Philosophy of Genetics

Why it's so hard to change yourself

Oprah and Dr. Phil are innately self-confident and charismatic celebrities, who became rich by trafficking their brand of self-help advice to people who (like most of us) are innately insecure.  Their highly addictive product (presented on TV shows, expensive self-help books and magazines) is ingested like a drug by gullible people who desperately want to fix their own personality.

Oprah and Dr. Phil tell their followers that by changing their habits they can change themselves.  Sounds easy.  Of course, the advice has no lasting effect.  People are temporarily happy, of course, to do what their leaders tell them, but are unwilling to change their habits for more than a few days or weeks on their own, without additional moral support from their leaders.  Time to buy a new self-help book, or watch a new commercial-filled episode of Oprah.

Unfortunately, most people are unwilling to believe that their motivations are innate.  They believe that following the right leader will make them change (does anyone see the irony of requiring a leader to tell you how to be more of a leader?), and therefore leaders can endlessly exploit this mistake, and make themselves rich at the folly of others.

What would it take for people to finally understand that motivations and personality are innate?  Paradoxically, it would a charismatic figure, whom people could trust and follow, to preach this new gospel, to make people believe.  But why would a leader do something so self-defeating?  Why would a person with leadership genes want to destroy the myth, and lose their grand position in society?  It's not going to happen.

Followership

This year's Kravis Institute Leadership Conference will focus on "followers" -- those people who seek out leaders with whom they can identify emotionally, and receive approbation and approval from (without whom there would be no need for followers).

As I have repeatedly shown, leaders differ from followers in their genetic traits, which implies that followers have their own distinct genetic variations.  Those variations are responsible for shyness and how high they are able to rise in the social pecking order, before feeling stress, fear and anxiety.

Followers don't seem to mind that leaders like Steve Jobs become billionaries at their expense -- being given a disproportionate share of society's resources due to their genetic differences -- because followers are too busy seeking their approval to notice.

Steve Jobs and slot machines

I just finished reading a biography of Steve Jobs, the charismatic co-founder of Apple Computers.  He is able to attract top talent to any company he starts, and those computer engineers willingly work 90 hour weeks on his behalf.  Yet, after he charms and attracts them with his vision of the future (often referred to as his "reality distortion field"), he is often abusive to those same employees, paying them poorly, taking credit for their work, and shunning them (even after many years of service) if they are critical or disloyal in any way.

So why do people continue working for Steve Jobs?  I'm reminded of the psychological concept of "partial reinforcement", often used to explain compulsive gambling. It goes like this: Slot machines reward their players at random intervals.  You never know when you will be rewarded, so you keep playing.  Random reinforcement turns out to be one of the most powerful human motivations.  Some people forget to eat or sleep, regardless of their finances, in pursuit of possible reward.

Followers want to identify with their leader's emotions.  They want to please him, and receive approbation and approval in return.  They are happy when he is happy, and sad when he is sad.  That is the nature of being a follower.  If the leader is abusive toward them, they feel stress and dismay, but also more motivated to please him in the future.

Steve Jobs naturally taps into the motivational power of partial reinforcement.  He is just being himself, although he is more rare breed than the rest, the distribution of traits at work.

Introverts and Extroverts

According to a review of Marti Olsen Laney's new book, "The Hidden Gifts of the Introverted Child":

"Introverted children enjoy the internal world of thoughts, feelings and fantasies, and there's a physiological reason for this. Introverts have more brain activity in general, and specifically in the frontal lobes. When these areas are activated, introverts are energized by retrieving long-term memories, problem solving, introspection, complex thinking and planning."

"Extroverts enjoy the external world of things, people and activities. They have more activity in brain areas involved in processing the sensory information we're bombarded with daily. Because extroverts have less internally generated brain activity, they search for more external stimuli to energize them."

"It's the different pathways that are turned on that activate the behaviors and abilities we see in introverts and extroverts... It impacts all areas of their lives: how they process information, how they restore their energy, what they enjoy and how they communicate."

Introverted children need time alone more than do extroverted children... "Extroverts gain energy by being out and about," but "being with people takes energy from introverts, and they need to get away to restore that energy."

"Shyness is behavior that may diminish as children grow; introversion is a character trait that lasts. "

Predicting Genius

The New York Times recently reported on the current "neglect of exceptionally talented children", at least in some people's eyes.

By contrast, things were different back in the 1920's.  Stanford psychologist Lewis Terman's "Genetic Studies of Genius" investigated California schoolchildren to see whether "intellectual capacity was innate", and if there was a way -- such as the newly introduced IQ tests -- "to predict and improve their chances of future greatness".  Yet such investigations fell out of favor after WWII when anyone who spoke of genetics and ability was branded a "racist eugenicist", and Terman's followers were labelled "termites".

According to the Times article:

In postwar America, the terms "gifted" and "talented" crowded out "genius," which sounded suspiciously elitist, and a quest was under way for a wider, democratic conception of human excellence. Psychologists pushed toward a more multifaceted understanding of giftedness, turning their attention to "divergent thinking" and creative capacities - fluency, originality, flexibility - as well as to a wider range of less distinctively intellectual abilities, like "task commitment."...Youthful giftedness could not be fully appreciated, or cultivated, without viewing it as a social construct ... with ... a receptive cultural context.

