Studies Show That People Who Have High “Integrative Complexity” Are More Likely To Be Successful
A self-made billionaire studied Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Elon Musk. An eminent researcher interviewed Nobel Laureates. They each came to the same conclusion.
Author’s Note #1: This article was written over 60 hours with love and care using the blockbuster mental model.
Author’s Note #2: I created a companion AI bot that helps you apply the insights from the article to your life. Paid subscribers get access to the bot and the prompt that created it.
Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.
—Walt Whitman
My 6’5” dad was black and grew up in one of the most dangerous cities in America. He sported a huge afro into the early ’90s, when he died at the age of 35 from lung cancer, a few years younger than I am now.
My mother, a Jewish refugee from Poland, arrived in Brooklyn when she was 17 with no money and no English. She was essentially a single mother for most of my childhood.
That makes me a half-black, half-white, 6’5” man born into a half-Christian, half-Jewish family, and raised by a refugee.
So I watch the daily culture wars unfold with mixed feelings. Recently, I listened to a podcast about race in which my people were described as “the victims.” Then I listened to another podcast, and this one cast me on the side of “the oppressor.” The result is that I tend to feel like a chameleon and see both sides of many of the issues currently being debated. I used to feel like I should pretend to strongly take one side or the other. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to embrace this ability to appreciate contrasting viewpoints without labeling one right and the other wrong.
And then I found five studies, independently conducted by five of the greatest thinkers of our time, that basically came to the same surprising conclusion: Many of the world’s top entrepreneurs—like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Elon Musk—along with Nobel Laureates have a common, rare skill called “integrative complexity.” Integrative complexity is the ability to develop and hold opposing traits, values, and ideas and then integrate them into larger ones.
These findings go against conventional wisdom in the business world, which is that we should double down on our strengths and mitigate everything else. They are also opposed to conventional tribal wisdom that says we should pick one side of every polarity and vehemently fight for it.
Here are the five breakthrough studies on why integrative complexity is a key to success, personal growth, and cultural polarization.
Breakthrough Study 1: Self-Made Billionaire Entrepreneur Studies And Interviews Some Of The Best Entrepreneurs Ever
In the first study, self-made billionaire Ray Dalio (author of Principles) conducted long interviews with and performed comprehensive personality assessments on Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Reed Hastings (founder of Netflix), Muhammad Yunus (social entrepreneur and Nobel Peace Prize recipient), Jack Dorsey (Twitter co-founder and CEO), and other luminaries. To my knowledge, no other study has gone so in-depth with so many high-level, busy leaders.
After collecting the data, Dalio narrowed his findings into a list of seven common traits. Of those traits, Dalio said that the most interesting was this:
All are able to see both big pictures and granular details (and levels in between) and synthesize the perspectives they gain at those different levels, whereas most people see just one or the other. They are simultaneously creative, systematic, and practical. They are assertive and open-minded at the same time.
In an interview with Tony Robbins, Dalio further unpacks his observation:
They also tend to do things that you assume people don’t do together. Let me give you an example... Ordinarily, you’ll have a creative who you say, “Oh, they’re very, very creative but they don’t like structured.” Or a very structured person doesn’t like creativity…
The best ones are people who not only have good mental maps of how things should be done, but they have high levels of humility. [In other words, they are smart and humble.] It may not look that way to an outsider. You may look at some of these people and you might say, “Wow. They sound so brilliant and they’re asking the questions.” But if you’re in discussions with them, and I’m sure that you [Tony Robbins] have been in discussion with them, what you find out is generally speaking that they’re curious, voraciously curious. They’re wondering if they’re wrong. They’re taking in information. So they don’t look as confident when you’re in those conversations.
