Wednesday, January 27, 2016

The immigrant genius - Schema Violation

By way of Ms. Aruna Viswanathan, in the Wall Street Journal article The Secret of Immigrant Genius:

"Scan the roster of history’s intellectual and artistic giants, and you quickly notice something remarkable: Many were immigrants or refugees, from Victor Hugo, W.H. Auden and Vladimir Nabokov to Nikolas Tesla, Marie Curie and Sigmund Freud. At the top of this pantheon sits the genius’s genius: Einstein. His “miracle year” of 1905, when he published no fewer than four groundbreaking scientific papers, occurred after he had emigrated from Germany to Switzerland."

From the number of entrepreneurial businesses started to the number of patents published in the US alone, one easy answer is that the "Scruffy but determined immigrant, hungry for success, arrives on distant shores. Immigrant works hard. Immigrant is bolstered by a supportive family, as well as a wider network from the old country. Immigrant succeeds, buys flashy new threads."

Yet, the article debunks this myth and shares research showcasing various traits of immigrants that enable the creative disruption anchored in what is called Schema Violation.

Read this excellent article here.

No comments: