CHAPTER 10

FIGHTING THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE NORMAL

Being a unicorn is difficult, complex, and tiring. Being different isn’t easy. Not fitting into the norm isn’t easy. Being in suspension, in evolution, in an obsessive tension with something that is always better isn’t easy. Constantly questioning yourself—getting out of your daily comfort zone, continuously evolving—isn’t easy.

Over the pages that follow, I want to recount to you some fragments of this complexity, as I’ve lived it, in my attempt—intimate and private—to grow into a unicorn and to then become the best unicorn I could imagine. I want to share this struggle with you, this multidimensional tension, and the way that I’ve tried to resolve it. I’ll do so through stories, memories, and anecdotes, taken straight from the deep pockets of my personal baggage, from my childhood to the present day.

Living in Suspension: The Difficulty of Being a Unicorn

Some years back, my parents knew someone whom I only vaguely recall. His name was Roberto, and he was a mystic and a preacher. Sometimes he came to our house, and it was always interesting listening to him chat with my mom and dad. There was something mysterious, intangible, and fascinating about that man with his long white beard and abundance of words. One evening we—my brother, my mom, my dad, Roberto, and I—were all at the dinner table. And Roberto asked a question: “What do you think is the farthest distance in the universe? The greatest distance that you can possible imagine?” Roberto gave us a moment to think. You could feel the deafening silence in the room as our brains whirled around, looking for the right answer, weighing up the potential responses.

In reality, Roberto didn’t want a reply; it was simply a rhetorical question. He was creating a state of suspense, an emptiness in atmosphere and time that he would soon close with his message. But then I decided to dive into the void, and I threw out a reply: “It’s the distance between the heart and the mind,” I said. Roberto looked at me with astonished eyes, smiled and then laughed, and said, “Yes, that’s quite right!” He then ran a hand through my hair and ruffled my locks to congratulate me. Roberto’s wonder quickly spread across my parents’ faces as well, but in them it soon transformed into pride. I was sixteen, and that moment remained forever impressed on my heart.

I remember that moment, first, because I had felt the pure and genuine happiness of a young man who had managed to give a good answer in front of his parents, the kind of reply “grown-ups” gave, legitimated by an expert from outside our family unit. It was one of the very first “grown-up” replies by a teenager who was shifting from adolescence to maturity. The response was a metaphorical first step into the world of adults, made in view of my mom and dad. Our first true physical steps aren’t something we can recall—we are too small—but that first cultural step, in a family for whom culture was as important as walking, had the same magical flavor for me.

The second reason that moment became memorable to me is also the reason I’m telling you this story. I had begun to adventure into the world of philosophy at my high school in Varese, and I was immediately struck by the unavoidable dichotomy that I had found in the discourses and thoughts of philosophers, intrigued and fascinated by that eternal tension between heart and mind that had marked the great flow of humanity’s thought for millennia. Roberto’s question that evening, in that small kitchen in the Bustecche neighborhood, was touching an intimate yet universal tension generated by the contrast, through encounters and conflicts, between science and religion, between rationality and romanticism, between instinct and reason, between passion and process: a tension that I have carried in my soul throughout my entire life, to every corner of the planet, navigating along the subtle boundary that separates those two different dimensions.

I have been attracted in a visceral way by the seduction of emotions, creativity, and intuition, celebrating their virtue and potential, pushing them to the limits in my life experiences, experimenting, building, destroying, in the name of the most extreme myth of love, in all its aspects. But I have always appreciated, respected, and embraced the potential of rationality, of the intellect, of reflection and reason as safety nets, as background, as fields of action, as cultural foundations, as navigational devices. Often with passion, sometimes through suffering, I have lived suspended between these two dimensions throughout my life, reconciling them, mixing them, amalgamating them, feeling their inner tension and learning to tame it, to channel it, to give it meaning. Rereading the long list of unicorns’ gifts and virtues, you will find a common thread: everything moves within this tension, which unicorns try to resolve through the demiurgic act of innovation.

