This is similar to what the Brown University psychiatrist Arnold Ludwig found when he examined the lives of more than one thousand eminent people—including creatives such as Frida Kahlo, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Howard Hughes—for his book The Price of Greatness. In his sample, creative types, such as artists and writers, were more likely than, say, businesspeople to be considered “odd or peculiar” as children, and more likely than public officials or soldiers to be “different” as adults.

In his 1962 study226 of architects, the psychologist Donald MacKinnon also found that the families of the more creative architects moved around a lot when they were kids, which “appears also to have resulted frequently in some estrangement of the family from its immediate neighborhood,” he wrote. Perhaps expectedly, the creative architects often said they felt alone and isolated as children.

Even though acing the scholarship interview was leagues below painting a masterpiece or designing an iconic building, it still required a fair amount of creativity. Unlike the media visionary I made myself out to be in those interviews, at that point I was actually a bit of a Luddite. I had only ever really worked for a human-rights nonprofit and a tiny newspaper. The most complicated technology I had ever navigated was Microsoft Word. That USC interview was the first time I had used the Internet to help me prepare for a job interview. It was also the first time I tried mimicking the language of a subculture—online journalism, in this case—to seem as though I already belong to it.

I do not know why I reacted to my rejection with a burst of creative insight, rather than by crawling further into my hole. Perhaps, at that time, I had simply run out of a hole to crawl in. In those months, I felt like I had washed up on the edge of the world. I was stranded, so I had to chart my own course.

Creativity is defined scientifically as a process that results in a “new and useful” product. It doesn’t have to be art—a new assembly-line procedure can be as creative as a painting. And its usefulness doesn’t have to be physical—joy can be as useful as productivity. Throughout my interviews with the individuals in this book, creativity seemed to be one of the more common advantages uniqueness conferred, whether by pivoting the person to a new perspective, or by forcing her to invent life-hacks. Next, we’ll delve into some of the other ways difference can promote creativity.