Greatness: How The Great Become Great… and You & I Don’t Bill Dorris, Ph.D. School of Communications Dublin City University Dublin 9, Ireland © 2020 Contents Contents 2 Note to Users 4 Blog and Reading Tips 5 Brief Bio and Endorsements 7 Acknowledgments 9 Introduction 12 How The Great Become Great – The Analysis 13 Key Characteristics 15 The Right Kind of Problems 17 Flow Activities & Escape Activities 20 How Many Potential Greats? 24 Generational Problems 25 Community of Birth 28 Matching the Person with The Right Kind of Problems - The Arrival of The Fittest 30 Organizations and Teams 32 Continuous Matching 33 Links 36 Cumulative Matching 38 Catalytic Matching 43 2 Catalytic Accelerations to Greatness 51 Chaotic Matching 56 Spwins 60 Spwins from Beginning to End 74 Where to look for Spwins 79 Women and Other Outsiders 90 How The Great Become Great - Implications 99 And as for Heroes? 99 What's It All Mean? 102 And You & I 107 einstein and santa claus 113 Notes 115 References 264 Indices 309 Greats 309 Concepts 313 Authors 317 3 Note to `Users Greatness is written for Anyone who is interested in the question of How The Great Become Great... and You & I Don't. This includes the general public, university students, and academics as well. How so? Simple. The Text of this book is written almost in story form, with barely a hint of academic research to be seen, so it can be easily read by anyone. As for the academic research, it is thoroughly discussed and easily accessible in the book's Notes, when and if you're interested. But you don't need to read a word of the Notes to understand the entire analysis, and in fact experience it coming to life for everyone from Einstein to Elvis, Mozart to Marilyn, or for that matter, Serena, Madonna, or Marie Curie. Anyone can also easily apply the book's analysis to their own development and success / or lack therof. If you're a Student, like the hundreds of students I taught while writing this book, you can apply the book's analysis to understanding how your favorite great became great. In fact you can send me your work to put up on the book's blog, alongside, eg, Lady Gaga and Novak Djokovic ( http://www.greatnessbd.com/ ) If you're an Academic, teaching any of a wide range of courses related to human development / creativity / achievement - eg in psychology, communications, or business - where the question of how individual behavior is influenced by interpersonal, organizational, institutional, even societal factors - you might want to consider Greatness as a free supplementary eBook for your students to use in project work relating to a topic of immense personal interest to all students, ie the How question. Just contact me via the blog and I'll send along info re how other academics are using Greatness, plus a free copy of the book. 4 Blog and Reading Tips My Blog - http://www.greatnessbd.com/- related to this book and the case studies book may be worth a visit; especially if you’d like a few photos, curious details and asides; plus a chance to post your own (and read others’) comments, queries, and observations. You can also download free PDFs of the books here. Re the question of How to Read this Book and/or the related Case Studies book, here are my thoughts: * The Text is quite short as social science research goes (102pp), and it is written almost in story form. So hopefully many of you will read it straight through. * Another possibility is to simply jump ahead to the short summary of the overall analysis (“And as for Heroes?”, p99+), and then go back into the Text and chase up the bits that irritate you the most. * Likewise you could go to any of the sections in the analysis, as outlined in the Contents, and zoom in there as this will give you case studies illustrating the relevant analysis. * Another possibility is to simply start out with the stories related to any Greats who interest you – eg Einstein, Elvis, Mozart, Marilyn, etc. If you go to the Greats Index, you can find the pages you want, in both the Text and the Notes. (some of the longest case studies – for eg, Darwin and Monet – are in the Notes) Over 40 Greats, across many generations and fields, are considered in the book. These range from the classic fields of music, art, science and literature to the likes of popular culture and sport. 