Powers of Two

How Relationships Drive Creativity

Joshua Wolf Shenk

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780544032026
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Capacité créative en psychologie

The power of collaboration, from Lennon and McCartney to Wozniak and Jobs: "An inspiring book that also happens to be a great read " (Daniel H.Pink, author of Drive ). Throughout history, partners have buoyed each other to better work—though often one member is little known to the general public. (See Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger, or Vincent and Theo van Gogh.) Powers of Two draws on neuroscience, social psychology, and cultural history to present the social foundations of creativity, with the pair as its primary embodiment. Revealing the six essential stages through which creative intimacy unfolds, this book shows how pairs begin to talk, think, and even look like each other; how the most successful ones thrive on conflict; and why some cease to work together while others carry on. At once intuitive and deeply surprising, Powers of Two will reshape the way you view individuals, relationships, and society itself. "A rare glimpse into the private realms of duos... A natural storyteller." — The New York Times "A book about magic, about the Beatles, about the chemistry between people, about neuroscience, and about the buddy system; it examines love and hate, harmony and dissonance, and everything in between... Wise, funny, surprising, and completely engrossing." —Susan Orlean "We sometimes think of creativity as coming from brilliant loners. In fact, it more often happens when bright people pair up and complement each other. Shenk's fascinating book shows how to spark the power of this phenomenon." —Walter Isaacson "Surprising, compelling... Shenk banishes the idea of solitary genius by demonstrating that our richest art and science come from collaboration: we need one another not only for love, but also for thinking and imagining and growing and being." —Andrew Solomon

Introduction: 1 + 1 = Infinity

For centuries, the myth of the lone genius has towered over us like a colossus. The idea that new, beautiful, world-changing things come from within great minds is now so common that we don’t even consider it an idea. These bronze statues have come to seem like old-growth trees—monuments to modern thinking that we mistake for part of the natural world.

We can be forgiven the mistake because creativity is so inexplicable. How, from all the sounds in the universe, from all the syllables and protean rhythms, does a great song arise? How do we account for the emergence of a good idea—the movement from chaos to clarity?

The dominant idea today is that, because creativity resides within the individual, we best expose it by telling stories of those rare geniuses—the ones who made the Sistine Chapel or Hamlet, the light bulb or the iPod. This model basically follows the declaration made by Thomas Carlyle in the 1840s: “The history of the world is but the biography of great men.”

The most common alternative to the lone-genius model locates creativity in networks. See, for example, Herbert Spencer’s retort to Carlyle that “the genesis of the great man depends” on a “long series of complex influences.” “Before he can remake his society,” Spencer wrote, “his society must make him.” Rather than focus on the solitary hero snatching inspiration from the heavens (or the unconscious), this concept emphasizes the long, meandering course of innovation. Instead of heroic individuals, it prioritizes heroic cultures—the courts of sixteenth-century Florence, say, or the coffee shops of Enlightenment London, or the campus of Pixar.

The trouble with the first model of creativity is that it’s a fantasy, a myth of achievement predicated on an even more fundamental myth of the enclosed, autonomous self for whom social experience is secondary. The lone-genius idea has become our dominant view of creativity not because of its inherent truth—in fact, it neglects and obscures the social qualities of innovation—but because it makes for a good story.

The network model has the opposite problem. It is basically true, but so complex that it can’t easily be made into narrative. Where the lone-genius model is galvanizing but simplistic, the network model is suitably nuanced but hard to apply to day-to-day life. An argument can be made—a rigorous, persuasive argument—that every good new thing results from a teeming complexity. But how do you represent that complexity in a practical way? How do you talk about it, not just at Oxford or the TED Conference, but in kitchens and bars?

Fortunately, there’s a way to understand the social nature of creativity that is both true and useful. It’s the story of the creative pair.

Five years ago, I became preoccupied with this thing we call “chemistry” or “electricity” between people. My first impulse was personal: I wanted to understand the quality of connection whose presence accounted for the best times of my life and whose absence made for the worst. This led me to think about Eamon Dolan, who edited my first book, Lincoln’s Melancholy. My relationship with Eamon was an example of the chemistry that intrigued me. As I reflected on this, it occurred to me that the question of chemistry itself—and an inquiry into it based on eminent creative pairs—would get right to the nexus of our interests.

I made a list of creative pairs I wanted to know more about: the Beatles’ John Lennon and Paul McCartney; Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, who created Apple Computer; Marie and Pierre Curie, who discovered radioactivity; and many other notable duos. I thought that if I could begin to understand these relationships, I could learn something profound about how people buoy each other. I imagined each pair in turn, and thought about the electrified space between them, and planned to write a biography of that space.

The project took on a new direction when I thought about Vincent van Gogh and his brother Theo. What was that story? I knew Theo as the recipient of Vincent’s correspondence and I had seen him described as Vincent’s supporter. But I soon learned there was much more to it. Theo was, in fact, a hidden partner in what I came to see as a true creative pair. I found so many other examples of hidden partners—you’ll meet a number of them in this book—that it began to seem more like the rule than the exception: one member of a duo takes the lone-genius spotlight while the other remains in history’s shadows.