Innovation is precisely this: knowing how to grasp people’s rationality and emotions, their needs and desires; how to manage a pathway comprising intuition and reason, brilliance and processes; and, finally, how to imagine and produce solutions that respond to these dreams and needs, in a perfect balance between form and function, a perfect synthesis between heart and mind.

The innovators live suspended between these two zones. They understand both, they love both, they draw on both—with intelligence and with passion. They find their ideal dimension and optimal equilibrium within that tension. It is the same tension that has animated the cultural debate of all humanity since the dawn of civilization, the tension that has torn apart consciences, has struck history itself, sometimes has inspired progress and at others has clipped its wings. Unicorns are the people who manage this dichotomy better than others do and who reconcile it on a daily basis, through their own thoughts, decisions, and actions. In a unicorn, this tension is resolved with harmony.

Finding that balance is far from simple, though. One of the main reasons is that we are dealing with an equilibrium that is completely dynamic and very different from the static nature that is imposed upon us by the communities we’re living in. Unicorns are usually very different from what our society expects and from what it defines as normal. They live on the edges of distinct worlds, moving between one and another, or simply inhabiting the middle worlds—worlds that are sometimes hybrid, sometimes multicultural, sometimes unexpected, sometimes unexplored. And if, over the course of unicorns’ lives, this abnormality has the potential to become a formidable competitive advantage, distinguishing them from the norm and raising them up to the point of being accepted and celebrated once they have reached maturity, nevertheless, in the process of personal growth, this diversity can also be a source of suffering. It can be punitive, it can risk alienating unicorns, suffocating them, choking them. Society tries to tame this kind of diversity; it tries to normalize it, to flatten it out. And thus, if unicorns don’t have the strength to protect this diversity, the ingenuity to impose it, or the awareness to resist, then their gifts risk being tamed, normalized, and flattened out by the system that surrounds them. Over the course of my life, I have experienced this myself, in different ways.

I grew up in northern Italy to parents originally from Rome, a city where the southern part of the country begins. My mom was born there in May 1946; my father was born during World War II, three years earlier, in the small town of Altopascio, near Lucca, in the Tuscan countryside. But his family moved back to Rome soon afterward, and that’s where he was raised. As a child, my north Italian accent was broken up here and there by fragments of idioms and accents from Rome. Instead of “coltello” (knife), I said “cortello”; for me, a small bread roll was a “rosetta” and not a “michetta,” as they would call it in Varese. I pronounced the letter “s” like a “z,” and my vowels had a distinctly Roman color to them, all very strange and amusing for northerners. When I met my school friends’ grandparents, I didn’t understand them; they spoke a local dialect that was almost incomprehensible to me, which seemed to me to be closer to French than to my own language. I remember as though it was yesterday the day when my uncle Renzo, my aunt’s Milanese husband, asked me during a Christmas lunch whether I felt northern. I told him, to his great surprise, that no, I didn’t feel I was either from the north or from the south: I was in the middle. Certainly I wasn’t from the south, nor from Rome. Rome isn’t really the south either: Rome is Rome, just as New York is New York. That I wasn’t from the south was undeniable. When we went to the seaside in July for our summer vacations, to a small town on the coast of Lazio, Tor San Lorenzo, my northern accent was unmistakable and out of place in the ocean of Roman sounds we were surrounded by, reminding me and the world around me that, despite everything, social imprinting and your cultural context beat your DNA in many ways.

This beginning, straddling different cultures without really belonging to one or the other, surely marked my early years, my way of thinking, giving me an important model for the rest of my existence. I was completely at my ease suspended between these cultures; I didn’t suffer from a lack of belonging. Or better still, I probably felt that I belonged to something hybrid, something that was mine alone and no one else’s.

