If it ain’t broke, break it, then build something better

Do you want to be an iconoclast like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Pablo Picasso or Jonas Salk? Gregory Berns’ book Iconoclast: A Neuroscientist Reveals How to Think Differently can tell you how. First, see what others don’t see. Second, conquer your fear of failure, of the unknown, and of ridicule. Third, master the art of social intelligence by figuring out how to make people interested in your ideas and how to sell those ideas to opinion leaders and influencers. “If you do these three things, you are well on your road to exciting ideas, discoveries, inventions, or whatever you fancy,” Berns explained.

Three new terminologies can be learned in this tome — neuroecomist, neuroeconomics and iconoclasm. A neuroeconomist brings into play mental imaging to primarily make sense of how the brain crafts judgments and resolutions. Technologies like MRI are used to probe specific activities in the brain while you are making decisions, and then you try to figure out how the brain represents things like risks and safety nets, gains and losses, and punishments and rewards, and other similar things. Neuroeconomics, a discipline that is only about a decade old now, studies the same thing but viewed from two very different angles.

Iconoclasm is doing things your own way, and in a more radical mode. As fictionist Jonathan Culver wrote, “Artists are agents of chaos. It is the artist’s job to encourage entropy, to promote chaos. Idols must be killed, icons crushed, beliefs shattered. It is the artist’s job to encourage legitimate, unadulterated, raw thought and emotion. Art that does nothing new, that simply fills an established role, is not art. It is a product. A stale, stagnant product of a disgustingly mundane process that has been done so much it is assumed mandatory. Little different than feces. The last thing the world needs is to get sh*ttier.” Here are some major takeaways from Bern’s work:

You are an iconoclast if you perceive things differently and your brain does not make many shortcuts. “Perception is a process that is learned through experience, which is both a curse and an opportunity for change,” Berns declares. There are two types of iconoclasts. There are the naturally born kinds who are unaffectedly contrarian thinkers and doers from their childhood, which they carry on to adulthood. And there are the accidental iconoclasts — people thrown into a particular situation who rose to the occasion when they performed in ways very out of the ordinary.

What you perceive is very much a product of your past experience. If you see something, you don’t necessarily take it as an objective reality. Your interpretation of what you are literally looking at is very much influenced by everything that has happened before in your life, and what other people say they see. And it’s almost impossible to completely get rid of the influence of past experiences and other people’s opinions.

All great iconoclasts have had fear. This is an accepted state, considering that when you do something very different, you run the risk of social ostracism, ridicule, or just outright failure. The challenge of any iconoclast is to overcome those fears, persevere and perform under those circumstances. But if you’re not an iconoclast, you could train your brain to respond like one. Your brain is not naturally evolved and wired to do things radically different compared to other people. But by overcoming your fear, you can be armed with the knowledge to make slight changes and make things easier under specific circumstances. The critical fear that inhibits you from sharing your ideas is the fear of being rejected. At its core, this fear has its origin in social pressure, which is one of the most common of human phobias.

The most common fear is fear of public speaking. And that doesn’t mean you don’t have good ideas to share to your audience. It means you get intimidated in the typical environment. In such situation, it’s up to you to set the right tenor and the right milieu to build confidence and foster your thoughts. You’ve seen yourself operating under fear — conquer it, and use it as an efficient motivation to get things done.

Social intelligence is an important component in becoming an iconoclast. It is incorrect to assume that an iconoclast is a loner and without social skills. Take the case of two of the most iconoclastic modern artists, Pablo Picasso and Vincent van Gogh. Picasso was very successful in his lifetime, while van Gogh died broke at a young age. The main difference between their stories has to do with their personality and ultimately their social skills. Everyone loved Picasso, while van Gogh didn’t have a single friend in his life (besides his brother Theo). If you’re doing something very different, it’s going to be rejected by most people because it’s different, unless you have the social skills to persuade people and win them over.

You don’t necessarily have to change the world to be an iconoclast. You can do things that can be innovative and different in your own way and in your own work environment. You may be clear in your mission to change things, but other people may not realize it until they’re in your situation. No one can predict the future and what changes and innovations can alter life on the planet. Remember that the more radical and novel the change, the greater the likelihood of new insights being generated. To think like an iconoclast, you need novel experiences. History will be the only judge of what’s truly innovative or not.

Imagination comes from the visual system. And your visual system is your sense of sight, the biological apparatus that supports it. But you can be blind and creative, as Helen Keller was. Or you can use your sense of sound to express creativity, just like Mozart did. You can even tap your sense of smell creatively: advertisers have discovered this and now find creative ways to make products appealing through our sensitivity to varying aromas, sounds, tastes and emotions. You can be creative in a synthetic way, like the creators of operas, ballets or musicals that combine the visual and the auditory in a highly synthetic yet precise way and get their audiences mesmerized.

Embracing the importance of diversity within your team creates better results. If you take a view of iconoclasm that extends beyond the individual, you can see how to assemble a team that collectively exemplifies iconoclastic traits. Groups that allow for minority opinions are statistically more likely to make better decisions than groups that require unanimity.

“The brain is lazy. It changes only when it has to. And the conditions that consistently force the brain to rewire itself are when it confronts something novel. Novelty equals learning, and learning means physical rewiring of the brain,” Berns emphasizes. The brain requires braking and churning. Culver captures the essence eloquently when he proclaims, “If it ain’t broke, break it. Then build something better.”

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