Then there were cases in which two creative people, each well known individually, turned out to have influenced and affected each other profoundly—Ann Landers and Dear Abby, for example, twin sisters whose rivalry fueled careers in advice-giving, and C. S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, whose distinct works were inexorably influenced by their creative exchange. Yet, for decades, even scholars of Lewis and Tolkien assiduously downplayed how they affected each other.

On top of my original question about the nature of creative relationships, I found myself asking a second one: Why have so many of these relationships been obscured and neglected?

The depths of the problem came home to me at a dinner hosted by a university where I gave a talk. A business professor asked whether I had considered the relationship between golfers and caddies. I hadn’t. All I knew about caddies I’d learned from Caddyshack. The professor told me that I ought to look into it; he’d played professionally as a young man, and the dynamics of a PGA match were really interesting in terms of relationships. “You see, the golfer is—by the rules of the pro tour—required to go out alone, and the caddie is the only exception,” he explained. “It’s not like baseball, where the manager can come to the mound for a talk or where they can meet in the dugout. So the caddies end up not just as helpers but as strategists and psychologists.”

Was there any pair in particular he would suggest as an example?

“Of course,” he said. “Tiger Woods and Steve Williams.”

Indeed, it turns out that Tiger’s caddie from 1999 to 2011 did far more than carry his bags. He did more, even, than advise and succor his boss. Williams also taunted Woods—to get his blood up—and deliberately misled him when he thought it would improve his play. At the 2000 PGA Championship, in the fourth round and on the fairway of the seventeenth hole, Woods needed a birdie to catch the leader. Williams had calculated ninety-five yards to the flag—but he told Woods ninety. “Tiger’s distance control was a problem,” Williams explained to Golf Magazine. “So I would adjust yardages and not tell him.” At the seventeenth, Woods hit the ball two feet from the pin and went on to win the three-hole playoff. Williams told Golf that he’d given Tiger incorrect yardages for the better part of five years.

The hidden nature of partnership extends beyond particular pairs to whole categories of relationships. Most fields have parallels to the unknown caddie, critical roles that are essentially hidden from public view. These workers matter enormously to insiders. But they rarely get general attention. It’s not just that Theo van Gogh happens to be unknown to the public. It’s that art dealers are largely unknown (and curators and fabricators and assistants and on and on). In the movie business, actors and directors go on Conan, not cinematographers and editors. Nor does Conan’s longtime partner executive producer Jeff Ross step out from behind the cameras.

In some cases, the silent partner eventually gets attention. After three decades, the artist Christo began to share public credit with his wife and partner, Jeanne-Claude, for what had always been their collective work. Elsewhere, ostensible lone geniuses actively obscure the truth. George Lucas’s original Star Wars films owed a great deal to his partnership with his first wife, the Academy Award–winning film editor Marcia Lucas, who biographer Dale Pollock said was her then husband’s “secret weapon.” “She was really the warmth and the heart of those films,” said Mark Hamill, who played Luke Skywalker. But after their divorce, authorized histories of the franchise barely mentioned her.

Not that George Lucas has had to do much to obscure his ex-wife’s role. In a lone-genius culture, all it takes is a slight advantage for the ball to begin to roll down the hill. With reputation, as with money, the Gospel according to Matthew applies: “To all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.” The sociologist Robert Merton found that when two scientists collaborated, whoever was better known got the lion’s share of the credit. And if two scientists came up with an idea separately at about the same time, the one who was better known received far more recognition for it. Merton called it the Matthew effect.

Lone-genius culture has robbed many women of the recognition they are due, as when Linus Pauling won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1962 for peace activism that his wife, Ava Helen Pauling, led him into. Until relatively recently, creative men have often taken credit for the labor of their wives, whether as research assistants, editors, or even de facto CEOs of the enterprises that bear their husbands’ names. This sort of prejudice extends beyond women, of course. Vivien Thomas was a technical wizard who, alongside Dr. Alfred Blalock, pioneered modern heart surgery. Yet Thomas, an African American man, was for several years classified in the hospital payrolls as a janitor, even as he ran labs and trained doctors.

Another reason interdependence so frequently remains hidden is that, even when viewed directly, it can be hard to understand, and not just for outsiders but for the principals themselves. Legendary editor Maxwell Perkins shaped Thomas Wolfe’s unwieldy manuscripts into the epic novels Look Homeward, Angel and Of Time and the River, and Wolfe exuberantly praised his partner in the dedication of the latter book. Then a critic charged in the Saturday Review that Wolfe’s “incompleteness” as an author could be seen in “the most flagrant evidence” that “one indispensable part of the artist has existed not in Mr. Wolfe but in Maxwell Perkins.” Wolfe raged at the idea that he couldn’t “perform these functions of an artist for myself.” In a tantrum, Wolfe then broke with the man who had helped make him.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, another author nurtured by Maxwell Perkins, once declared that the test of a first-rate intelligence was the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind without cracking up. Thomas Wolfe could not accept that he was both a complete artist and a dependent partner.

In Wolfe’s defense, interdependence can be hard for any of us to grasp in a genius-obsessed culture. “A time is marked,” Lawrence Lessig writes, “not so much by ideas that are argued about as by ideas that are taken for granted.” We certainly take for granted that the core unit of creative achievement is the individual. From the tests given to schoolchildren to the statistics that rank players in major league baseball to Fast Company’s “most creative people in business” list and all the way to the MacArthur Fellowship (the “genius grant”), we return over and over to the notion that creativity originates—imagine me tapping my skull—in here. We speak of a Supreme Court justice’s opinion as though he or she wrote it entirely alone, the same way the legendary Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel. In fact, the justices work just as Michelangelo did, among a scrum of colleagues and acolytes. Many of the biggest creative stars of our time—from Justin Bieber to Mario Batali to Doris Kearns Goodwin—are best understood not as solo actors but as brands representing collectively produced bodies of work.

Where did the myth of the lone genius come from, anyway? The very short answer is that it emerged in the Enlightenment, grew popular in the Romantic era, and took its final shape in the contemporary United States. From the start, the myth was entwined with a view of human nature as a product of the atomized self. So much of what we believe to be true about how we develop, how we operate, and indeed who we are evolved in the shadow of an erroneous idea about human beings as self-contained, cut off, solitary.

For example, for all the diversity of modern psychology—from psychoanalysis to biological psychiatry, from B. F. Skinner’s behaviorism to the developmental theories of Jean Piaget—the overwhelming focus has been on the experience of the individual. The popular “hierarchy of needs” formulated by the psychologist Abraham Maslow made one of the field’s assumptions explicit: Maslow ranked human needs from the most basic to the most exalted, with physiological needs (for, say, food and excretion) at the bottom, topped by safety needs in the second-lowest position. In the second-highest position are esteem needs (self-esteem, confidence), and self-actualization is at the pinnacle. Stuck ingloriously in the middle: love/belonging needs. In other words, Maslow saw connection with others as more advanced than using the toilet and having a home but just a step along the way to personal growth and fulfillment.

Today, a burgeoning movement in science and creativity studies has laid the foundation for a new understanding. The epochal changes in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that led to the myth of the lone genius were products of massive shifts at the intersection of politics, economics, and culture (the emergence of the nation-state, the birth of the market economy, the shifting role of religion in everyday life). Today, amid similarly massive shifts (the birth of the Internet and its far-reaching effects; the global economy; scientific advances that give new insight into everything from child development to complex systems), these core ideas are finally being taken apart. In recent years, an impressive new body of scholarship on human connection—including social psychology, relationship studies, and group creativity—has emerged. Steven Johnson’s book Where Good Ideas Come From advances what we could call a network theory of human achievement, one that has its best metaphor in ecology, the constant interdependence of many unseen forces that “compulsively connect and remix that most valuable of resources: information.”

Yet, while this emphasis on groups and networks is valuable and truthful, it is an insufficient corrective to the lone-genius model. “Genius” is a story made up to account for the broad and ultimately mysterious nature of creativity. It contains and contextualizes something immense. Once the illusion of an autonomous Tiger Woods or Vincent van Gogh or Thomas Wolfe is exposed, it is tempting to try to tell the full story, to study the entirety of the individual’s immediate circles, all the influences absorbed from near and far. Soon, this exercise leads us to the idea articulated by Percy Bysshe Shelley: “Every man’s mind is . . . modified by all the objects of nature and art; by every word and every suggestion which he ever admitted to act upon his consciousness.”

Anyone with some intellectual ambition can appreciate this notion—alongside the critique of the “author” associated with Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes. But the utter complexity of this idea makes it hard to hold in mind, let alone apply to everyday life. The brightest among us could read an exegesis of The Odyssey and The Iliad as the accumulation of generations of oral tradition and myth, and yet still refer to the author as Homer. It is well known that Homer is an amalgamation, but contests between mind-bending truths and simple fictions are lopsided, to say the least.

The network model also brushes over the subject of intimate relationships. We all know intuitively that life happens in close connection with other people, though it’s often tempting to look away from this obvious truth. “On some level, people like to focus on groups because it’s more comfortable,” said Diana McLain Smith, a family therapist turned adviser to leadership teams and the author of The Elephant in the Room: How Relationships Make or Break the Success of Leaders and Organizations. “They don’t have to think of people as people. When I show up talking about relationships, people always laugh nervously. They say, ‘It’s like couples therapy at work.’ There’s this unease around acknowledging it, because it’s outside of the cultural norm of the rational organizational life. But it’s what everybody is really talking about, around the water cooler, at the bar after work, with their spouse at home. Relationships are really all people think about. Except, they don’t think about it very well, which is part of the problem.”

The pair is the primary creative unit. In his study of creative circles ranging from the French impressionists to the founders of psychoanalysis, the sociologist Michael Farrell discovered that groups created a sense of community, purpose, and audience but that the truly important work ended ...