Most traits that highly successful people have are not inherently beneficial. It takes a good dice roll, both genetic and circumstantial, for their benefits to accrue rather than destroy.

Imagine someone is extremely good at noticing things that no one else sees, better than 99.9999% of others. Perhaps they’d use this skill to identify mispriced assets and become a hedge fund billionaire, or maybe they’d invent new systems of equations to better model the cosmos. But they could also end up a little too good at noticing patterns, perhaps believing their television set is secretly speaking to them via hidden references, or that they’re constantly being followed. Rather than ending up rich or famous, this person may end up in a mental institute or even prison.

Another great example is one of energy levels. Most highly successful people have great baseline energy. But if you have too much energy, you may become manic and believe you’re god, constantly get in fights, and end up out on the streets.

There are a few reasons why humans aren’t smarter than they are, like that we literally cannot make our brains any larger while still allowing for natural birth (see: obstetrical dilemma). But one of the reasons is that if you solely optimize for intelligence and creativity and energy, the results you get aren’t particularly pretty, at least if you start from the human baselines we have today. If we bred humans solely for IQ and energy based on GWAS, all the individual SNPs which appear beneficial would result in an emergent phenomenon unlikely to function should it even be able to survive.

So there are limits to how smart and creative and energetic someone can be while still being functional (savant syndrome is a perfect case study of this). And the higher you push these limits, the higher the chance you get someone who ends up completely insane (bipolar and schizophrenia are more common examples, but more strange and out of distribution issues abound. see also: antagonistic pleiotropy).

So it often ends up that many of the most influential people are on the edge of insanity.

Nikola Tesla was fixated on the number 3. He loved walking around a block three times before entering a building. He required exactly 18 napkins for every meal. He was constantly paranoid of being poisoned and fell in love with pigeons.

Gödel had paranoid delusions of a similar nature and Erdős was a heavy amphetamine user for decades. Beethoven would often pour water over his head while composing, rarely bathed, and constantly muttered to himself. Newton likely had mercury poisoning from too many alchemy experiments and Nash believed aliens were sending him encrypted messages.

Alexander the Great suffered from alcoholism, Caesar had epilepsy, and Genghis Khan had a severe phobia of dogs even after conquering most of the known world.

Of course, this isn’t just a phenomenon of history, but also of the present. You can probably think of at least a few highly successful people yourself which match the above patterns. They come in many forms, distinct and nonfungible across many dimensions.

I use the term “on the edge” to refer those who match the above archetypes.