An Answer To K. Duffy's Question - "Should I Stay Or Should I Go?"

Dear Kathleen,

Should you stick around South Jersey?

No.  Actually you should not.

How can you think outside the box when you’re living inside the box and all you see are those four cardboard walls? All you’ll ever get out of that box is samey-sameness.

For instance, spend some time in Haddonfield and notice that whenever you see a black face or an Asian face or any kind of different face, your mind immediately says “Whoa. Someone different!”

 But diversity isn’t meant to be a novelty act. It has a purpose.

Sure, during every election cycle in this country (meaning – all the time) politicians tell us diversity is good. They just never tell us why.

But science does. Check out an article written by Jonah Lerher in the March issue of WIRED magazine called “Cultivating Genius”. Lehrer reports on the research of statisticians who sought to answer the question “How’d they do that?” How did Athens, in ancient Greece, come up with Plato, Socrates, Euripides, Aeschylus and Aristophanes all in the same time period? Their work is the foundation of Western civilization and thought.

The same thing happened in Florence, Italy between 1440 and 1490. One city of 70,000 people produced Michangelo, da Vinci, Botticelli and Donatello, among others.

The scientists did that whole fact-checking thing and looked for common denominators in cultures where geniuses (plural) emerged over the span of one or two generations. David Banks, a statistician at Duke University found at least one common factor . (Warning:  Banks has written such works as “Comparing Methods of Multivariate Nonparametric Regression" which’ll turn your brain into Scooby-Doo. “Multivariate? Ruh?”)

What Banks found was that all these cultures were in or very near major trade routes. Thus, they had lots of different people from lots of different places. That means different ideas were intersecting. And when one group begins to encounter the ideas of another group, what emerges is a degree of creativity and innovation that’s unequaled in our homogenous cultures.

Another well know sociologist named Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi came to the same conclusion in the 1990s. (BTW - Don’t even try to pronounce his name. Mark Twain once said a name like that looked like “the alphabet on a drunk.”) Regardless. Csikszentmihalyi used a control group of very accomplished writers, artists, CEOs and other innovators. Each was given a date, time and voice recorder to carry around. They’d use the device whenever they had a creative thought or worked on a creative project. It was no coincidence that the more diverse their environment, the more creative and genius the idea. A larger view was not just available, it was nourished. His results are laid out in his book called “Flow.”

In other words, Kathleen, if you want to grow and contribute to the community, get out of SJ and go to New York or Southern California or Florida or anywhere people don’t eat, dress, talk, think alike. The longer you stay in South Jersey, Kathleen, the shorter, tighter, smaller becomes your world view. A trip to Europe, my dear, does not a genius make.

Seriously. You’re young. Smart. Ready to innovate. You owe it, not just to yourself, but to those coming behind you to . . .

get

the

hell

out.