December 13, 2013
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“That’s a myth,” one chemist explained. “Crick made those discoveries on his own. He was frustrated because not only were his peers dubious of his theory. They couldn”t even understand it. Watson was going through the same problem. When they met each other the attitude was, “Finally, someone as crazy as me.”” They were rewarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine together in 1962. Another Nobel Prize winner often described as a “maverick“ is Norman Borlaug. This revolutionary biologist saved a billion lives by developing disease-resistant wheat. “You love wearing your Che Guevara shirts,” I told the audience. “He killed thousands of people in the name of the team. Borlaug is an individual who saved a billion lives. Where’s his T-shirt?”
Conspicuously absent from all this talk of Nobel prizes were Asians. I don”t know if it’s because Mao killed all the nonconformists, but there is something about the way they do things that engenders very little innovation. “They”re great at duplicating our work,” an engineer told me, “but all the major discoveries are done by Americans. Things such as memory where we leap from 1K to 4K to terabytes of data in one thumb drive is purely a Western phenomenon.” By ramming teamwork down our throats we”re encouraging the drone mentality that has turned China and Japan into the great imitators.
I ended my “rambling tirade“ with a brief discussion of other fields such as comedy and art because the audience cares a lot more about Carrie Underwood than they do about Kary Mullis. When Andy Warhol revolutionized pop art, he did so as an individual. Art prospers when some nut goes off on a tangent and does it again and again until we get it. Roy Lichtenstein tried his best to recreate comic-book panels because he understood that no matter how hard he tried to do a perfect copy without making his mark, the imperfections would make his mark. Later he did this with the help of employees, not team members.
Comedy is the same. When someone such as George Carlin gets onstage, we are hearing one person’s bizarre take on the world. It has an impact because the mob in the audience hadn”t thought of it that way before. The more unique a comedian is, the more interesting his take is. What’s with this obsession with making us all the same? Only incompetent people love the team, and they love it because it makes it harder to discover their incompetence.
I ended my talk by paraphrasing Steve Jobs:
Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes…the ones who see things differently”they’re not fond of rules….You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things….They push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world are the ones who do.