5 * If you are interested in the academic research which underlies the entire analysis developed in the Text, go to the Notes (p115+). These are considerably longer than the Text and consider how the existing academic research is relevant to the arguments made in the Text. * Finally if you want to try out the analysis in relation to your own greatest achievements, or lack there of, go to the section entitled “And You & I” (p107+). There, by way of illustration, I analyze in detail how it was that I ended up writing this book. 6 Brief Bio and Endorsements I have a Ph.D. in Social & Clinical Psychology from UCLA, and have published in JPSP, J. Pers, and other APA-refereed research journals. Early on I was a member of the Psychology Faculties at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and Mount Holyoke College. Later I worked as a family systems therapist in the States and Ireland for several years. Inbetween times I wrote and presented a radio program on WMUA in Amherst (‘Dr Bill’s Myths, Lies, Facts, and Songs’). In more recent years, in addition to a course on ‘Social Systems, Communications, and Psycho- logy’, I’ve been teaching the likes of ‘Creative Writing’ and ‘Dramatic Authoring for the Web’ at Dublin City University. And yes, I once tried moving to Nashville, but I’d say that was well before I met Mairéad or Utah Phillips. I spent about 15 years sorting the initial version of this book, entitled: The Arrival of the Fittest: How The Great Become Great (Dorris, 2011). It received very strong endorsements from a number of internationally prominent academics. For example, here’s a starter, or as you baseball fans would have it, a closer. Well actually – if you know anything about the research literature on genius & greatness – the closer: "Arrival is a truly fascinating book. It's not only highly informative, but also equally inspiring!" Dean Keith Simonton, Ph.D. Distinguished Professor Department of Psychology University of California, Davis 7 Since then several editors have offered me very helpful advice re rewriting my work in a style which would make it publishable as academic research… which I suppose is reasonable since over half of it is still brand new to the research literature. And after that?? I’d no doubt get stuck into working up a few sets of exam questions and next thing you know.. hey.. we’d all be nodding off. So instead I’ve added some new faces - Marie Curie, Darwin, Mark Twain, Bob Marley, the Williams sisters, etc. - and gone for a new, and hopefully “Google- friendly”, title: Greatness: How The Great Become Great… and You & I Don’t. 8 Acknowledgments In addition to many of my colleagues and students at Dublin City University, I'd like to thank a number of extremely busy academics – who didn't know me from Doris Day – for taking time to read the earlier drafts of my work, for raising a number of very helpful queries, and for giving me such positive feedback regarding the theoretical arguments. My favorite comment though, I have to admit, was about the writing style: "Do you by any chance have a revivalist background?" My sincere thanks to Professors Robert Albert, Anders Ericsson, David Henry Feldman, Ravenna Helson, Robert Plomin, and John Sloboda. Also I want to thank a large number of authors whose works have been essential to the analysis developed in this book, essential to documenting it. There is of course no way I could have presented the theoretical arguments of this book without using information from numerous biographies and related works as data. I have cited every quote and bit of information that I used, but in order not to disrupt the flow of the presentation, I rarely cite sources within the text. The numerous sources and their authors are however fully documented in the book’s extensive Notes. Beyond this I especially want to thank those authors whose works were essential to documenting the major case studies presented in this book. After fifteen years myself on this one, I know something of the chase. Still whatever about my own marathon, thanks to them, it feels like my feet barely touched the ground. So my sincerest thanks to: Donald Spoto, John Russell Taylor, Albert LaValley, and Tanya Modleski re Alfred Hitchcock; 9 Joe Klein, Henrietta Yurchenco, and Woody Guthrie re Woody Guthrie; Donald Spoto, Fred Lawrence Guiles, Carl Rollyson Jr, Richard Dyer, and Marjorie Rosen re Marilyn Monroe; Ernst Schenk, Edward Holmes, Michael Levey, and Nicholas Till re Mozart; Peter Guralnick, Charlie Gillett, and Albert Goldman re Elvis; Robert Katz & Celestine Dars, Carla Rachman, and James Rubin re Monet; Bill Russell & Taylor Branch re Bill Russell; Abraham Pais, Ronald Clark, Roger Highfield & Paul Carter, John Gribben & Michael White, and Albert Einstein re Einstein; James Watson, Francis Crick, and Harriet Zuckerman re Watson & Crick; Sharon McGrayne re Marie Skłodowska Curie; Richard Williams & Bart Davis, and Serena Williams & Daniel Paisner re the Williams sisters; Ron Powers re Mark Twain; Loren Eiseley, Alan Moorehead, and Arthur Koestler re Charles Darwin.