Earlier in my career, I’ve shied away from working with people who seemed to diverge from being a normal person. The misfits, the weird ones, the crazies. I’ve definitely shied away from who I thought were highly crazy, but not only that – I looked at it more of as a trait to avoid as much as possible.
After working with people in tech companies for 8 years, my opinion on this has flipped completely. I now look at it as something that is almost a requirement in a way to have at least a little of. Too much is clearly bad as it leads to even more issues. But being “perfectly normal” is also bad.
There are several different ways one can think about this. One may take the logical approach and say that given multiple variables (eg. analytical ability, sales ability, emotional balance, philosophical depth, being a good swimmer – anything), one can only optimize for one variable to get the best result. As soon as you start adding more, the results drop dramatically. While this is only an upper bound in theory, anecdotally, the drop in results is quite steep as you optimize for more variables. As an example, consider hiring the best “programmer” for a job vs the best “programmer + conversationalist + salesperson” combination.1
A big part of this is purely anecdotal. There are many examples that reinforce this trend. And yet a third way to look at it is the practical: given two equally talented people working on a skill, the one who can get obsessed over it will over the long term spend more time and be better than the one who takes a reasonable approach and a more balanced life.2
It’s an important note that the topic of this post only seems to apply to working with others. It doesn’t seem to apply to personal relationships.3 And even if we take work, it seems to only apply to a specific subtype within that – work around innovation, tech and creating new things.
For society as a whole, it’s important to understand that the “misfit” image of startups isn’t a bad sign or a coincidence. It’s the norm. So, if you’re trying to create something new and exceptional, and you run across someone who seems at least a little odd, give the benefit of the doubt and remember that while the chance that they will be a bad fit is significant, the chance is virtually 100% for a completely “normal” person.
In defense of the freak show
[1] This may seem evident to some readers, but it’s still a common mistake. If we stay with the programmer example, it’s human tendency and a natural hiring mistake to hire based on how good a candidate is with social skills even if it’s largely unrelated to their job. But it can go even beyond a single person – the woke and DEI hiring wave in California is a good example. The fact that Scale AI felt the need to announce that they hire based on merit, and that the widespread reaction to it was that “it’s a bold, unapologetic and forward-looking” view goes to show how far delusions and dysfunction can go even on a society level.
[2] This can even be observed in people that reach a level of achievement (max out their career, exit their startups, etc). They realize they obsessed over it for 10 years and take a step back – they reduce it from most of their identity to just one aspect of it and lead a more balanced life. For startups, this is doing more investing, advising, etc. But in many ways it also means that they pass their historical peak.
[3] The why might be a topic for another day, but a section from Zero to One rings true here: “Tolstoy opens Anna Karenina by observing: ‘All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’ Business is the opposite.”