Salvador Dali used to take micro naps. He would sleep in a chair with his hand holding a key above a plate. Right as he drifted off to sleep he would drop the key and the cacophony of key and plate colliding would wake him up. He claimed that these millisecond naps engendered the creative process.

Steve Jobs was a vegan most of his life and even flirted with Fruititarianism (just eating fruit) for weeks at a time.

Warren Buffett eats the same lunch every day: a steak and a cherry coke.

Ben Franklin, D.H. Lawrence, John Cheever, Victor Hugo, and Franz Kafka are all said to have incorporated nudity into their writing routines.

Van Gogh mailed his ear to his girlfriend. (It’s a fine line between eccentric and insane.)

Jack Kornfield said that as people become more spiritually mature they become more eccentric. I get a kick out of eccentric people. They make the world a lot less boring.

The other day I was reading a Marc Andreessen post on luck. Andreessen was reviewing Dr. James Austin’s 1978 (updated in 2003) book Chase, Chance and Creativity which presents a theory that there are four kinds of luck:

Pure chance - this is blind luck and we have no control or influence over it.

Chance by action - the idea here is that action increases your odds of bumping into a novel solution. Think of the scientist running around the lab, knocking one beaker of chemicals into another and creating the next wonder drug. Or my friend who once bought a lottery ticket in order to “give God a chance.”

Chance by preparation - See Louis Pasteur’s famous line about chance favoring the prepared mind. If you develop expertise in a given area you are more likely to stumble upon novel solutions because you have so much context and knowledge.

And finally, something akin to Chance by personality - This is the kind of luck that comes to you and only you because of who you are.

To quote Austin:

Chance IV can be drawn together and fused only by one quixotic rider cantering in on his own homemade hobby horse to intercept the problem at an odd angle.

and again:

Chance IV favors those with distinctive, if not eccentric hobbies, personal lifestyles, and motor behaviors.

To which Andreessen asks:

How uniquely are we developing a personal point of view -- a personal approach -- a personal set of "eccentric hobbies, personal lifestyles, and motor behaviors" that will uniquely prepare us to create? This, in a nutshell, is why I believe that most creative people are better off with more life experience and journeys afield into seemingly unrelated areas, as opposed to more formal domain-specific education -- at least if they want to create.

Since childhood my goal has been to lead an interesting life. But I’ve struggled with what that means. A side of me is very ambitious: I want to make a tangible positive impact on the world. And another side of me is so enamored of the world that I just want to revel in its beauty through travel, art and relationships.

It can be hard to reconcile the two. Is my ambition really looking out for me? Sometimes it feels very zero-sum. If you pursue an ambition doggedly and do not succeed, will you ultimately be happy with that choice? Will ambition place your attention on things which are outside of your control? And what does that do for your happiness?

But if you focus on relationships, adventure, art, spiritual development and travel you don’t have to worry as much about “success", but you might wonder whether you could have done more for the world. Did you give back enough?

I have a casual acquaintance (a good friend of one of my good friends that I have met a few times through the years) who is living a life that fascinates me. He is working as a shepherd in the Basque region of Spain. He is living with a woman who is 7 or 8 years his senior. They recently had a kid together. He enjoys living on the farm and writing and living day to day. It is seriously straight out of Hemingway.

I have another acquaintance who sold his startup for $300 million. He has developed his ability to make things happen. He has the freedom to do it. And he has the rest of his life to devote his considerable skill to chaining the world for the better.

Both are leading wildly different but wildly interesting lives.

Andreessen helps me see that these two idea are not actually in conflict. Experiences inform who you become. And who you become matters: many of the great contributors to the world were made by eccentric people who allowed themselves to see the world differently. Their unique experience and eccentricities made them the right people to make their contributions. And so I need not be afraid of interesting experiences that have no clear objective. Steve Jobs said this really well in his Stanford commencement address. He said, "Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards."

The self-esteem movement of my childhood left a bad taste in my mouth when it comes to things like “developing uniqueness”. And yet developing a unique lens through which you view the world is one of the most important things you can do. Schools could probably do a better job of making this more explicit. One should actively cultivate ones eccentricities and experiences both because they prepare your mind to approach the world in a novel way and because they make the world a hell of a lot more entertaining.

Of course, it’s naive to think that developing eccentricities will necessarily lead to some world changing break through. But that’s okay. Because eccentricities and experiences are worth pursuing in their own right because of the inherent joy they bring.

It pleases me to imagine that the very thing that makes the world so damn fun and interesting is also the very thing that drives it forward.