How has chutzpah helped you?

Judith Regan : When you're at the edge of the pool and you jump, your life is filled with many rewards, but you pay the price as well.

Don't proceed with caution, not when it comes to love, not when it comes to commerce. You don't get to see the peaks and valleys unless you live life to the fullest. ... I make multi-million dollar gambles every week. If you don't, you're going to lose. If you do, you might win.

Do you get bored without controversy?

At boarding school, Salma Hayek was a practical joker of sorts, a trickster, which is to say she was not asked to come back when the nuns discovered she'd hired a maid for her room.

She's still sheepish about that. "I am a Virgo, and Virgos are supposed to be organized, but I am not an organized Virgo," she laments.

When she was fourteen, her parents sent her to Paris for private French classes, but, proving herself to be a great actress, she somehow convinced her parents that her teacher had died of a heart attack.

She was moved to another school, a little more lax ("If you didn't go, you didn't go") and a little more convenient to the coast of the south of France ("We were on the beach all the time").

Before starting classes she hitchhiked from Greece to France, solo...

"I thought to myself, Look, as long as I don't get into trouble. As long as I don't get drunk, and I come back a virgin, and I come back alive. ... It was very dangerous. I was insane to do that, but I wouldn't trade it for the world. It was a good experience."

What was also insane was the amount of clothes she bought for her trip: she backpacked with suitcases.

> from article "Free Spirit" by Robert Sullivan, Vogue, June 2005
>photo at right as Frida Kahlo in Frida (2002, Miramax Films) [Hayek was also a producer]

Americans are the world’s largest contemporary collection of migrants, and we are particularly excited by competition and risk, of any sort.

We hate to let opportunity pass us by and in that aggressive pursuit we now dominate the world.

But the technologies that helped create the 1990s bubble have also created a new world of “affluence” -- an overload of everything from food to information that is now perpetuated by what we have come to accept as the “necessity” for commercial growth.

There is growing evidence that this new demand driven environment is making us sick, in mind and body. For the reward driven creatures that we are -- and particularly is the migrant so driven -- our new habitat is self-reinforcing and addictive. ...

The new environment that we have created in America (which in the book I have dubbed The Fast New World) is compelling, but also unique in human experience.

And most important, it is potentially toxic for the individual and for our nation. ... Affluence and a culture of excessive individual reward -- unless we understand and modulate it -- have the potential to slowly destroy the vital infrastructure that makes for a stable social order and for human happiness.

Successful entrepreneurs are not just braggarts. They are highly creative people who quickly generate a tremendous number of ideas -- some clever, others ridiculous.

Their “flight of ideas,” jumping from topic to topic in a rapid energized way, is a sign of hypomania. ...

I interviewed a small sample of ten Internet CEOs. After I read them each a list of hypomanic traits that I had synthesized from the psychiatric literature,

I asked them if they agreed that these traits are typical of an entrepreneur:

He is filled with energy... flooded with ideas... driven, restless, and unable to keep still... often works on little sleep... feels brilliant, special, chosen, perhaps even destined to change the world... can be euphoric...

becomes easily irritated by minor obstacles... is a risk taker... overspends in both his business and personal life... acts out sexually... sometimes acts impulsively, with poor judgment, in ways that can have painful consequences...

John D. Gartner, Ph.D.

> photo, text from book site hypomanicedge.com

> quotes from his book The Hypomanic Edge : The Link Between (A Little) Craziness and (A Lot of) Success in America

> also see his article The Hypomanic Edge

Mania is a severe illness... Manic episodes almost always end in hospitalization. People who are highly energized, and also in most cases psychotic, do bizarre things that are dangerous, frightening, and disruptive.

They urgently require external control for everyone’s safety, especially their own. Most people who have experienced a manic episode remember it as a nightmare.

By contrast, hypomania is not, in and of itself, an illness. It is a temperament characterized by an elevated mood state that feels “highly intoxicating, powerful, productive and desirable” to the hypomanic, according to Frederick K. Goodwin and Kay Redfield Jamison, authors of the definitive nine-hundred-page Manic-Depressive Illness.

Most hypomanics describe it as their happiest and healthiest state; they feel creative, energetic, and alive. A hypomanic only has a bipolar disorder if hypomania alternates, at some point in life, with major depression.

This pattern, first identified only in 1976, is called bipolar disorder type II to distinguish it from bipolar disorder type I, the classic manic-depressive illness, which has been well known since the time of the ancient Greeks.

If a hypomanic seeks outpatient treatment it is usually for depression, and he will define recovery as a return to his old energetic self. Not all hypomanics cycle down into depression. What goes up can stay up. ...

> also see page : bipolar disorder.......

> from book The Hypomanic Edge : The Link Between
(A Little) Craziness and (A Lot of) Success in America -
by John D. Gartner, Ph.D.

> photo: Brad Pitt in film "12 Monkeys"