Have you ever wondered where most Nobel Laureates are from? If so, the Nobel organization website helpfully provides both their birthplaces and academic affiliations at the time of their awards. If you start browsing, you may notice a pattern. The world’s most revered scientists are an incredibly mobile bunch.
Most of us have heard the story of Polish born Marie Curie’s move to France or Einstein fleeing Europe for the United States. But they are only the most famous of the many, many Nobel laureates who moved from country to country and institution to institution. One analysis of 21st-century Nobel winners showed a full 40 percent of laureates who did their prizewinning work in the U.S. were born abroad.
Does this just reflect that the best and the brightest can work where they please? Or do the mobile lives of Nobel laureates have anything to teach the rest of us about how to be more creative and successful?
A new study into these questions and came to a fascinating conclusion: if you want to come up with more and better ideas, you should probably move more.
More moves leads to quicker success
Ohio State University labor economist Bruce Weinberg has spent much of his career studying innovation. Where do important ideas come from? How do they spread? And how can we encourage more of them? If these are your questions, Nobel laureates are an excellent group to study.
And not just because they’re the source of some of the most impactful ideas. They’re also famous. Which means it’s possible to dig up detailed information on their lives.
Which is just what Weinberg and his colleagues, John Ham, a professor of economics at New York University in Abu Dhabi, and Brian Quistorff of the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis did for a recent study published in the journal International Economic Review.
Reconstructing the biographies of Nobel laureates in chemistry, medicine and physics from 1901 to 2003 yielded an interesting pattern. The more these scientists moved from place to place, the earlier they came up with the groundbreaking ideas that won them the Nobel.
If, for instance, a scientist changed location every two years, they started their Nobel-worthy work an average of two years earlier. Time and place were irrelevant. The pattern held whether they were a chemist in 1916 or a medical doctor in 2001.
“For someone who might have taken ten years to begin their prizewinning research if they stayed in one place, moving every two years could reduce that time by nearly a quarter. That is substantially accelerating their innovations,” Weinberg commented.
Why new places lead to new ideas
As anyone who has ever changed jobs can tell you, settling into a new role in a new place is difficult and time-consuming. At first your productivity suffers. So why did moving around make Nobel laureates more successful, more quickly?
The researchers believe switching locations does have costs. But it also comes with a huge compensatory benefit. In each new location scientists are exposed to new people and new ideas that can advance and inspire their work.
“Really interesting work happens when people combine ideas in novel ways,” Weinberg explained on the Curious by Nature podcast. If a young scientist moves from Boston to New York or London, say, “they’re going to be exposed to a different set of ideas than the ones they already have.”
That means they “can mix them up in a novel way relative to other people who hadn’t just made that transition.”
Does this work for nongeniuses too?
Which is fascinating, but what does it have to do with us nongeniuses who aren’t regularly being invited to CERN for research collaborations? Is it likely these findings apply beyond the rarified world of Nobel Laureates?
Weinberg and his collaborators believe they do (more on exactly how later). Plus, theirs is not the only research suggesting that physically moving can have a much bigger effect on our life trajectories than we think.
National Geographic journalist Dan Buettner studied the world’s happiest places for 15 years for his book The Blue Zones of Happiness. His conclusion: “There’s no other intervention anybody can tell me about that has that dependable and lasting impact on happiness than your geography.”
Similarly, where a child grows up has a surprisingly large impact on how their life turns out. When data scientist and author Seth Stephens-Davidowitz analyzed research on the biggest factors influencing kids’ life outcomes, he found, “the best cities can increase a child’s future income by about 12 percent.”
That’s not just because parents in some neighborhoods have more resources than in others. The same family tends to have substantially different outcomes in different places. “I have estimated that some 25 percent–and possibly more–of the overall effects of a parent are driven by where that parent raises their child,” he reports in the Atlantic.
Can’t move? Nobel laureates can still teach you a lesson.
Where you live matters an incredible amount for how your life turns out no matter who you are.
But that being said, Weinberg acknowledges, “most people just aren’t going to move, uproot their family and [say] ‘honey, pack up the boxes and pack up the kids and let’s go somewhere completely new.’”
But you can still use his study of Nobel laureates to nudge you towards new ideas and greater success. Moving around accelerates innovation because it exposes people to fresh ideas and contacts. “Exposing yourself to novel combinations of ideas, novel sets of ideas, ideas that other people aren’t getting exposed to is really the key,” Weinberg underlines.
Moving is one way to do that. But there are alternative ways to bring fresh inspiration into your life:
“Reading something that you wouldn’t ordinarily read, talking to a different set of people than you would ordinarily talk to, going to see a lecture or a movie or a piece of art that you wouldn’t necessarily expose yourself to is a way of seeing things and learning things that you wouldn’t naturally have come across.”
Be like Nobel laureates: seek novelty
University of Chicago economist Stephen Levitt once set up an unusual experiment. He solicited people on the internet who were struggling with a decision to let him decide with a random coin toss.
Surprisingly, 20,000 people agreed to leave a big life decision to chance. When Levitt followed up to see how things turned out, he discovered people were much happier when the coin flip had told them to do something new — to quit that job, start that venture, or get that tattoo.
“I believe that people are too cautious when it comes to making a change,” Levitt concluded.
Which is the practical takeaway of this new study of Nobel laureates too. If your life is such that a new adventure in a new place is just a U-haul drive away. Then by all means, start packing. The lives of celebrated scientists suggest you will be more creative and successful if you move more.
But if you have kids in school, a mortgage to pay, or a business to think of and can’t go to a new place, you can still up your chances of having breakthrough ideas. Just add more new people and new ideas to your life. That will almost certainly increase your odds of success no matter who you are or what you’re aiming for.
The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.
Jessica Stillman
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