Breakthrough Study 2: Eminent Psychologist Studies Creative Geniuses
The second study was completed in 1996 by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (author of Flow), after performing in-depth interviews with a diverse group of 91 creative geniuses, from Nobel Laureates to business tycoons to renowned artists. When describing what these individuals had in common, he wrote this (it’s a long passage, but worth it):
If I had to express in one word what makes their personalities different from others, it would be complexity. By this I mean that they show tendencies of thought and action that in most people are segregated. They contain contradictory extremes — instead of being an ‘individual,’ each of them is a ‘multitude’…
These qualities are present in all of us, but usually we are trained to develop only one pole of the dialectic. We might grow up cultivating the aggressive, competitive side. A creative individual is more likely to be both aggressive and cooperative, either at the same time or at different times, depending on the situation. Having a complex personality means being able to express the full range of traits that are potentially present in the human repertoire but usually atrophy because we think that one or the other pole is ‘good,’ whereas the other extreme is ‘bad’…
A complex personality does not imply neutrality, or the average. It is not some position at the midpoint between two poles. It does not imply, for instance, being wishy-washy, so that one is never very competitive or very cooperative. Rather it involves the ability to move from one extreme to the other as the occasion requires.
Breakthrough Study 3: Leading Business Thinker Studies Business Icons
The third study was conducted by academic researcher and business school dean Roger Martin, who was named the world’s leading business thinker in 2017. Martin conducted in-depth interviews (some over eight hours long) with over 50 of the world’s top business leaders—such as Michael Dell, former Procter & Gamble CEO A.G. Lafley, and Jack Welch—and put his findings into several books. His conclusion echoes Csikszentmihalyi and Dalio:
What made them successful was not making trade-offs … just refusing, and then saying, ‘There’s got to be a better way.’
Martin calls this approach “integrative thinking,” and defines it in his book The Opposable Mind:
The ability to face constructively the tension of opposing ideas and, instead of choosing one at the expense of the other, generate a creative resolution of the tension in the form of a new idea that contains elements of the opposing ideas but is superior to each.
Breakthrough Study 4: Adult Development Pioneer Surveys Tens Of Thousands
Finally, we have the lifetime work of Harvard psychologist Robert Kegan and his peers in the field of adult development. To put their work in context, you should know that in the 1930s, psychologist Jean Piaget identified four universal stages of cognitive development in humans:
Piaget’s work suggested that adolescents reached a final stage, which they remained in throughout adulthood.
This understanding was later turned on its head by the adult development field, where longitudinal studies showed that similar to children, adults go through a series of universal and predictable phases, as shown in the model below created by Robert Kegan…
The final stage of Kegan’s model, which only one percent of the population reaches, is called the Self-Transforming Mind. What’s fascinating about this stage is that one develops the ability to hold conflicting, contradictory, and paradoxical ideologies, thoughts, and values simultaneously. At this stage, we’re no longer a prisoner of one identity. Instead, we can fluidly explore the subtleties and complexities of multiple ways of experiencing reality.
Breakthrough Study 5: Good To Great Author And Researcher Jim Collins Says Great Leaders Follow The “Genius of the AND”
Collins explains…
Instead of being oppressed by the “Tyranny of the OR,” highly visionary companies liberate themselves with the “Genius of the AND”—the ability to embrace both extremes of a number of dimensions at the same time. Instead of choosing between A OR B, they figure out a way to have both A AND B.
We’re not talking about mere balance here. “Balance” implies going to the midpoint, fifty-fifty, half and half. A visionary company doesn’t seek balance between short-term and long-term, for example. It seeks to do very well in the short-term and very well in the long-term. A visionary company doesn’t simply balance between idealism and profitability; it seeks to be highly idealistic and highly profitable. A visionary company doesn’t simply balance between preserving a tightly held core ideology and stimulating vigorous change and movement; it does both to an extreme. In short, a highly visionary company doesn’t want to blend yin and yang into a gray, indistinguishable circle that is neither highly yin nor highly yang; it aims to be distinctly yin and distinctly yang—both at the same time, all the time.
Irrational? Perhaps. Rare? Yes. Difficult? Absolutely. But as F. Scott Fitzgerald pointed out, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” This is exactly what the visionary companies are able to do.
Reflecting And Connecting The Dots On The Studies
Upon learning about “integrative complexity,” I started noticing the quality in the iconic entrepreneurs I’ve been writing about over the past few years—entrepreneurs like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Ray Dalio, Steve Jobs.
Jeff Bezos is a master at balancing short-term and long-term. To this end, one of his favorite quotes is the Latin saying Gradatim Ferociter, which means “step-by-step ferociously.” At the same time, he’s financing the development of a 10,000-year clock on one of his properties to symbolize the value of long-term thinking.
