“SO,” says Stelios Haji-Ioannou, the founder of easyJet,
easyCar, easyGroup and a host of other easyThings equally
untroublesome and anti-grammatical. “What is it you think I
am?”
A hypomanic, I say. Sir. A sort of milder version of a
manic depressive who never gets the depressive bit. Somebody
who is on a constant up, indefatigable and tireless, who
loves taking risks, hardly sleeps, brims with ideas and
feels an almost religious zeal about what they do. It’s a
benign form of madness, basically. Do you think you’ve got
it?
“Hmm,” he says. “Well. It’s certainly a theory."
It is that. The hypomanic theory is currently causing a
stir Stateside, off the back of a new book by a
psychologist, John D. Gartner, The Hypomanic Edge: The
Link Between (A Little) Craziness and (A Lot of) Success in
America (Simon & Schuster). Gartner’s theory is
bipartite. First, he thinks that entrepreneurs are nuts.
Secondly, and by extension, he thinks that America is such
an economically successful nation because it is full of
nuts. Poverty-stricken, whingeing Brit that I am, I like
this theory a lot.
“During the 1990s,” writes Gartner, “I was planning to
write a book about religious movements started by manic
prophets. But I began to be distracted by messianic
movements happening around me in real time . . . I was a
member of one.”
Gartner is talking about the dotcom boom. As an investor
in tech stocks, he immersed himself in this world
thoroughly. With theoretical millionaires exploding all
around him, Gartner began to realise that your religious
loon who comes staggering out of the desert and your
entrepreneurial demon who comes staggering out of the bank
might have an awful lot in common. Almost all entrepreneurs,
in his view, are hypomanic. In this sense, hypomania is not
a mental illness. Illness suggests something broken, or
undesirable. In Gartner's view, “hypomanics” are very much
to be envied. As individuals, invariably, they are
economically successful. They are tireless. Rather than
being afraid of risk, they revel in it. They’re too nuts to
quit, so they don’t. They thrive.
Here is a snapshot of a few of what Gartner thinks are
the key signs of a hypomanic: “filled with energy; flooded
with ideas; driven, restless, and unable to keep still;
channels his energy into the achievement of wildly grand
ambitions; often works on little sleep; feels brilliant,
special, chosen, perhaps even destined to change the world;
a risk-taker; charismatic and persuasive; prone to making
enemies”.
It goes without saying that these are all also the signs
of an entrepreneur. And also, it goes without saying, that
somebody needs to tell Sir Richard Branson.
I tried. He didn’t return my calls. In fact, it’s amazing
how many hugely successful businessmen don’t get back to you
when you approach them, out of the blue, to ask whether they
are nuts. Gartner reckons that a true hypomanic will always
be thrilled to be identified but, in my experience, this
doesn’t seem to be the case. I must have tried eight or so,
all semi-household names. Barely a whisper. Thank heaven,
then, for Stelios.
He’s not convinced, though. “I do sleep,” says Stelios.
“I need a good night’s sleep a couple of times a week. I can
only survive on three or four hours for a few nights in a
row." Stelios describes himself as a “serial entrepreneur”
and is famed for checking his BlackBerry e-mail the very
moment that he wakes up, when still in bed. “I work maybe
ten to 12 hours a day, and a couple of hours at the
weekend,” he says. “Although, thanks to that bloody
BlackBerry, a day off is a relative term.”
Stelios wouldn’t quite say that he channels all his
energy into work, at the expense of other things. “There
aren’t really other things,” he says, a little
apologetically. “I have this terrible habit of turning other
things into work as well.”
Does he grow irritated at minor obstacles? Would he
panic, for example, if his business empire had to survive
without him for a whole day? “It doesn’t happen,” he says.
“There’s the BlackBerry, you see.”
Yes, Stelios. But imagine that the BlackBerry was broken.
Imagine that the phone lines were down, and you couldn’t get
to a PC. What then? The millionaire entrepreneur is silent
for a moment. “I can’t imagine it,” he says, finally. “I
just can’t imagine a day without having anything to do. I
suppose that’s your answer, isn’t it?” I’m not so sure. I
suspect that Stelios called me back not because he’s a
hypomanic, but just because he’s a nice, helpful guy.
Professionally, and over the telephone, he seems altogether
too calm, and grounded, to fit the bill.
Laurence McKinney is a selfconfessed American hypomanic,
who, after reading Gartner’s book, set up a website (www.hypomanics.com)
to attract similarly minded (or, rather, similarly brained)
folk. McKinney is a marketing consultant, a web designer and
an all-round entrepreneur. I e-mail him, to find out how the
site is getting on.
His reply (his first reply, actually) is about a page
long. Paragraph one talks about the website, albeit briefly.
Paragraph two, for some reason, launches into a discussion
of a cream he sells to combat thread veins. “My mother,
incidentally,” it concludes, “was an honours grad from RADA
(Royal Academy of Dramatic Art) and was presented to the
Queen Mum in 1939.”
Then he’s off, mainly about people he met during his
years at Harvard Business School. And, at one point,
Wal-Mart. This is real hypomania. It’s terrifying.
Dr Mark Parkinson, a UK psychologist, has investigated
the thinking styles of many business professionals. “There
are characteristics that you often find in successful
entrepreneurs,” he agrees, “although, I hasten to add, they
aren’t unique to them — a high need to achieve,
perseverance, very high levels of energy, the ability to
keep incredible hours to the exclusion of all other things,
including family and health.”
