Crazies can be sinkers or drowners, or they can be geniuses, affluent eccentrics. Crazy people sink to a watery grave or they can swim, generating tremendous erudition, applied intelligence, and wealth. Michael Gelb explain the avenues in which craziness can be channeled to create tremendously enriching outcomes. “Crazy people who are productive are geniuses. Crazy people who are rich are eccentric. Crazy people who are neither. productive nor rich are just plain crazy.” Clearly, the goal is to not minimize the insanity, but to channel the “non compos mentis” (Latin, literally meaning, not having control of one’s mind) into creativity by dancing with your own craziness to create productive eccentricity and genius. In other words, you can be crazy one of two ways: Successful crazy or Insane crazy. Both successful crazy and Insane crazy people have somewhat of a psychopathology at their core, but insane crazy people destroy and create malign, while the successful crazy people auspiciously channel that core into creative, nourishing, inventive acts. The trick is to not remonstrate craziness, but to herald it.
C.S. Lewis writes that Jesus — given his outrageous claims of being able to enact miracles, revive the dead, exorcise the demons, and more — was a “Lunatic, a Lord, or a Liar”. Saying he was the son of God could only mean that he was a complete nutso, a total liar, or an actual lord. This is not implying that we all are either a lord, lunatic, or a liar, but that we must take up honesty to avoid lies, and embrace productivity and wealth to negate the insanity and the wretched suffering from lunacy. There are some brilliant comedians, for example, who would not be funny if they weren’t crazy. Instead of suffering and combating their craziness in an ornery denial, they allowed it to flourish. Gelb reminds us that crazy people who are neither productive nor rich and active, simply wallow in their lunacy. However, committing to that unknown can generate a wild, but galvanizing roller-coaster.
Truly though, most of the successful people are lunatics. The unparralled, superlative intelligence or strength or artistic ability — whatever the attribute — can only be reached by an unparalled, superlative method, a unique unconverntional method. If the superlative could be acquired by simply following the status quo with a simple, ho-hum, convenvtional method, it would mean that everyone could be much more or much less intelligent, but that procedure could never be the path of a genius because genius posesses “exceptiona” creative power, intellectual ability or some other ability. Key emphasis on the exceptional. If everyone else has that same intellectual ability and creative power, it ceases to be an exception. In his book GENIUS, author James Gleick describes mathematician Richard Feynman as a “‘Renaissance Man’ were that term not so diluted from its application to everyone from television sitcom stars who scribble a few lines of poetic doggerel to major league athletes who speak in complete sentences. Instead, let’s just say that, in this Jewish-American son of a New York uniform salesman, we find a remarkable marriage of transcendental intellect, hubris, and frat house debauchery. A “character” to be sure. But also a genius.” A renaissance man possessing transcendental brainpower, pride, and an affinity for parties? With all of those zany characteristics stewing together in the same melting pot, how on earth could Feynman be anything but a little crazy? He was very much crazy, but this made him VERY much a genius.
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