Still, some researchers doggedly continued where Terman left off:

[Prof. Julian] Stanley inaugurated the Johns Hopkins talent search and began gathering subjects for the second-most-famous longitudinal gifted study: the continuing Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY), which includes a superselect cohort of students who scored 700 or above on the math or the verbal section before turning 13 (a feat performed by 1 in 10,000 children).

So it is again fashionable for "experts [to] sound the alarm about the brilliant minds that aren't being found or are being frustrated".  But this is silly.  True geniuses persevere despite the obstacles.  They don't care what society says, or whether they are popular.  They have exceptional resilience and single-mindedness, and are unwilling to accept defeat.  These qualities, which I believe to be innate, should be considered just as important as "raw mental ability".

Certainly, there are smart people in the world who would succeed with enough coddling.  But the coddlers (mentors, teachers, etc) will always represent the status quo -- the current paradigm.  A genius with a mentor would not be a genius, since he or she would be trapped in the same paradigms and ways of thinking as the teacher.  A genius must stand apart, and see things in new ways.

A truly novel idea is inherently alienating to the old order.  Joseph Schumpeter called this “creative destruction”. A genius is a person who destroys old ways of thinking, and invents new ways.  There is no such thing as "socially constructed genius".  A genius must act alone.

Choosing leaders as a form of Genetic Selection

Jack Welch, former CEO of GE, wrote a book recently about his experiences running a large corporation. He says he is often asked whether leadership can be learned, or whether it comes as “part of the package” (innate). His answer is: “a little of both”. He agrees that IQ and “energy level” are probably innate, but that self-confidence is learned “at your mother’s knee”.

But in reality, it’s all innate. Successful leaders often make this mistake. They feel their confidence is learned from experience since it increases over time, as they achieve more success. When a successful leader is young, he often feels trepidation in front of more senior people, or when confronted with difficult situations, yet later he becomes more confident.  So it must be learned, right?

The confusion here is whether you can develop into a confident leader, not whether you're able to inspire confidence from the day you were born. (Did Napoleon command anyone the day he was born?)  The ability to develop into a leader over time is what’s innate.

If you are a born leader, you will seek out experiences that help you develop. You will feel energized when things go well in their development, as when your parents support you.  Born leaders often remember the energizing feeling when they were at their mother’s knee, assuming that their mother was the one who instilled it, when their mother simply reinforced something that was already there.

If you are born with raw leadership ability, your early experiences will serve to help you understand it, exercise it, come to terms with it, and “fine tune” it. But your early experiences don’t make you a leader - you are born that way. Recently, however, in the Oct 16, 2006 issue of Business Week magazine, Welch seems to contradict himself when he writes that "charisma ... seems to be inborn.  It can't really be trained."  How could charisma be innate, when self-confidence is learned, Jack?

According to Jack Welch, leaders must “exude energy” and “be able to inspire confidence” and “be optimistic” and “be comfortable in their own skin”. Yet some people feel stress (instead of energy) when given positions of leadership and they fall apart.  Some people have a hard time making eye contact, or smiling when others look at them, and this gets worse as they get older.  Some people have no motivation unless rallied by a leader.

Leaders fulfill the needs of their employees, who want to be appreciated, acknowledged, and given approval and dignity. Employees need to have their self-confidence built-up by the leader. Yet those traits in employees often limit their ability to be a leader themselves, since the higher you climb in an organization, the fewer people are around to stroke your ego. In order to become a leader, you need to be self-confident and “comfortable in your own skin”.

Another recent book by a former GE executive, in an honest moment, confesses that sometimes these traits are “just not in [your] DNA”.  Sifting through thousands of employees to find the ones with the right traits is really a crude process of finding those with leadership genes.

What is Charisma?

According to the book Charismatic Leadership, "charismatic leaders generally exhibit such attributes as extraordinary emotional expressiveness, self-confidence, self-determination, and freedom from internal conflict" and "a strong conviction in the righteousness of their own beliefs" (p.46).

Followers, on the other hand, feel "heightened performance and motivation" and "a sense of empowerment" (p.328) when they find a leader whom they can trust.  Followers identify with the leader, and feel a "willing obedience" toward them, and "make the leader their own conscience" (p.330).

Leaders cause followers to feel good about themselves.  Followers do the same for leaders by feeding their need for power and status.  Motivation works both ways.

Leadership ability is innate

Leaders can often smile and speak confidently in the face of others who are skeptical, hostile or indifferent. They can laugh enthusiastically, promote new ideas, and infect others with their optimism. They don’t require approval and approbation to feel self-confident (although they often bask in the "general approval" of crowds).

Followers, on the other hand, feel stress when they are put in a leadership position.  Their eyes water.  They feel like hiding.  They simply want approval from a leader, or to be left alone.

We don't choose our motivations and emotions, and they can't be taught.  They come from within (i.e. they are innate) although they do have to be tuned. 

Certainly there is an abundance of books and training courses on developing leadership skills.  But those books don't change your motivational structure.  They simply train born leaders how to fine-tune their skills.  Anyone else who buys the book is simply wasting money.  If you browse through a typical book on leadership, you will find admonitions like "first, be confident"... "then, be bold"... In other words, their advice to become a leader is "first, be a leader".