Washington - The man could not stand dirt. When he built his company’s first factory in California in 1984, he frequently got down on his hands and knees and looked for dust on the floor.
For Steve Jobs, who was rolling out the Macintosh computer, these extreme measures were a necessity. “If we didn’t have the discipline to keep that place spotless, then we weren’t going to have the discipline to keep all the machines running,” the Apple co-founder recalled.
This perfectionist also hated typos. As Pam Kerwin, the marketing director at Pixar, told me: “He would carefully go over every document a million times and would pick up on punctuation errors such as misplaced commas.”
And if anything wasn’t just right, Jobs could throw a fit. He was a difficult and argumentative boss who had trouble relating to others. But Jobs could focus intensely on exactly what he wanted – which was to design “insanely great products”.
Hard work and intelligence can take you only so far. To be super successful like Jobs, you also need that X-factor, that maniacal overdrive – which often comes from being a tad mad.
For decades, scholars have made the case that mental illness can be an asset for writers and artists. In her landmark work Touched With Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament, psychologist Kay Jamison documented the “fine madness” that gripped dozens of prominent poets, novelists, painters and composers.
As Lord Byron wrote of his fellow bards: “We of the craft are all crazy. Some are affected by gaiety, others by melancholy, but all are more or less touched.”
For the author of Don Juan, as for many of the other artsy types profiled by Jamison, the disease in question is bipolar disorder, but depression is also common.
Sylvia Plath’s signature works – The Bell Jar and Daddy – hinge on her suicidal despair.
But while most now acknowledge that many famous writers were unbalanced, few realise that the movers and shakers who have built the US – chief executives like Jobs – also struggled with psychiatric maladies. This misunderstanding motivated me to write my latest book, America’s Obsessives.
After discussing Jobs and other figures, I cover seven icons, including Thomas Jefferson, marketing genius Henry J Heinz, librarian Melvil Dewey, aviator Charles Lindbergh, beauty tycoon Estée Lauder and baseball slugger Ted Williams. (Like Jobs, the Hall of Famer was a neatness nut who used to quiz his clubhouse attendant on the detergent he used on the team’s laundry.)
By picking trailblazers who toiled in different arenas, I wanted to show how a touch of madness is perhaps the secret to rising to the top in just about any line of work.
These men and women of action did have occasional bouts with depression, but they primarily suffered (or benefited) from another form of mental illness: obsessive-compulsive personality disorder. The key features of this superachiever’s disease include a love of order, lists, rules, schedules, details, and cleanliness; people with OCPD (Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder) are addicted to work, and they are control freaks who must do everything “their way”.
OCPD is not to be confused with its cousin, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Those with OCD are paralysed by thoughts that just won’t go away, while people with OCPD are inspired by them.
Jobs couldn’t stop designing products – when in the intensive care unit, he once ripped off his oxygen mask, insisting that his doctors improve its design on the double.
Lauder couldn’t stop touching other women’s faces. Perfect strangers would do, including those she might bump into on an elevator or a street corner.
These dynamos are hard-pressed to carve out time for anything else but their compulsions. Spouses and children endure long stretches of neglect.
Obsessives hate nothing so much as taking a break and they typically do so only when felled by illness.
“Home. Not well. Busy about house. Always plenty to do. Cannot well be idle and believe will rather wear out than rust out,” wrote the 35-year-old Heinz in his diary in 1880, four years after starting his processed food company.
Heinz’s compulsions included measuring everything – he never left home without his tape measure and kept track of meaningless numbers. But this love of pseudo-quantification would produce in the early 1890s one of the sturdiest slogans in American advertising history – “57 Varieties”. At the time, his company actually produced more than 60 products, but this number fetishist felt that there was something magical about sevens.
By his early fifties, Heinz had driven himself close to a complete nervous collapse several times, and he reluctantly passed the reins of the company to his heirs.
Dewey, whose childhood fixation with the number 10 led him to devise the Dewey Decimal Classification system, was also forced into an early retirement by his feverish pace.
Dewey published the first edition of his search engine – the Google of its day – in 1876, when he was only 24. For the next quarter of a century, Dewey took on a series of jobs, juggling two or three at a time, as a librarian, businessman and editor.
In the end, it was his sexual compulsions that did him in. He was a serial sexual harasser and in 1905 was ostracised from the American Library Association when four prominent woman members of the guild filed complaints against him.
Lindbergh also was an order aficionado whose oversized libido created a mess.
This dad saw his five children only a couple of months a year. He ruled over them and his wife, the best-selling author Anne Morrow Lindbergh, not with an iron fist but with ironclad lists. He kept track of each child’s infractions, which included such innocuous activities as chewing gum.
After Lindbergh turned 50, feeding his sex addiction became his job; for the rest of his life, he was flying around the world to visit his three German mistresses.
Remarkably, though these obsessive icons were all awash in neurotic tics, there has been no shortage of hagiographers who idealise their every move.
Of Heinz’s penchant for collecting seemingly random numbers, one biographer has observed that he “enthusiastically wrote down in his diary the statistics that one must know and record on such an occasion”.
Another saw in Heinz’s factoid-finding a reason to compare him to “a scientist such as Thomas Edison”.
The author of the first biography of Dewey made the laughable claim that “there was no psycho-neurosis in (him).”
Even today, some still agree with what New York governor Al Smith said about Lindbergh soon after his legendary flight to Paris: “He represents to us… all that we wish – a young American at his best.”
We like our heroes and do not easily let them go. By pointing out the flaws in our superachievers, I do not intend to diminish the greatness of their achievements.
Instead I aim to show how they managed to pull them off. And more often than not, it was with a touch of madness. – Slate/The Washington Post News Service