Business Tips
Innovative Personalities
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- Parent Category: Business Tips
- Category: Innovation
1. Neuroticism,
2. Extraversion,
3. Openness,
4. Conscientiousness and
5. Agreeableness.
The psychologist Jordan Peterson argues that innovators and revolutionaries tend to have a very particular mix of these traits, particularly the last three: openness, conscientiousness and agreeableness.
Innovators have to be open. They have to be able to imagine things that others cannot and to be willing to challenge their own preconceptions. They also need to be conscientious. An innovator who has brilliant ideas but lacks the discipline and persistence to carry them out is merely a dreamer. That, too is obvious.
But crucially, innovators need to be disagreeable. By disagreeable, we mean that on that fifth dimension of the Big Five personality inventory, "agreeableness," they tend to be on the far end of the continuum. They are people willing to take social risks, to do things that others might disapprove of.
"If you have a new idea, and it's disruptive and you're agreeable, then what are you going to do with that?" says Peterson. "If you worry about hurting people's feelings and disturbing the social structure, you're not going to put your ideas forward."
As playwright George Bernard Shaw once put it: "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
Source: Malcolm Gladwell: “David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants”