Venkat analyzes what he calls the “da Vinci mind” and a couple of books that describe the minds that will dominate the future. Although the whole article is intriguing, what I found most interesting is his section on the failings of those who have this kind of mind:
Whole New Mind is a book with which I resonated wildly, but which nevertheless made me very uncomfortable. On the one hand I felt an instant surge of resonance and recognition. I could not help but recognize myself clearly in the portrait Pink paints of this thinking style. In fact, through my meandering years through graduate school, I zeroed in on almost exactly the same set of attributes as characterizing the strengths of my thinking style. Metaphor and narrative, in particular have driven much of my work. So Pink’s book was, in a way, a source of strong validation to the point where I found myself thinking, “Dammit, if I were a better writer, I could have written this book.”
And yet, I found myself feeling uncomfortable about the uniformly “brave new world” tone of both books. My discomfort probably has to do with my fundamentally tragic outlook on life, which rests solidly on the idea that our brains (right-brained or not) are hopeless flawed and optimized for self-delusion. Had I been the one to write WNM, I suspect I’d have devoted as many chapters to the pathologies of the whole new mind as to its strengths. Wild mood swings and bipolar tendencies, bouts of deep and extended lethargy, dissipated daydreaming, sloppy amateurishness — these are all traits as characteristic of the WNM as its conceptual and creative strengths, and no amount of the sort of educational reform that Gardner and others like Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi and Martin Seligman suggest, will fix these flaws.
Which does not mean necessarily that the WNM will not rule the future. But just because many influential people may be (metaphorically, in the Pink sense) right-brained in the future does not mean most right-brainers will be influential (applying a dose of left-brained necessary/sufficient logic here). Most of us will in fact fade into oblivion as blog writers or end up institutionalized believing we are Napoleon or Bill Gates. The reason is hard logic: the output of one Einstein can keep hundreds of left-brainers busy for decades. The world only has the bandwidth to realize the conceptual imaginings of a few of the most creative right-brainers. The rest who don’t make the Einstein grade will have to learn to play with their underdeveloped left brain.
On a smaller scale, this issue plays out in the tension that exists between discipline and IQ. To succeed you need a combination of both – having just high IQ is not enough.