Perhaps due to this cultural diversity, perhaps because of my family education, or maybe due to my genetic code—or a cocktail of all of these things together and much more besides—since I was very young, I have often found myself having to deal with what we would call today my different point of view about the world, ranging from the smallest situations up to important decisions. There was normality, and then there was my own point of view. Sometimes it was aligned to that normality, and sometimes it was not. But it was mine, only mine, always mine. It wasn’t planned or strategic; I didn’t look for it, brag about it, or study it: it just happened. It was just like that. Normality was what a whole series of people—teachers, neighbors, friends, the local priests, the entire community, society as a whole—expected of me and what they expected of everyone. And then there was my own way of seeing things, which was often quite different, always supported and sustained by my parents, sometimes consciously, at other times less so.

This mindset would manifest itself in many different ways, many times in the smallest details. When I was very young, for example, I began to hold my pencil in a fashion that was “different” from what was considered normal, grasping it between my middle and ring fingers, instead of between the index and middle fingers. I began to use the pencil this way, and that’s how I managed to draw well. Over the years, my inclination for drawing began to be recognized by people around me, and at school I received exceptional grades in art class. I took part in drawing competitions, and sometimes I won them. I loved experimenting with new materials, from graphite to watercolors, chalk to oil paints. I played with pyrography (the art of decorating wood with burn marks by applying a hot metal nib), first mimicking what my dad was doing and then independently trying the technique out on new surfaces, so that I could be the innovator of the family, using fabrics and leather, belts and jackets. I drew because I enjoyed it and because it came naturally to me. Who knows whether I enjoyed myself because I was good at drawing or whether I was good at drawing because I enjoyed myself? Probably the two things are completely interconnected. Either way, I did everything with a pencil, a pen, or a felt tip held in my hand “incorrectly,” according to others.

I was unaware that this way of holding my pencil or pen was “abnormal” until one day that I recall very clearly, with the clarity of an emotional shock that burns into your heart when you are young. That day my mom came home frustrated and annoyed after a meeting with the schoolteacher. During the meeting, the teacher had complained to my mom about the fact that she had never corrected how I held my pencil when I was younger. It was clear that I was a child who hadn’t been brought up well by my parents. And how could it be otherwise, from the standpoint of normality? My mom, who had dedicated her life to her children, who had sacrificed everything for us—including her own job—and who had celebrated the virtue of education, culture, and knowledge her whole existence, was being criticized for not having educated me.

Who Decides What’s “Normal”?

In truth, what my mom had done was simply not to educate her child according to a series of norms that society wanted to impose on her. She hadn’t corrected how I held my pencil. My mom, a sensitive and passionate person like myself, felt offended and attacked. Her reaction in that moment, calm and dignified but clearly wounded, remained impressed on my green mind and in my childhood heart. What does “normal” mean? What is the “normal” way of holding a pencil? Who decided that one way is normal, and why should it be the same for everyone? Was the norm invented to produce excellence or simply to flatten everything out in the name of efficiency and stability?

And what happens if that normal produces mediocrity instead? If by holding the pencil in a different way I was able to produce excellent work, with naturalness and without effort, then why should that way of holding the pencil be considered an error?

Back then, I didn’t realize the impact that these gut reactions would have throughout my life, but I understand today more than ever that they were early signs of a way of interpreting the world that was entirely mine: yet again suspended between, on one side, normality—which in many ways I supported and which was part of my desire for integration and belonging—and, on the other, the originality of my own point of view, which was part of an opposing instinct.

The real magic—for which I can thank God alone—is that as a child I was, for the most part, ignorant of the fact that my perspective, so often different and anomalous, might be unique: I simply had that way of thinking, and it seemed to be the most natural thing in the world. This meant that I didn’t try to change it, vainly searching for some form of acceptance and integration. And above all, this ignorance allowed me to be original in a peaceful way. “Happiness consists in the ignorance of the truth,” wrote the poet Giacomo Leopardi.⁹ I was certainly ignorant of how different some of my behaviors and opinions were, and in that phase of my life this was of huge assistance to me. My domestic environment, where that originality of thought was stimulated, protected, and celebrated as if it were the most natural mindset in the world, was probably the source of my inner peace, along with a blessed natural unawareness. Only a couple of decades later, I began to develop a new awareness about the meaning of that diversity, but with this new consciousness I also developed the wisdom to selectively ignore irrelevant social pressures, to conserve yet again some of my existential calm.

