IF YOU WANT TO GET SOMETHING DONE, HIRE A MANIACALLY DETERMINED PERSON – a report – by Gary Smolker, Social Commentator, Values Critic

The recently released move “Harriet” accurately portrays the super human power possessed by a manically determined person.

I know from personal experience that manically determined people have extraordinary powers.

IF YOU WANT TO GET SOMETHING DONE, HIRE A MANIAC

Mania is the driver which enables a person to perform beyond normal human boundaries.

Mania swallows your full attention, your life, your being.

Maniacs find difficulties addictively challenging.

To a great extent a maniac becomes a hostage to his mania.

A true maniac has no personal life at all.

THOMAS EDISON

According to Edmund Morris’ book “EDISON”

On a wall in his library Edison was a framed quotation: “There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking.”

Edison wrote of himself, a self-appraisal:

“Everything on earth depends on will. I never had an idea in my life.  I’ve got no imagination.  I never dream. My so-called inventions already existed in the environment – I took them out. I’ve created nothing. Nobody does. There is no such thing as an idea being brain-born; everything comes from the outside. The industrious one coaxes it from the environment; the drone lets it lie there while he goes off to the baseball game.  The ‘genius’ hangs around his laboratory day and night. If anything happens he is there to catch it; if he wasn’t, it might happen just the same but if would never be his.”

The executive quality he admired the most was curiosity.

During the depression of the 1920s bank presidents committed suicide, homeowners lost their homes to sheriffs and Billy Durant of General Motors was out of a job. Edison has no intention of sharing Durant’s fate.

Edison fired an enormous number of his employees.

He congratulated himself on having got rid of “thousands of untrained and careless workers” by one estimate one third of  his eleven-thousand-man-payroll.

He worked out a plan to replace highly paid executives with young men willing to work for less money.

This ment a risky investment in recent college graduates.

He designed a questionnaire to bring out their general knowledge to ensure that he got the best of the hundreds of desperate job seekers with college degrees.

He sought to hire young men who displayed alertness of mind, power of observation and interest in the life of the world.

He designed an IGNORAMOMETER questionnaire to test job applicants for those qualities.

Humorists, professional and amateur, satirized his “Ignoramomenter.”

A group of Wellesley girls sent him a five-foot-long list of their own questions, including “What are the chemical properties of catnip?” and “When you turn off the electric light, where does the light go?”

The New York Times published almost forty articles on the subject of “the Edison brainmeter,” while magazines such as Literary Digest, Harper’s, and The New Republic began a debate on intelligence tests.

The World remarked that in a time rendered dismal by depression and Prohibition, “Mr. Edison with his questionnaire, has contributed to the gaiety of life but also to the dissemination of knowledge.”

Only 4 percent of his initial batch of applicants struck him as worth hiring.

“The results of the test are surprisingly disappointing.” “Men who have gone through college I find amazingly ignorant.”

Edison claimed to study twenty-seven periodicals, ranging from the Police Gazette and the “liberal weeklies” to the Journal of Experimental Medicine, plus five papers a day, and “about forty pounds of books a month.”

“Nearly all my books are transcripts of scientific societies, which will never be republished.”

He was an energetic margin scribblers.

He was a self-taught man.

His erudition was beyond that of many university professors, let alone their graduate students.

The electrical theoretician George Steinmetz remarked, “I consider Edison today as the man best informed in all fields of human knowledge.”

ALBERT EINSTEIN’S AND NICOLA TESLA’S RESPONSE

Einstein, the father of relativity, said that he saw no point in cluttering his mind with data obtainable from any encyclopedia. “The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think.”

Nicola Tesla, Einstein’s rival in popular genius rankings, agreed. “Edison attaches too great a value to mere memory.”

LONELY LIFE

Edison’s wife Mina said of him: “Because of his work he has had to live a great deal by himself and in himself.”

For many years the members of the National Academy of Science refused Edison membership because Edison was a mercenary, publicity-seeking technologist.

Edison was not surprised by the rejection. He had invited it with many jibes against “lead-pencil” theorists.

Finally the National Academy of Sciences voted to admit him after being shamed by a member quoting a French academician’s epitaph to Moliere “We cannot afford to say when Mr Edison dies, ‘Nothing can add to his glory, we can only regret that he does not add to ours.'”

LIFESTYLE

Edison worked 18 hours a day, monotonically focused on whatever current project interested him.

He made no distinction between day and night,

He was completely unconscious of time.

When asked what he did for recreation, he replied: “I eat and think.”

OUTPUT

Edison patented one thousand and ninety-three machines, systems, processes, and phenomena.

Edison averaged one patent for every ten to twelve days of his adult life. The complete list, arranged by number and execution date, is available online at edison.rutgers.edu/patents.

PERSONAL NOTE

The really smart people I know read a lot of books.

They are always reading one or more books.

ENERGETIC MARGIN-SCRIBBLER

I am an energetic-margin-scribbler.

PERSONAL CORRESPONDENCE

On January 18, 2020, I received the following email from a good friend who was recently hired to transform a major highly capitalistic institution.

“I have been feeling manic at work. There is so much to be done. The inefficiency and disorder hurts my feelings. I want an elegant solution. I want to fix it all – now. I dislike the anxiety which comes with negative surprise. I need to create order in the world.

“I too wake up at 2-3 a every day. I wake up thinking about things that need doing.  I think about things I could have done better  I ruminate about things I’ve done and said and analyze the consequences of each potential action.  I can’t stop.

“I work out at 4:30 am. My brain is solving problems all the time, running in the background.  Too many open tabs sometimes. I fall into exhaustion when I’m spent.

“I do enjoy spending time just thinking. This is my favorite time To sit and read or sit in the bath and think (and talk) to myself.”

The woman who wrote the quoted note above is living the life she loves.

IT TAKES A BEAUTIFUL MIND TO APPRECIATE A BEAUTIFUL WORLD.  THERE IS BEAUTY EVERYWHERE.

Manically determined people are extraordinarily sensitive.

They see and seek and appreciate beauty everywhere.

That photo is of a bejeweled pin to put in a turban.

It, and other wonderfully hand made beautiful objects, is in the clothing accessories collection in the Topkapi Palace Museum.

Gary Smolker, Social Commentator, Values Critic

Copyright © 2020 by Gary Smolker, All Rights Reserved