was hard to know which was more shocking, the outrageousness of Columbus’s demands, or the arrogance with which he made them.

Historians describe these demands with such words as absurd, mad, inconceivable, and ludicrous. ‘Moreover,’ Granzotto wrote, ‘he flew into a rage at any suggestion that he modify his claims.’ He refused to even negotiate.

His demands were summarily denied, leaving Columbus nothing to do but leave town. On the verge of achieving it all, he now had only ‘the night and the day,’ as the Spanish say of someone who has lost everything.”

“But prophets are not ordinary people, and they did not build an ordinary country. The new Moseses who settled America were bipolars with messianic missions of cosmic importance. And America has been teeming with messianic characters ever since.”

“Hamilton had nerve. He wasn’t so much brave as unafraid. As with most hypomanics, the meaning of risk simply failed to register with him emotionally.”

“Carnegie’s hypomanic optimism was a force of nature that would prove essential to his meteoric rise. ‘Next to Carnegie, Norman Vincent Peale was a clinically depressed pessimist,’ wrote Richard Tedlow in Giants of Enterprise. There was nothing Carnegie thought he could not accomplish. ‘That he could ever fail in life, that any possible ambition could not be achieved - such doubts never entered Carnegie’s mind,’ wrote biographer Burton Hendrick.”

“Andrew found freedom from drudgery in books. He traces this to the generosity of a Colonel Anderson (‘I bless his name as I write’), who opened up his personal library free of charge to ‘working boys.’ ‘The windows were opened in the walls of my dungeon through which the light of knowledge streamed in.

Every day’s toil and even the long hours of night service were lightened by the book which I carried about with me.’ Having a book in his pocket gave Carnegie hope.

When the library narrowed the definition of working boys to include only apprentices, Andrew wrote a letter to the Pittsburgh Dispatch ‘urging we should not be excluded,’ and the definition was changed. With little formal education, Carnegie became an autodidact. Colonel Anderson’s library launched a lifetime of learning.”

“Carnegie’s impact on literacy was so immense that it is difficult to calculate. Carnegie spent more than $50 million to open 2,811 libraries in eleven countries and every state in the union but Rhode Island.

Collectively, these institutions lent tens of millions of volumes each year to people who would not otherwise have had access to books. It was a famous expression that the sun never set on the British Empire. Carnegie liked to say that the sun never set on his libraries.

Some derided him as a modern Ramses II, immortalizing his name in stone. In fairness, Carnegie never required that his name be attached to his libraries, though he always appreciated it and was ever ready to supply a photo of himself for the lobby.

But he did require each building to be inscribed with these words from Genesis: ‘Let there be light.’ It showed the spiritual reverence Carnegie had for books and their capacity to enlighten. It also put Carnegie in the role of God - issuing forth intelligent life on Earth.”

“Carnegie also made large personal gifts to individual scientists such as Madame Curie. Sometimes he would read about a scientist in the newspaper and just send him or her a check.”

“Carnegie’s most messianic undertaking was his attempt to bring world peace. The policies Carnegie advocated were idealistic but not crazy: world disarmament, adjudication of international disputes through a world court, and enforcement of the world court’s decisions by an international police force. What was insane about his plan was that Carnegie, ‘empowered by a sense of destiny,’ believed emphatically that he could personally make these things happen, and quickly.”

“‘A steam engine in pants,’ Theodore Roosevelt defined hypomanic energy. As a crusading New York legislator, the ‘cyclone assemblyman’ entered the chamber each morning ‘as if ejected by a catapult’ and submitted as many as twenty bills a day to the legislature.”

“Venter is often described as ‘playing God’ for having helped unlock the code to create a human being. When asked ‘What’s the role of God in all this?’ Venter replied, ‘He’s been a big help so far,’ as if to suggest that we’ll take it from here.”

“Hypomanics are on this earth for good reason. And I predict that if we take them out of the gene pool, tomorrow’s Christopher Columbuses will never be born, and our descendants won’t find their new worlds.”