Elon Musk balances incredible vision with exquisite attention to detail. On the one hand, he is known for visions decades in the future that include humanity becoming multi-planetary, getting off of fossil fuels, and avoiding an artificial general intelligence apocalypse. At the same time, he literally taught himself how to be a designer, rocket scientist, and car engineer. When Musk showed Ray Dalio his own car for the first time, Dalio says, “he had as much to say about the key fob that opened the doors as he did about his overarching vision.”
Steve Jobs was a detail-oriented visionary. He is famous for insisting that the inside of a Mac should be as well designed as the outside—even though no one would ever see it. We learn in Jobs’ biography that as he lay in his bed dying from cancer, he asked for five different oxygen masks so that he could choose the one with the best design.
In addition to noticing the quality in the luminary I studied, I noticed the pattern in my own life. For example, when I reflect on my life, I see that many of my struggles ultimately came down to a few polarities. Here are a few examples:
Being (fully experiencing life now) and Doing (accomplishing things that will pay off in the future). For me, being in a constant state of productivity is what feels comfortable. It makes me feel like I’m living life. When I relax, I feel mild anxiety. While this has led to some parts of my life that I’m most grateful for, it also has led me to run myself into the ground. For example, often, by the time the kids get home from school, my brain is operating on fumes and less functional as a parent. While this is a polarity that I’m still integrating, I have made progress and spent a lot of time exploring meditation, for example.
Product and Sales. I started my business as a product person. I focused on developing a quality product and looked down on marketing, which I associated with the unscrupulous tactics of a used car salesman. However, when the business failed to bring in money, I eventually and reluctantly learned that I needed sales skills in order to keep it afloat. Furthermore, if my product was truly solving a problem, then other people needed to learn about it, and that meant I needed to get comfortable promoting it. Now I consider myself both a product person and a salesperson. As soon as I started focusing on sales, the business took off.
Confidence and Open-Mindedness. Throughout my life, I’ve been very coachable and open-minded. This has helped me grow rapidly when I have the right mentor. It has helped me be comfortable with tension. On the other hand, I’m still getting comfortable with the ability to confidently express my opinions. This has led to me being overlooked and underestimated. I’m currently inspired by the idea of “strong ideas, loosely held.”
If the conclusions of these studies are true, they have major implications for business, education, parenting, and personal development. They force us to rethink some of our most fundamental beliefs about how we can develop our potential.
More specifically…
Move beyond the strengths-based paradigm of skill development
Think about what to learn next in a fundamentally different way
Listen less to your intuition and more to your counterintuition
Run toward tension rather than away from it
Learn how to work with your opponents instead of just your friends
Implication 1: Move Beyond The Strengths-Based Paradigm Of Skill Development
The current trend in management thinking is to focus almost solely on our strengths and mitigate our weaknesses by hiring other people. If you have a blind spot or are resisting learning something, that’s fine. Just get someone else to do it.
These studies imply that we may want to instead focus on developing and synthesizing atypical combinations of skills and traits with their opposites in order to develop an emergent skill set that is both rare and extremely valuable.
In other words, the focus would not just be on strengths, but instead on multiplier skill sets where 1+1=10. For more on the power of combining atypical combinations, read my article People Who Have “Too Many Interests” Are More Likely To Be Successful According To Research.
The most eloquent explanation that I’ve ever seen on multiplier skill sets comes from one of the top venture capitalists and entrepreneurs in the world, Marc Andreessen:
The world is becoming an ever more complicated place. Everything is slamming together. Fields that used to be discreet are now combining, due in a large part to what we’ve been talking about. And so it’s not about any individual skill, it’s about combining skills, and then constantly layering in new skills.
Andreessen goes on to give an example of an engineer who is also a writer, and who then becomes knowledgeable in education. Each of these skills is common, but as you combine them you end up with more and more rare skill sets:
When you think about it, the power of atypical combinations is really remarkable. It’s like creating real gold from fool’s gold. It’s the ultimate act of alchemy.
