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- 🚀 The Hypomanic Edge
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Top Highlights
The book breaks down famous people in history who were “hypomanic,” not quite manic, but not quite normal, either.
Christopher Columbus
Alexander Hamilton
Andrew Carnegie
People who were fanatically successful but also just a bit crazy. The premise is the crazy is largely responsible for their success.
1.. Hypomanics are brimming with infectious energy, irrational confidence, and really big ideas. They think, talk, move, and make decisions quickly. Anyone who slows them down with questions “just doesn’t get it.” Hypomanics are not crazy, but “normal” is not the first word that comes to mind when describing them. Hypomanics live on the edge, between normal and abnormal.
2.. The things most likely to make them depressed are failure, loss, or anything that prevents them from continuing at their preferred breakneck pace.
ALexis de Tocqueville, a Frenchman who traveled throughout America in the 1830s, was among the first to define the American character. He found us to be “restless in the midst of abundance,” and the proof was that we were always moving. Tocqueville was astonished to meet people moving from east to west and west to east. That so many people would surrender the comfort and safety of their home in pursuit of an “ideal” struck him as odd.
3.. When asked, “Do you think starting a new business is a respected occupation in your community?” 91% of Americans said yes, as compared to 28% of British and 8% of Japanese respondents. In Japan there is still a deep disgrace attached to business failure. Men who lose their jobs often hide it from their families and pretend to go to work each day.
4.. Alexander Hamilton’s solution was that the federal government should assume all these debts and consolidate them into one large national debt. The total was too massive to be paid in one lump sum. Rather, Hamilton proposed that the restructured debt be serviced with monthly payments. The reliability of those payments would establish America’s credit, just as his mother’s regular payment to Nicholas Cruger had kept her in business. Today, the world trusts U.S. Treasure bonds more than any other financial instrument short of cash itself. In more than two hundred years, the U.S. government hasn’t missed a payment.
This reference describes the founding of America’s financial system. Shortly after the American Revolution, the country was bankrupt with now stream of revenue. Hamilton wrote a 40,000 page report in 3 months explaining the credit system he envisioned.
5.. Hypomanics have a hidden talent which is integral to their success. They have an uncanny ability to make other people feel good about themselves.
Only four generations after Alexander Hamilton’s death, America surpassed Great Britain to become the world’s preeminent manufacturing economy, just as Hamilton had prophesied. At least some credit must be given to Andrew Carnegie, as he traded places with John D. Rockefeller for the “richest person in America” title — they both propelled the American economic machine foward.
6.. Machines and systems that can increase efficiency are worth their weight in gold, but people who can design, run, and improve such systems are worth their weight in platinum.
7.. Paying high wages to the best of his employees lowered costs. It seemed incomprehensible to Carnegie that his competitors didn’t get this. Jones made him millions. Carnegie couldn’t afford to nickel-and-dime him when he knew his competitors were trying to lure him away.
8.. Carnegie made partnership in his company available to any employee who proved his worth. “Any ambitious young man had universal opportunity just sitting there waiting to be taken. No barriers.”
Carnegie’s grandiose idealism blinded him to an important concrete reality: that the conditions in his mill were inhumane. They have been described as “among the worst in the world.” The worst strain of all was put on the simple laborers, who endured the smoke and heat of a veritable Hades on Earth to work the furnaces and roll the steel. There were hundreds of fatal accidents, many due to fatigue. To run the mill twenty-four hours a day, Carnegie designed a shift schedule he called “the long term plan,” where workers pulled twelve-hour shifts for twelve days in a row, followed by a grueling twenty-four-hour shift on the thirteenth day and then a meager twenty-four hours off on the fourteenth.
9.. Carnegie ultimately craved redemption for all he had denied his workers. By any accounting, he owed them, and he knew it. His first philanthropic act upon retirement was to use $4 million to create the Carnegie Relief Fund “to provide pensions for the retired, as well as aid for the injured and families of those who died in his mill.”159 He also gave $15 million to “aged university professors” to form what became TIAA, the retirement system that covers almost every professor in America today. Carnegie pursued his pension penchant in hypomanic fashion, giving away an additional $4 million in pensions to more than four hundred people chosen almost at random, from his childhood mailman to total strangers. He gave a pension to one woman he did not know, whom he passed on the street, because she physically resembled his deceased mother.
This is not from the book — but it is nonetheless fitting, as this man fits in with Andrew Carnegie, Hamilton, and all the others: Walt Disney.
Walt started (and failed) more times in his life than most humans. He was notoriously optimistic, often to his own detriment. Betrayed and nearly bankrupt every year for many years — his success is a testament to his inability to die and his hypomanic tendencies.
In August, we start a series on Disney and how to model the parts of his character that are worth modeling in life & business. You can get in for a free trial here, and while you’re in check out our series on Theodore Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, and Winston Churchill.
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