I always remember back in my corporate days that the people I admired the most for their creativity were the "geeks" - often in faded jeans, t-shirts and their bicycle leaning against the wall in their office. They were not the folks in fancy business attire.
Sure this is a generalization but I recall the feeling well, so when I came across this passage in a 1993 book Microcosm by George Gilder it resonated soundly with me - I love it :-)
The United States did not enter the microcosm through the portals of the Ivy League, with Brooks Brothers suits, gentleman Cs, and warbling society wives. Few people who think they are already in can summon the energies to break in.
From immigrants and outcasts, street toughs and science wonks, nerds and boffins, the bearded and the beer-bellied, the tacky and the upright, and sometimes weird, the born again and born yesterday, with Adam's apples bobbing, psyches throbbing, and acne galore, the fraternity of the pizza breakfast, the Ferrari dream, the silicon truth, the midnight modem, and the seventy-hour week,
from dirt farms and redneck shanties, trailer parks and Levittowns, in a rainbow parade of all colors and wavelengths, of the hyperneat and the sty high, the crewcut and khaki, the ponytailed and punk, accented
from Britain and Madras, from Israel and Malaya, from Paris and Parris Island, from Iowa and Havana, from Brooklyn and Boise and Belgrade and Vienna and Vietnam, from the coarse fanaticism and desperation, ambition and hunger, genius and sweat of the outsider, the downtrodden, the banished, and the bullied
come most of the progress in the world and in Silicon Valley.
Credit: George Gilder, Microcosm
I think it is even truer today than 30 years ago!