I wore my watch on my right wrist instead of on the left. At first, I did so simply because I found it comfortable. But later, it became something that contributed to defining me. I was the only one who wore a watch in this “not normal” way. And yet, I also looked for fashionable shoes or a sweatshirt produced by a trending brand, because while I loved distinguishing myself, I also felt the common desire to be integrated into the group, the community, the society in which we live.

I didn’t frequent the local church in my neighborhood, the Bustecche, and I used to travel miles on my bicycle every day to reach the church in a different area, at Bizzozero. I had to obtain special license from the parish priest to do so. I got on better with the boys in that neighborhood, and that environment inspired me. I was the only child attending that church, out of hundreds, who didn’t live in the neighborhood. Yet again I was caught in suspension, this time between neighborhoods. I was different because I came from “outside,” and at the same time I tried to make myself belong to this new context. I always maintained this aspect of originality. I was both Bustecche and Bizzozero. And at the same time, I didn’t completely belong to either one place or the other.

Abnormality was, quite simply, often my normality. It was what I desired, and I wasn’t afraid of any obstacles in my way. Ever since, I have followed my dreams, supporting my desires without thinking twice, like a child set free in a field of grass, living in the naive conviction that anything is possible. If that was what I wanted, that was what I’d do. The passing years and the facts of life have moderated this belief intellectually, but emotionally that flame is still alight within me, and it will never be extinguished. A good dose of unawareness and naivete is necessary to dream and then to make those dreams come true.

I could keep going with many other anecdotes, but the point would always be the same: since my childhood I’ve always been comfortable in a state of becoming, floating between different worlds, between the normal and the different, between belonging and uniqueness, between integration and originality, bringing together choices and aspects of my life that have defined and distinguished me in a unique way, along with ones that instead have helped me to become part of the social fabric.

That diversity has often given life and space to expressions of marginalization and discrimination, because people—all of society—often fear whatever is different from them, whatever isn’t the norm, and tend to reject diversity. How many times have I been mocked, set aside, or left out, because of my diversity? I have experienced this from the beginning of my life, starting, for example, with the fact that when I was a child, people from the south were not loved in the north of Italy. Racism against southerners, who were labeled with discriminatory words such as a terrone (a classist and pejorative neologism that etymologically means “somebody working the land”), was the norm. Faced with these difficulties, I have reacted in different and even polarized ways. On the one hand, I have drawn on a set of practices and tools to deal with the contrast, to build bridges with the world I live in, while on the other hand I have often found myself at ease in that difference, enjoying my diversity and everything that made me unique and even special. I have searched for diversity; I wanted it.

I have obviously never suffered from the extreme persecution that those in some communities live through because of the color of their skin, their country of origin, their sexual orientation, their religious or political preferences, their different physical abilities. I didn’t fear for my life at every step and every corner. Who knows how I would have reacted if I had belonged to any of those communities? I don’t think those situations are really imaginable for someone who has not lived them in the first person, and surely they are not situations I can compare to my own. But my small diversities—geographical, cultural, and intellectual—have nevertheless been a source for attacks and aggressions originating from the same cultural matrix: ignorance and fear.

Transforming Diversity into a Competitive Advantage

In order to manage these situations better, I have always tried to work on my strong traits, transforming points of uniqueness into potential assets, showing how my diversity could in truth become a unique advantage to the community I was living in—and thus, in the end, in one way or another, could become a unique advantage to myself as well. My childhood and my adolescence were my training ground, which helped me to think in limbo, suspended between different, often conflicting worlds, and to accept others’ diversity, to celebrate my own, to investigate everything that might be considered abnormal with a certain honesty—having an original and unique point of view—and then integrating this into the community through an open, authentic, and transparent dialogue. Over the years, with an ever greater dose of awareness, I have taken this mental attitude into the world of business as well.

