Madness and brilliance

It is often said that the difference between madness and brilliance is small. Its not difficult to find examples of people who have been both at different times. Godel, Tesla and Van Gogh are well known examples of people who have very obviously been both at different points.

It seems very common to switch between the two and in some cases maybe even occilate a bit back and forth (e.g. Steve Jobs). If the distance between brilliant and madness is small then a curious corollary emerges: To be brilliant you will find ourself in the neighborhood of madness quite often. To make matters worse the difference is oftentimes only clear after the fact. For example the difference between a succesful bluff and a failed bluff is not really something the bluffer can control. Either you're lucky, the bluff succeeds and you look like a genious or the bluff fails and you look like a madman.

Its been my experience that proximity to madness makes a lot of people uncomfortable. Going against the consensus rarely feels good. This blocks an awful lot of brilliance in my opinion.

Brilliance without madness

It seems it might be possible to be brilliant without also being mad. Examples of this include

• Picasso
• Ed Sheeran
• Thomas Edison

One thing many of these brilliance-without-the-madness types have in common is their dedication to quantity, not quality.

Van Gogh only made it to 37 years of age compared to Picasso's 91. However in terms of output the score is about 2000 vs well over 50000, the difference in age does not account for this difference. Ed Sheeran writes several songs a day and Thomas Edison has been quoted for saying many things on this including

"Success is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration"

and

"I've not failed to make a lightbulb I have just found 9999 ways to not do it".

It seems that focusing on quantity rather than quality can have a stabilizing effect. In its own weird way this makes sense. If to be brilliant you need to get close to madness and you can't tell the difference then it can be quite unnerving to put all your eggs in one basket.

The second thing that is very underrated about quantity is that it gives you much more feedback. Someone producing 10 works will get 10 times more feedback than someone producing 1 work. It is possible to improve without feedback, but its certainly harder. This has a large effect on quality.