Parkinson feels that the hypomanic tag may be a bit too
dramatic. “Perhaps they have some sort of bee-in-a-bottle
component,” he says. “That is a safer way of putting it. But
I suppose that it would be an interesting question, whether
a high proportion of successful people have some sort of
mania. You might well find that, when they are stopped, they
can become quite depressed. If you nailed a successful
entrepreneur to his chair, I’d imagine that he would become
rather down. But, then, we all would, wouldn’t we?”
Indeed. Gartner does differentiate hypomania from actual
mania, the wild up-cycle of the manic depressive, but is
keen to stress that it is reasonably similar. “A hypomanic
has a bipolar disorder only if hypomania alternates, at some
point in life, with major depression,” he writes. He does
concede, however, that “hypomanics are at much greater risk
of depression than the average population”.
Gartner also thinks that hypomania is genetic, and
hereditary. There is a link, he writes, between people with
problem manic illness and people with a beneficial,
take-over-the-world hypomania. Citing a variety of sources,
including The American Journal of Psychiatry,
he notes that “relatives of manic patients have high rates
of hypomania” and “have consistently been found to be far
above average in income, occupational achievement, and
creativity ”.
Why does America have so many hypomanics? Because, says
Gartner, it is a nation of immigrants. The very nature of
being an immigrant, he reckons, means that an immigrant
increases the likelihood of being hypomanic. “Do men and
women who risk everything differ temperamentally from those
who stay at home?” he writes. “It would be surprising if
they didn’t.”
It might seem a little neat, all this, but it is grounded
in a degree of empiricism. The countries with the highest
rates of diagnosed, problem manic patients in the world are
all immigrant nations: New Zealand, America and Canada, in
that order. The countries with the lowest are those into
which immigration is unusual: Taiwan and South Korea.
Hypomanics from across the world, Gartner believes, packed
their bags and moved to America. As hypomania — like mania —
is genetic, and hereditary, the America that exists today is
a hypomanic nation.
Gartner identifies a series of notable Americans as
displaying hypomanic tendencies, from Christopher Columbus
(honorary American, I suppose) to the geneticist J. Craig
Venter. All men, interestingly. There is no reason why
females can’t be just as hypomanic as males, but
historically, one presumes, they have been harder to spot.
Gartner suggests that the world, particularly Europe, has
conflicting feelings about America. “They like our cheerful
optimism,” he writes, “even when it seems naive. They
appreciate our confidence, but not when it veers towards
arrogance . . . How an advanced nation can be so ripe with
religious zealots mystifies them. And our messianic streak
scares the hell out of them, especially since the Iraq war.
Everything that the world loves and hates about America is a
manifestation of our hypomanic temperament.”
It certainly adds a new slant to the immigration debate,
doesn’t it? And notably, even in Britain, some of our
highest-profile entrepreneurs are of an immigrant
background. The Body Shop’s founder, Dame Anita Roddick, is
of Italian stock. Though on holiday and not available for a
chat (hardly hypomanic behaviour, that) she did refer me to
a few chapters in her 2000 book, Business As Unusual
(HarperCollins), in which she discusses the entrepreneurial
mind.
“It’s because I’m Italian, and Italians eat a lot of
tomatoes,” she writes. “Maybe there is an enzyme in there
that makes you very perky, because the Italians I know never
seem to go through real downs. My guess is that it’s to do
with tomatoes.”
My guess is that Dame Anita and McKinney might have an
awful lot to talk about. Roddick’s list of entrepreneurial
attributes, actually, is very similar to Gartner’s checklist
for spotting a hypomanic. Roddick writes about vision being
“a type of psychopathy”, and the need for “a touch of
craziness” and “pathological optimism”.
“There is a fine line between an entrepreneur and a crazy
person,” she writes. “An entrepreneur’s isolation is often a
kind of madness.”
Are successful entrepreneurs actually different from the
rest of us, on a genetic level? Are Americans? Personally, I
nurture a fervent hope that they are. It’s like discovering
that those wildly high-achievers, the ones who started life
as nothing and ended up as multimillionaires, like something
out of a Jeffrey Archer novel, were blessed with magic beans
all along. We no longer need to feel bad for not having
achieved what they have achieved; they are a different
animal. And it also, of course, proves the truth of that old
coffee-mug motto: “You don’t have to be crazy to work here,
but it helps.”
ARE YOU HYPOMANIC?
1. You sleep . . .
a) Ten hours a night
b) Four hours a night
c) Occasionally, and grinning
2. You want to make . . .
a) A living
b) A million
c) Countless billions
3. You have plans to change . . .
a) Your clothes
b) Milk cartons
c) The world
4. You speak . . .
a) Occasionally
b) Seven languages
c) Faster than the voiceover at the end of an insurance
advert
5. Somebody blocks your path. You . . .
a) Wait for them to move
b) Ask them to move
c) Shoulder-barge them out the way and hit on an idea for
padded suits made of bubble-wrap
Mostly As: Not even slightly.
Mostly Bs: Driven, yes. Hypomanic, no.
Mostly Cs: You’re the genuine article. But you’ve
probably moved on by now.