Today, in my midforties, I realize more than ever before that this proclivity for being suspended between different dimensions has been one of the greatest drives in my professional life. And one of the main reasons for the particular advantage of this approach to life lies probably in the scarcity of this mindset in the modern world. We live in a society that the Argentinean psychoanalyst Miguel Benasayag has defined as the “dictatorship of the normal,” a reality where “everyone wants to be normal,” where “there is no longer a creative, joyous marginality.”¹⁰ From Benasayag’s enlightened point of view—and my own as well—“the problem is the normal people, we need to free them. To be normal means being passive, to function as little as possible.” In his Elogio del conflitto (“In Praise of Conflict”), he writes that “the incredible armada of psychologists” want to transform “multiplicity into unity,” while for the psychoanalysts, conflict “is a consubstantial dimension of human subjectivity.”¹¹

The psychiatrist Giancarlo Dimaggio, in an interview for the Italian magazine Sette, associates Benasayag’s theories with the words of the Mad Hatter, in the 2010 Disney adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, when he says to Alice: “You used to be much more muchier, you have lost your muchness.”¹² There is so much truth in that fabulous neologism. We all need to be more “muchier,” accepting our own personal “muchness” without anxiety, as a form of growth, discovery, and evolution, and appreciating the collective “muchness” as a form of social wealth, communitarian potential, and group inspiration. This “muchness” is none other than what we today call “diversity.”

The first twenty-five years of my life, before I entered the professional world, gave me fundamental lessons and experiences and provided me with the intellectual and emotional tools necessary for later navigating the infinite complexity of that professional world in a more natural way. Looking back, I can see an important thread running through everything that I experienced in those years and up to today. This subtle thread that connects everything is the concept of suspension.

I experienced this suspension between normality and originality, between cultures, between approaches, geographies, societies—always in a state of becoming, always in tension, always traveling, attracted by the unknown, by discovery off the beaten track. In these unexplored territories, I could find myself, design my identity, express my point of view about the world, and form my own unique reality. I have been suspended between Varese and Rome, between Italy and America, between design and business, between analysis and risk, between integration and diversity, between normal and abnormal, between creativity and rationality, between today and tomorrow. With my pencil held in the wrong way and my watch on the wrong wrist, with my Roman accent in the north of Italy and my bucolic spirit enchanted by the city lights, I have navigated the world and my life, sometimes suspended by chance, other times by circumstance, and then ever more often by a specific conscious plan.

Many people find themselves uncomfortable in a situation that is undefined and in flux; they need the stability of a label, a pigeonhole to place themselves in, a community to belong to. I have always had an almost physiological need to print my own personal label, to construct my own pigeonhole, to forge the community I belong to. And I have always done so through opposing dimensions. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus, in the fifth century CE, observed that “if there are opposites in the universe, worlds that seem not to reconcile themselves—such as unity and multiplicity, love and hate, peace and war, calm and motion—then the harmony of these opposites cannot be found by canceling out one side, but through letting both live in a continuous tension. Harmony is not the absence but rather the balance of contrasts.”¹³

Over the past twenty years I have been an anomalous designer, a figure the design community didn’t fully understand for a long time; it’s only in recent years that this community has partly understood and accepted me. The reason was that I was suspended between the worlds of design and business, and it was difficult to identify and fit into the traditional categories of either professional community. Even today, some designers mistakenly call me a marketer because they ignore the kind of design I do. And yet, I certainly don’t belong to the traditional marketing community. The marketers, the proper ones, see me as an alien on vacation in their world. They like me because, even though I come from Mars, I speak their language; I understand them, I appreciate them, and I give them a set of useful and innovative instruments that I have brought with me from my distant planet. But in their eyes I have green skin, scales, and antennae. I am a designer, a creative, a being visiting the marketing planet, an ambassador with a diplomatic visa.

