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The Hypomanic Edge
The Link Between (A Little) Craziness and (A Lot of) Success
But
given how closely they
overlap with the hypomanic profile, these traits might be better
understood as expressions of an American temperament, shaped in large
part by our rich concentration of hypomanic genes. 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. "Immigrants
are unusual people," wrote James
Jasper in Restless Nation. Only one out of a hundred people emigrate,
and they tend to be imbued "with special drive, ambition and talent." In
fact, the top three countries with the most manics — America, New
Zealand, and Canada — are all nations of immigrants. Asian countries
such as Taiwan and South Korea, which have absorbed very few
immigrants, have the lowest rates of manic depression. Europe
is in the
middle, in both its rate of immigrant absorption and its rate of mania.
As expected, the percentage of immigrants in a population correlates
with the percentage of manics in their gene pool. 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 and entails a lot of risk, and which might seem daunting if you
thought about it too long or too realistically. I
think 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 who have felt hemmed in by
native lands with comparatively fewer opportunities. Tocqueville
was astonished to meet people
moving from east to west and west to east. That so many people would
surrender the comfort and safety of their homes in pursuit of an
"ideal" struck him as odd. And we are still the most voluntarily mobile
people on Earth. According
to Jasper, the average American changes
residences every five years — more often than the inhabitants of any
other nation. And we change jobs more frequently too. Tocqueville
"found an entire people racing full speed ahead, and we've kept on
racing for more than three hundred years," wrote Michael Ledeen in
Tocqueville on American Character. He
sensed that the
American motivation to make money was more about the excitement of
making money than it was about wealth itself. "The desire for
prosperity has become an ardent passion which they pursue for the
emotions it excites as much as for the gain it procures." And
these
people never stopped working. "Everybody works," wrote Tocqueville. The
aristocratic European ideal was to become wealthy enough that one did
not need to labor. In America, "work opens a way to everything; this
has changed the point of honor quite around." To Americans it was a
disgrace not to work. But is
it reasonable to ascribe
such enormous influence on the contemporary day-to-day behavior of
hundreds of millions of diverse Americans to a defunct 17th century
English Protestant sect? The
average American recalls only the barest
outline of who the Puritans were, if at all. When you talk to these
strivers, they tell you that their drive comes from within and that
they have been strongly "self-motivated" since they could remember. They
hit the ground running and couldn't tell you why. I would
attribute the number of hours Americans work to what I call the
"immigrant work drive," an internal biological compulsion passed from
parent to child through their hypomanic genes. Such
"serial entrepreneurs" will tell you that they shake off
failure like a dog shakes off water, and are soon raring to go again
with a new idea. In
Japan there is still deep disgrace attached to business
failure. Men who lose their jobs often hide it from their families and
pretend to go to work each day. Some economists have argued that Japan
has been slow to bounce back from its decadelong recession because the
population has lost all taste for risk after the fallout of the stock
and real estate bubbles of the early 1990s. Most
Japanese save a
substantial portion of their money in secure savings accounts that
yield zero interest, tying up capital that could either be invested in
businesses or stimulate the consumer economy through consumption. Our
immigrant genes predispose us to optimism. "You had to be an optimist
to move. Pessimists didn't bother," wrote Yale historian George
Pierson. Because this optimism comes from within, it is not easily
discouraged by external events. And optimism, like pessimism, often
becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. In
every census from 1880
to 1990, as long as they have been keeping records, immigrants were
significantly more likely to be self-employed than natives. (The single
exception to this 110-year long trend was the roaring 1990s, when both
immigrants and native-born Americans were selfemployed at a very high
rate, just above 11 percent.) In the
last decade, America, Canada, and Israel were the top three countries
in new-company creation according to a 1999 crossnational survey of 10
industrial nations conducted by the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, a
joint project of the London Business School and Babson College. "What's
unique about the top countries is that all three have been created by
people moving into them," Paul Reynolds, one author of the report, told
Business Week. Moreover,
the magnitude of these differences is large.
The average American is four times more likely to be the founder of a
company than a Frenchman, for example. Because
they are "constantly driven to participate
in commerce and industry," Americans, who make up only 5 percent of the
world's population, account for 31 percent of its economic activity. As
British economic historian Edward Chancellor
noted in his history of financial speculation Devil Take the Hindmost,
the result is a society of people both culturally and genetically
predisposed to economic risk:
The American is equipped with more than just a
hopeful vision of the future and a drive for self-improvement. He is
prepared to take enormous risks to attain his ends. To emigrate to
America was itself a great risk. This appetite for risk — so great one
might say it was imprinted in American genes — has not diminished with
time but remains a continuing source of the nation's vitality.
They
may be our greatest natural resource. An untold number of hypomanics
helped make America the richest and most successful nation on Earth. These
hypomanics were outrageous — arrogant, provocative,
unconventional, and unpredictable. They are not "well adjusted" by
ordinary standards but instead forced the world to adjust to them.
Their stories are inspiring, comical, and sometimes tragic, as the
hubris that fueled their improbable rise often led to their fall as
well. Yet
without their irrational confidence, ambitious vision, and
unstoppable zeal, these outrageous men and women would never have
sailed into unknown waters, never discovered new worlds, never changed
the course of our history. TWO POSSIBLE FUTURES TO AVOID "If we
close our borders to new immigration, you can kiss
goodbye the new energy, new tastes, new strivers who want to lunge into
the future.That's the real threat to the American creed," wrote David
Brooks of the New York Times. Andrew
Carnegie said immigration was
America's "golden stream," and it will begin her decline when that
golden stream dries up. Immigrants are the source of our strength,
energy, and creativity.We should welcome them.They are doing America as
big a favor as it is doing them. The
decision may feel like a no-brainer.What couple would
knowingly choose to have a mentally ill child? And yet, what would be
the collective result of these individual rational decisions? Genes
that have survived millions of years of brutal competition could slip
away in a generation without a fight. I
began this article with a discussion of entrepreneurs. Economist John
Nye became famous for his "lucky fools"theory. To believe that your new
idea will be a smash hit when the realistic odds are slim is
intrinsically foolish. But,
once in a while a fool gets lucky and
strikes oil. Columbus was a lucky fool. He stumbled across America,
while recklessly claiming to have found China, along with the Garden of
Eden and other Biblical sites, all while he personally liberated the
Holy Land and ushered in the Apocalypse. You
can't be much more foolish
than that. But it's these types of people who go where no one has gone
before. If we want to keep human genius alive,we'll have to suffer
fools gladly. 16 Characteristics of a Hypomanic
Entrepreneur He is filled with energy. He is flooded with ideas. He is driven, restless, and unable to keep still. He channels his energy into the achievement of wildly grand ambitions. He often works on little sleep. He feels brilliant, special, chosen: perhaps even destined to change the world. He can be euphoric. He becomes easily irritated by minor obstacles. He is a risk taker. He overspends in both his business and personal life. He acts out sexually. He sometimes acts impulsively, with poor judgment, in ways that can have painful consequences. He is fast-talking. He is witty and gregarious. His
confidence can make him charismatic and persuasive. ~ ~ ~  John
D. Gartner, Ph.D., is a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry
at Johns Hopkins University Medical School. He is a graduate of
Princeton University, and widely published in scholarly journals and
books. His
recent
book is The
Hypomanic Edge:
The Link Between (A Little) Craziness and (A Lot
of) Success. See
more personal development and success articles at
Nightingale-Conant "Powerful ideas are at the very heart of success" 
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