Implication 2: Think About What To Learn Next In A Fundamentally Different Way
We’re moving from a one-skill model to a multi-skill model. At a minimum, every few years, we’re going to need a new skill.
And in this rapidly changing knowledge economy, one of the most important and difficult decisions we have to make repeatedly is what to learn next. Do we take that course on data science and machine learning or sign up for a design class? Do we study mental models or receive coaching on how to build relationships? Do we learn the thing that will pay off right away or focus on the long-term goal?
These studies suggest a surprising approach: Learn the polar opposite of a skill or trait you already have. If you’re great at numbers, develop your language skills. If you’re a whiz at keeping track of details, learn how to see the big picture. If you love business, delve into something creative. If you love art, learn about business.
Implication 3: Listen Less To Your Intuition And More To Your Counterintuition
Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.
—Carl Jung
In our culture, we’ve deified our gut instinct. Many think of it as a higher power speaking the truth from the heavens. For sure, many of our most creative decisions and insights come to us in a flash from our subconscious.
But so do many of our worst. Over the last 30 years, a growing list of hundreds of cognitive biases have been identified. Many were instrumental to our survival in an ancient world but can lead to irrational decisions in the modern world.
Three biases, in particular, lead to a decreased ability to handle integrative complexity. Collectively, they give us the feeling that our beliefs are reality, rather than just a fallible model. They’re…
Confirmation Bias. The tendency to look for ideas that confirm what we already believe.
Backfire Effect. The tendency to focus on the holes in ideas that go against what we already believe.
Ingroup/Outgroup Bias. As Dr. David Rock, the director of the NeuroLeadership Institute, puts it: “The brain classifies everyone as in-group or out-group. We do that with every person we come into contact with or even look at. The decision that is made is from a wide variety of neurological processes that we’re often not aware of. It impacts the networks we use to perceive movement, empathy, data, and whether we’re motivated to see the person win or lose.”
The findings of the five studies I’ve shared show that we may actually want to do the opposite of what our intuition tells us to do in some cases: run toward difference rather than away from it. As soon as we notice any polarity, rather than defending one side, we should focus on understanding “the other.” In other words, don’t ignore your “crazy” conservative or liberal uncle with opposing ideas to your own. Read the news outlet that represents a view other than your own bubble. Try to understand others’ diametrically opposed viewpoints.
Of course, this is easier said than done. But the good news is that the individuals in the studies have shown that it’s possible to improve and even a little bit can make a big difference.
The success of the scientific method over the last few hundred years is proof that humans can at least partially overcome their cognitive biases. The scientific method is designed to counteract our cognitive biases, and it has allowed us to come to very counterintuitive conclusions about how the universe works.
Just consider how counterintuitive it is that the Earth revolves around the sun. How easy it must have been to believe otherwise, when for millennia all humans could see was the sun “moving through” the sky each day. Consider how difficult it must have been for our ancestors to first understand that many illnesses are caused by invisible things called germs. These examples show how often our intuition has been proven wrong, and how much of what we now believe is likely to also be wrong. It’s a great argument for learning more than one side of an issue.
Implication 4: Run Toward Tension
I never allow myself to have an opinion on anything that I don’t know the other side’s argument better than they do.
—Self-made Billionaire Charlie Munger
We’re often taught that controversy is a bad thing. But controversy, polarity, conflict, cognitive dissonance, confusion and tension may be one of our biggest opportunities for growth as individuals and as a society. Perhaps when we see any polarity that’s important to us, we should run toward it rather than away from it.
Throughout the world, polarity can create prejudice, discrimination, demonization, and even war. But it can also be an opportunity for learning, growth, and cooperation.
Implication 5: Learn How To Work With Your Opponents Instead Of Just Your Friends
I recently watched a livestream interview (43:40) between Scott Adams of Dilbert fame and Naval Ravikant, one of Silicon Valley’s most respected angel investors and entrepreneurs. I admire Adams and Ravikant because they are each independent thinkers.
In this interview, they had a fascinating back-and-forth relevant to this article. Adams posed the following question for each of them to answer:
Which is the better strategy, becoming better friends with your friends or finding a way to work with your opponents?
