Jim Whitt, Contributing Editor

Are You Crazy?
Over 60 channels and there’s still nothing to watch on TV. When I couldn’t find an Andy Griffith rerun one night I finally settled on a documentary about Southern Rock (music that is), and learned something. The group Lynrd Skynrd was playing bars throughout the south in the 1970s when a Macon, Georgia record producer decided they were good enough for the big time. He recorded a dozen of their songs and headed to L.A. to pitch the band to the big boys of the music business, only to find no takers. They said one song was particularly hurtful to their chances; it was too long and would never get airtime on the radio. The song was Free Bird. But somebody did give it playtime and it ended up selling a gazillion copies, not to mention being featured along with Sweet Home Alabama, another of their hits, in the film Forrest Gump.

Stephen King was struggling to make ends meet as a schoolteacher with a wife and two kids. Rejection letters from publishers kept piling up until one day he got a call at school from one who offered him a $2,500 advance for a novel he had written. The novel was Carrie, and 30-some-bestsellers later, he’s still at it.

Janet Evanovich started collecting rejection letters from publishers in a cardboard box: “When the box was full I burned the whole damn thing, crammed myself into pantyhose and went to work for a temp agency.” Four months later she got a call from an editor offering $2,000 for the last manuscript she mailed. Last year she sold more than 4 million books.

There is a common thread in these stories – rejection with a capital R. These wildly successful people were rejected and rejected and rejected. Yet they kept sending manuscripts or recording songs. Normal people might ask, “Are you crazy?” But according to John Gartner, highly successful people are just that—a little crazy.

My wife gave me a copy of Gartner’s book, The Hypomanic Edge: The Link Between (A Little) Craziness and (A Lot of) Success in America. I think she was trying to tell me something. In this book, Gartner, a psychiatrist, conducts a postmortem psychoanalysis of Christopher Columbus, Alexander Hamilton, Andrew Carnegie and other successful people throughout history, to come up with a startling diagnosis—they were hypomanic.

What is hypomanic you ask? In short it might be described as a mild form of bipolar disorder or manic depression. Those who suffer from this disorder go through times of deep depression periodically punctuated by manic phases where everything is wonderful. It is an extreme of high and low mood swings, but can be controlled with medication.

Hypomanics suffer these same mood swings to a lesser degree. But what’s interesting is that their mania is what enables them to accomplish such great things. Columbus proclaimed he was going to sail around a world that everyone believed was flat and discover a new trade route to India. You can imagine people looking at him and asking, “Are you crazy?” It was a crazy idea and Columbus didn’t even find what he was looking for—he found a whole lot more. He discovered America. Gartner asserts that Columbus had to be a little crazy to persevere because he met with multiple rejections in his quest to sell his idea and get it financed.

In his discovery of America, Columbus inadvertently found a home for hypomania. Millions of others throughout history have followed the explorer’s wake to America, seeking a better life in the land of opportunity. Most of this immigration took place before television, motion pictures and radio when most news traveled at a snail’s pace by newspaper and word-of-mouth. To come to America based on what people said required a leap of faith. What right-thinking person would get on a boat and leave family, friends and security behind? A hypomanic, of course —someone who was a little crazy. Consequently, Gartner says, America has a disproportionate representation of the hypomanic gene. The most hypomanic of these crazies hopped into boats with wheels called prairie schooners and headed west. These are the people who built the beef industry.

My grandmother got on one of those boats coming to America when she was thirteen years old. She couldn’t speak a word of English and owned nothing more than what was required to get through Ellis Island and onto American soil. Thank God she did. She escaped Poland before the ravages of World War II and the Soviet occupation. She had to be a little crazy to get on that boat and I suppose that means I got a heavy dose of that hypomanic gene. That means I’m a little crazy, too. But I have a lot of company. I live in America where we’re all a little crazy. And if that’s such a bad thing, why do people still risk their lives to come here?

Crazy ideas will always be accompanied by resistance and rejection. Rejection is the psychological equivalent of touching a hot stove. Once you get burned you learn to avoid the stove. Rejection may receive the highest ranking of the major fears we deal with: the unknown, change, failure and success. Couple that with what Abraham Maslow described as the psychological need of belonging—the need to be loved and accepted by others—and it’s easy to see why most people don’t persevere in the face of rejection. You have to be a little crazy. I always take comfort in the fact that the path of success typically leads through the valley of the shadow of rejection (closely related to death in our minds).

So, the next time you stand in front of your banker with hat in hand, asking him to finance one of your crazy ideas, remember this, “NO!” is not personal (at least most of the time). “NO!” is just part of the process. And you might ask your banker to consider this—think about those poor souls who had to go through life explaining that they were the ones who turned down Columbus and Lynrd Skynrd. Now, those people had to be crazy.

Please e-mail comments to Jim Whitt jim@whittenterprises.com

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