It’s a Pirandellian situation: I’m a character in search of an author, a designer impersonating a businessman too.¹⁴ In the end, I always remain a designer—a pure and true designer, a designer in every cell of my brain and heart. But I constantly live suspended between design and business, in a virgin territory, trying to create value for both communities. The great difference between me and Luigi Pirandello’s characters is that I feel great in this suspended dimension—because it’s in this dimension, where his characters lose their identities, that I finally found my own!

The great Italian designer and my good friend, Fabio Novembre—in an interview he gave in my very own Varese in 2018—defined this dimension, through a metaphor that has remained branded on my heart and mind because he sublimely, romantically, and poetically defined what’s happened over the past twenty years. I’ll quote him word for word: “Mauro’s great lesson is the following. For me, you know why they say I’m a young designer? Because I’m the last of the Mohicans. That is, I followed a well-beaten track and I followed it well, and I’m considered one of the great ones. But I took a well-worn road! Mauro went out to find a track that didn’t exist, he went to cut his way through the forest. And that’s a huge thing to do. Can you imagine this young guy, only twenty-seven years old, at 3M, ready to begin that kind of climb?”

I will do everything I can to educate my children to grow up fascinated by the unknown, by discovery, by unexplored territories, by the culture of suspension. Through example, education, and experience, I will try to give them that virtual machete that they can use to make their way through the jungle they choose, beating new and unexplored pathways. I will watch them from afar, letting them discover, experiment, allowing them to fall, to make mistakes, always ready to run to their help in moments of need, while I will continue to make my own path, opening up new sections in my own personal jungle. Suspension, discovery, and the unknown are my unavoidable destiny, where I find all the energy I need to survive, to be happy, and to fly.

The concept of suspension is a fundamental filter that blends all of the ingredients that define the recipe for the unicorn. In this dynamic, constant, changing suspension, I have searched for myself—and this is where I found my unique and distinct identity.

All those who want to innovate have to find themselves at ease in this constant state of suspension. To everyone who lives this on a daily basis: Don’t fear it, don’t flee from it, don’t give in to the pressures of a society that always wants to make you normal, to tame you, to force you into a definition, a label, an accepted and shared dimension. Don’t be afraid to live in suspension; don’t be afraid to be different. And to anyone who is the leader of a company, a community or a team and wants to innovate: Remember to look for this abnormality, this suspension, this diversity. Celebrate it, nurture it, amplify it.

Can You Make a Horse into a Unicorn Through Education?

Many of the anecdotes shared over the preceding pages are stories that concentrate on my early years of life. And they recount a natural tendency to be a unicorn, a tendency that has nevertheless been formed, directed, and molded by the culture in which I was immersed, especially by the culture of my family and my social context during those years.

Over time, I have found myself speaking about the unicorn’s gift on countless occasions, in the most varied contexts, in different forms, and often I’ve been asked questions that perhaps some of you are also asking yourselves while you read these lines: Is it possible to educate someone to become a unicorn? Can you train a unicorn? In other words, is it possible to identify a set of individuals and coach them in a strategic and systematic way to become unicorns?

My reply is always the same: yes and no. To be a unicorn, a real unicorn, a pure one—to possess the long list of personal gifts shared in this book and to demonstrate each of these virtues in an exceptional way—is, in part, a natural talent. So to a certain extent, people are born unicorns. This doesn’t mean, however, that if someone isn’t a natural unicorn, that person can’t try to become one. It only means that if someone isn’t born a unicorn, then that person doesn’t start with all of the characteristics that give a unicorn that extra gear for innovating in an exceptional way.

