Editor’s note: This article was first published in March 2014. Marissa Mayer was then Yahoo’s CEO (she left in 2017), and Maya Angelou, described as still active, died in May 2014.
If you want to succeed, you will have to be a little weird (or very weird). According to Harvard psychologist Shelley Carson, eccentric people tend to be more creative because of something called “cognitive disinhibition“. Some call it madness, others creativity, but the truth is that it is these highly creative eccentrics who have given the world great advances that, without that touch of madness, we probably would not have.
Highly successful people achieve success because, to make their ideas work, they do not usually follow the rules everyone else has set, and so they do things the rest do not manage. Still, let’s look at what some of them did to be more creative, because some of it borders on madness.
1. Yoshiro Nakamatsu left his brain half-dead to come up with great ideas.
Nakamatsu is one of Japan’s greatest inventors, with a total of 3,300 patents over his lifetime, among them the karaoke machine, the taxi fare meter and the digital watch. By his own account, he had a technique for coming up with great ideas and then carrying them out: he would hold his head underwater until he almost drowned.
He literally let his brain all but die from lack of oxygen, up to 0.5 seconds before death. He claimed that this was how great ideas came to him, ideas he could visualise and then write down. Let’s say it was a kind of threat to his brain: “either you give me ideas or I let you die”, and his clever brain preferred to give him ideas.
2. Ludwig van Beethoven developed his ideas in the bathroom.
Beethoven, despite being deaf, became one of the most influential composers in the world. His pupil Anton Schindler recounted that Beethoven used to compose in a strange way in the bathroom: he would stand at the washbasin and pour large jugs of water over his hands, shouting and sometimes humming. It was his way of meditating and giving free rein to his creativity, although according to Schindler it annoyed his neighbours. Over time, many other entrepreneurs have said that the bathroom is a place where great business ideas come up and where many problems get solved, especially in the shower.
3. Thomas Edison refused to sleep when he was on a roll.
Thomas Edison thought sleep was a genetic inheritance from our “cave days” and a waste of time. That is why, when he was in the middle of a run of discoveries, he said he once went up to 72 hours without sleep so as not to break that winning streak, and that without it he probably would not have invented the alkaline battery or the phonograph.
Of course, as history has moved on, Edison has lost credibility in his words and inventions, since he is among the possible inventors who could be a fraud. Many historians say that Edison was not an inventor but a buyer of patents. In fact, it is now known that Edison did not invent the light bulb. And while I’m at it, I also doubt that three days without sleep make you more creative.
4. Marissa Mayer (Yahoo) slept at her desk to maximise productivity and creativity.
Marissa Mayer says that when she worked at Google she put in up to 130 hours a week until she finished the projects she was working on. To do it, she slept at her desk and took strategic showers to wake up her creativity. But… how did Mayer avoid fatigue and burnout? Simple. Mayer had a rule of taking a full week’s holiday every four months.
5. Maya Angelou rented a hotel room to cut herself off from the world.
This woman has achieved countless successes over a 50-year career: autobiographies, books of poetry, films and television programmes. Her secret: a small hotel room where she would go from seven in the morning until two in the afternoon, with a dictionary, a Bible, a deck of cards and a bottle of sherry. That way, she said, she reached her highest level of productivity and creativity.
6. Francis Bacon said hangovers helped him with his works of art.
Bacon is a British artist known for painting horrifying but highly valuable portraits. Let’s say he was an artist who spent most of his time drunk, and who admitted that he loved working when he woke up with a hangover, because that way his mind could not think clearly, and so the creativity came out on its own.
The truth is that some works of art make us wonder whether Bacon’s technique is more common than we think.
Clearly, everyone has their own method for developing creativity, and although the methods of the people we have named are not what we would call very common, it is also true that they worked for them. Each person has to find their own way of being more creative.
This article is adapted from a piece that originally appeared in Business Insider.
Further reading
- The one thing highly successful people never do
- The best advice 9 successful business people ever received
Featured image: Ushuaia.pl, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
