Marc Andreessen on the 5 personality traits of an innovator

When you're talking about real innovators, like people who actually do really creative breakthrough work, I think you're talking about a couple things. So one is very high in what's called trait openness, which is one of the big five, which is basically just like flat out open to new ideas. And of course, the nature of trade openness is. Trade openness means you're not just open to new ideas in one category, you're open to many different kinds of new ideas. And so we might talk about the fact that a lot of innovators also are very creative people in other aspects of their lives, even outside of their specific creative domain. So that's important. But of course, just being open is not sufficient, because if you're just open, you could just be curious. Curious and explore and spend your entire life reading and talking to people and never actually create something. So you also need a couple other things. You need a high level of conscientiousness, which is another one of the big five. You need somebody who's really willing to apply themselves in our world, typically over a period of many years, to be able to accomplish something great. They typically work very hard. That often gets obscured because the stories that end up getting told about these people are just. There's this kid and he just had this idea, and it was a stroke of genius and it was a moment in time, and it's just, oh, he was so lucky. And. And this. No, for most of these people, it's years and years of applied effort. And so you need somebody with an extreme, basically willingness to defer gratification and really apply themselves to a specific thing for a long time. And of course, this is why there aren't very many of these people, is there aren't many people who are high in openness and high in conscientiousness because to a certain extent they're opposed traits. And so you need somebody who has both of those. Third is you need somebody high in disagreeableness, which is the third of the big five. So you need somebody who's just like, basically ornery. Because if they're not ornery, then they'll be talked out of their ideas by people who will be like, oh. Because the reaction most people have new ideas is, oh, that's dumb. And so somebody who's too agreeable will be easily dissuaded to not pursue, not pulling the thread anymore. So you need somebody highly disagreeable. Again, the nature of disagreeableness is they tend to be disagreeable about everything, right? So they tend to be these very iconoclastic renegade characters. And then there's just a table stakes component which is they just also need to be high iq. They just need to be really smart because it's just, it's hard to innovate in any category if you can't synthesize large amounts of information quickly. And so those are four basically high spikes, very rare traits that basically have to come together. You could probably also say they probably at some point need to be relatively low on neuroticism which is another of the big five because if they're too neurotic they probably can't handle the stress. Right. So it's this dial in there and then of course if you're into like the sort of science of the big five, basically these are all people who are on like the far outlying kind of point on the normal distribution across all these traits. And then that just gets you to I think the sort of hardest topic of all around this whole concept which is just there are very few of these people.