Case Studies
“It’s good to learn from your mistakes. It’s better to learn from other people’s mistakes.”
- Warren Buffett
Across 30+ brilliant thinkers who worked through diverse disabling physical and/or mental illnesses across space and time, we’ve identified key patterns between those who lived and produced sustainably, versus those who were destroyed by the process. Out of respect for their memory, we’ve named of the people included in our analysis at the end of the article:
What Never Fails
- Get credit for your work so that you can enjoy it while you’re alive
- Seek out treatments
- Make sure they’re effective, rather than harmful
- Prioritize investing resources in accessing treatments that help as consistently as possible
- Build and maintain support systems intentionally
- Coordinate them whenever possible
- Don’t put all your eggs (supports) in one basket
- Your level of productivity is not inversely related to the sustainability of your lifestyle
- What matters more is how you design your life and the amount of agency you have over it, so make your environment work for you
Important: The biggest factor in your success or satisfaction probably will not be determined by your circumstances, the severity of your diagnosis, or in some cases even access to a diagnosis. What matters most are the choices that you make with what you have over a lifetime and your persistence to keep trying.
Of all the talented individuals we explored, the most redundant factors (in over 10% of those we researched) that separated whose lives were destroyed by illness, versus those who were able to produce sustainably was not the severity of the illness but generally the establishment of something that over a lifetime represented a coordinated and durable support infrastructure that generally stayed in tact, plus a working treatment that was generally kept in place continuously.
Different Levels of Control
- Ideal Case: Some were blessed with good timing (worst symptoms came after their career took off), found strong support systems, elite institutional backing, wealth, and the tendency to make decisions that help, even if some things were still hard or they didn’t necessarily “fit” into society.
- Middle Case: Others made mistakes or had bad luck but managed to pull through and build something meaningful and sustainable by building with what they had and not giving up.
- To Avoid: Finally, some died because their support fragmented, they actively rejected (or avoided) opportunities to make better decisions, lost access to a treatment that worked, or their work was only recognized after their death.
What Never Works (Causes Collapse or Death)
- Staying in abusive and dangerous romantic relationships
- Loss of agency, such as coercive rest in the case of women for example, has typically been isolating, infantilizing, and maddening if not also traumatic.
- At the same time, resisting opportunities to make better decisions or avoiding confrontation with what isn’t working always makes things worse.
- Treating rest as dangerous, but so is viewing productivity as incompatible with health management.
Who
- Annie Jump Cannon
- Marie & Pierre Curie Charles Darwin Emily Dickinson
- Joan Didion
- Janet Paterson Frame
- Carrie Frances Fisher
- Stephen John Fry
- Charlotte Perkins Gilman (née Perkins; also Charlotte Perkins Stetson by first marriage) Kurt Gödel
- Temple Grandin
- Antonio Gramsci
- Stephen Hawking Ernest Hemingway
- Alice James
- Kay Redfield Jamison
- Frida Kahlo
- Henrietta Swan Leavitt
- Audre Lorde
- Wilma Pearl Mankiller
- Harriet Martineau
- Henri-Émile-Benoît Matisse
- Christine Miserandino
- John Nash
- Florence Nightingale
- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
- Mary Flannery O’Connor
- Sylvia Plath Edgar Allan Poe
- Marcel Proust
- Oliver Wolf Sacks
- Elyn R. Saks
- Susan Sontag (née Rosenblatt)
- William Clark Styron Jr. Nikola Tesla
- Theo (Theodorus) van Gogh
- Vincent van Gogh
- David Foster Wallace
- Ludwig van Beethoven
- Virginia Woolf (née Stephen)