We had walked to the tip of the pier, where a multicolored Ferris wheel loomed over the crashing waves below. I suggested we ride it, thinking it might be my only chance to do so.

As we waited in line, my little silver flip-phone rang.

“Olga,” said the voice on the other end, “congratulations, we’d like to offer you a full scholarship to USC.”

Kelly and I leapt up and down, screaming, this time, with joy.

I’ll never know if the digital gobbledygook I spewed in those meetings is really what got me the scholarship. But I would later come to understand how my brain snapped itself out of its funk and powered me through my interviews.

In a study223 a few years ago, researchers found that being rejected or feeling uncertain, much like I had been in the lead-up to the L.A. trip, can actually motivate people to conjure creative solutions. Sharon Kim, a business professor at Johns Hopkins, told me she had always noticed that some people credit their creative successes to being loners or rebels. She was skeptical that those two qualities actually correlated, so she decided to test the theory by inviting some volunteers to her lab to solve word problems. Before they began working, Kim and her colleagues “rejected” some of the study subjects by telling them they weren’t picked to work as part of “the group.” (There was no group, of course—Kim and her team just wanted to make them feel left out.) Another, control, group of participants weren’t snubbed in the same way. Kim then had all the participants perform a pair of exercises on paper. First, they were asked to determine what unites a group of unrelated words (“fish, mine, and rush”—the answer is gold). Then, they were told to draw an alien from a planet very unlike our own.

The rejects, it turned out, were better at solving both types of problems. The non-rejected participants drew standard, cartoonish-looking Martians. But the aliens drawn by the rejected participants looked radically different from humans—they had, for example, all of their appendages sticking out of one side of their bodies.

So there was a relationship between rejection and creativity. But this advantage was only seen among the participants who considered themselves unique—who had an “independent self-concept.” Those who felt like they already weren’t part of any particular group were more creative when they were rejected by an arbitrary collective. There appears to be something about being a weirdo that uncorks your mind and allows new ideas to flow.