Powers of Two: Finding the Essence of Innovation in Creative Pairs

Gottman also emphasizes that conflict needs to be distinguished from contempt. The former can be like rain on a house—no threat to the structure and good for the gardens.

The dyad is also the most fluid and flexible of relationships. Two people can basically make their own society on the go. When even one more person is added to the mix, the situation becomes more stable, but this stability may stifle creativity, as roles and power positions harden. Three legs make a table stand in place. Two legs are made for walki

One study for the National Bureau of Economic Research looked at the two reasons venture capitalists choose partners: for their ability or for their affinity, such as a shared ethnic background or having worked at the same firm. Similarities of ability enhanced performance, but similarities of affinity “dramatically reduces the probability of inves

That’s one of the paradoxes of the writing life, that the way to originality is through imitation.”

But there’s a big difference in quality, and usually a major gap in time, between the excitement of first contact and the entwinement of mature work. It’s not so unusual for two people to come together, excite each other—maybe even knock each other sideways. But exceptional pairs have more than moments of electricity. They come to jointly occupy a

“Creative individuals alternate order and disorder, simplicity and complexity, sanity and craziness in an ongoing process.”

“You mean to say,” I asked, “that people don’t really want out of the relationship itself, they just want out of the dynamic?” “That’s right,” she said. “They don’t want to go away from the person, necessarily. They want away from the feeling.”

In fact, some clusters of society can be devilishly hard to penetrate. One key to fluid movement is what the psychologist Karen Fingerman calls “consequential strangers.” These are people outside your inner circle who have enough interest in you to make connections but enough distance from you to be exposed to interesting people in other spheres.

Yet, just as legacy cultures can grow stodgy, a culture of newbies can innovate itself right into ridiculousness. The dot-com boom of the late 1990s was a classic example.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, another author nurtured by Maxwell Perkins, once declared that the test of a first-rate intelligence was the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind without cracking up.