They each resoundingly said that working more closely with your opponents was the more growthful path. Ravikant said:
Clearly, if you can work with your opponents, you’ve got it made. You win every time.
Adams agreed:
It seems to me that wherever you’re looking at a situation like ‘How can I succeed,’ ask yourself who is my opponent and how can I break that. Because that opponent is friction.
When you look at their responses through the framework of “integrative complexity,” they make total sense.
These 5 Studies Are Not Alone. Almost Every Culture Throughout Time Has Independently Wrestled With Integrative Complexity
Oddly enough, the paradox is one of our most valuable spiritual possessions, while uniformity of meaning is a sign of weakness.
—Carl Jung
The more that I’ve studied the phenomenon of polarity and integrative complexity, the more that I realize it is an age-old problem/opportunity.
Almost every culture has developed a language to describe it and even to solve it. And, if all of these cultures have independently come across this idea, it’s safe to assume that it’s fundamental to the human experience.
In the East, we have:
The yin-yang symbol developed nearly 2,000 years ago, symbolizes the tension and integration of polarities.
Hinduism’s Nonduality, where polarities are integrated into an undivided whole, and the perception of duality is a result of ignorance.
Zen Buddhism (Koans) uses a paradoxical statement or question to provoke deep contemplation and insight, leading to the realization of non-dualistic truth.
In the West, we have:
The Socratic method actively explores contrarian perspectives through questioning.
Dialectical thinking from philosopher Friedrich Hegel actively seeks out contradictions and uses debate, reflection, and logical reasoning to arrive at a more nuanced understanding.
The Transcendent Function of Carl Jung is the psychological mechanism through which conflicting or contradictory elements (unconscious & conscious, feminine & masculine, persona & shadow) are integrated into a more complex and unified whole.
Parts work, which focuses on integrating different parts of ourselves into a larger unified whole, appears in many subfields of psychology, including Gestalt Therapy, Internal Family Systems, Transactional Analysis, Psychosynthesis, Psychodrama, Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) as parts integration, Voice Dialogue (Big Mind Process), and Dialectical Behavior Therapy.
The list goes on: Antinomies from Immanuel Kant, Moral dialectics, dialectical leadership, cultural dialectics, etc.
So now that we understand the value and implications of integrative complexity, the question becomes:
How do we apply integrative complexity to our life?
One of the best and most simple answers comes from researchers Michael Commons (Harvard) and Sara N Ross…
How To Develop Integrative Complexity Step-By-Step
Whereas the term “integrative complexity” names the end state of a mind that is able to hold contradictory, extreme perspectives, dialectical thinking explains the process that leads to it.
Researchers Michael Commons and Sara N Norris break down the steps of dialectical thinking.
The first step is understanding the polarity you’re addressing (more on this at the end of the article).
The second step is adding and exploring the pro & con dimension to each side of the polarity…
This step is important because it helps make sure that you work through the pros & cons of each side of the polarity in order to get a fuller understanding. This matters because when there is a charge, we tend to focus on the pros of the side we agree with and the cons of the side we disagree with. Furthermore, this charge causes us to fall for confirmation bias more readily as we look for evidence that proves what we already believe. Thus, our perspective gets distorted without us realizing it.
The summary of the dialectal thinking process is encapsulated in the following steps:
I explain how to actually follow each of the six steps in this model in Dialectical Thinking: How To Develop World-Changing Ideas, According To Research.
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Now, the question becomes:
How do we become aware of polarities to work through?
In some ways, this is the hardest part since polarities often exist in our blind spot.
To help you with this challenge, I created a bot for you that has been helpful for me…
Introducing The Polarity Finder Bot (Paid Subscribers Only)
This bot helps you find timeless polarities in the following categories:
Universal polarities
Professional polarities
Psychological polarities
Spiritual polarities
Interpersonal polarities
Creative polarities
From there, it helps you get a deeper understanding of a specific polarity that you select. More specifically, the bot provides you with an:
Overview of how that polarity has manifested throughout time and across cultures
Explanation of how resolving the polarity positively impacts different parts of your life on a concrete level
Overview of deeper related polarities that you may want to look into. For example, some polarities are surface-level manifestations of deeper psychological polarities.