Today is December 6 and the Navigate the Chaos question to consider is “How often do you demonstrate maverick characteristics?"
People who navigate the chaos often demonstrate one or more of the characteristics of being a maverick. Just because something has never been done before doesn’t mean it cannot be done.
This is the fundamental belief of being a maverick. Mavericks often possess the perfect blend of self-delusions and ego to succeed, whereas others either failed or dare not go.
The latest research on being a maverick comes from Elliroma Gardner, an organizational psychologist at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Gardner coined the term maverickism as a continuum where people fall along a range. Some people are likely to be high in maverickism, others moderate, and some low.
By constructing this scale, Gardner is able to better quantitatively measure maverick tendencies. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Sergey Brin, and Larry Page are often described as mavericks.
With her maverickism scale, however, Gardner’s research indicates that being creative, taking risks, breaking rules, and being goal focused are traits many people actually have but they don’t always have the same scale of results as Jobs and the others, which makes them less well-known.
If one is open to new experiences, relentlessly curious and maintains a fascination with the world and a compulsion to understand how it works, then it is possible to be a maverick on a smaller scale.
As Bill Gates noted "Don't compare yourself to anyone in the world. If you do so, you are insulting yourself."
Mavericks don’t compare themselves to others. How often do you demonstrate maverick characteristics?