Being a unicorn is a talent just as, for example, the most obvious and visible abilities in sport are talents. Maradona and Ronaldo were born talented athletes; Serena Williams and Roger Federer were, too, as were Tom Brady and Peyton Manning, Kobe Bryant and Magic Johnson, Sachin Tendulkar and Shahid Afridi. However much I trained, I would still find it difficult or impossible to reach the results of these superstars of sport. And it’s the same in the world of business: Steve Jobs, Henry Ford, Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos, and Bill Gates were born innovators.

In the case of unicorns, these characteristics are contained in these individuals’ genetic code, but at the beginning of their journeys through the world, some are still rough, and others pure energy. Some are bursts of excellence that appear in an uncontrolled way; some are flashes of genius; and others are dormant, mere potential awaiting activation. Education and training are a way to tame and awaken these characteristics. Therefore, education and training are fundamental.

Let me be very clear: this is true for people who are born with these gifts as well for those who do not have them naturally. A nonnatural unicorn who wants to become one and who has the right training and proper motivation could manage to generate better results than those of a natural unicorn who does not cultivate these gifts with the right education.

To avoid confusion, I’m not saying that a soccer player who has no natural gifts can become a Maradona through good training. Maradona’s raw talent, that of a pure unicorn, can’t be reached through training alone. But a normal soccer player, with a good dose of training and effort, can manage to play in a more satisfying and eventually superior way than someone who is gifted but never trains or puts in any effort.

Let’s try to understand this logic in greater detail. Education has three main functions: generating awareness, growing, and maintaining.

Generating Awareness

Education first of all creates awareness: it makes a unicorn aware of the function of some of those gifts that otherwise the person might take for granted. Education can even make a unicorn aware of having some of those gifts, in case the individual had not already realized this.

The situation is like that of a young soccer player with a magic touch and lucid vision, who as a child thinks that all of the other children have the same control over the ball and clarity in the field, until he trains on his first team and the coach points out how extraordinary the player’s gifts truly are. The match makes him realize his value and how that value can make a difference: training gives him a measure to compare himself to and makes him aware of the unique nature of his attributes.

It’s the same with someone who is naturally empathetic but doesn’t realize the extraordinary value of this ability to read a room at first glance, to attend to people’s surface reactions, their moods, their level of interest, their function in that context, the social dynamics established between individuals in any given moment. Then, the training ground of life, or an encounter with a coach, allows the person to understand the extraordinary value of those gifts and their deep significance for innovation processes as precious tools for understanding people, both as the objects of research and as project partners.

Awareness is a fundamental step, because it allows unicorns to focus their own skills in a more intentional way, nurturing them and amplifying them exponentially.

Growing

The second function of training is precisely this: growing, fine-tuning, and perfecting these gifts.

The soccer player with good footwork who continues training, session after session, to continuously improve in technique is fine-tuning, getting closer to perfection, constantly and systematically.

This is the unicorn who is able to bring together, in a natural way, vision and execution, dream and action, but who simultaneously, through practice and education, perfects this balance, understanding how to move with agility and efficiency, refining the timing, defining the rhythm, fine-tuning the frequency.

Maintaining

Finally, continuous training and constant learning are indispensable for maintaining these gifts to the utmost degree, to keep them toned, brilliant, fresh, and exceptional. To do so requires understanding that life is a journey of study without end, a continuous school without limits or conclusion, where we have to act like students and apprentices for the whole duration of our existence.

Soccer players who train every day to keep their performance and technique more brilliant than ever are maintaining their gifts. So is the unicorn who never stops being curious, reading, studying, staying informed, listening, thinking, with the goal of perfecting every single gift that Mother Nature has bestowed, in a gradual and constant way over time.

In her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, Carol S. Dweck provides a very powerful term for this way of acting and thinking.¹⁵ She calls it growth mindset. People with a growth mindset, even without an exceptional basis of talent, can overtake people with natural talent who do not have this same mindset, in terms of performance and results. Through self-awareness, and careful work to grow and maintain their gifts, such people can reach optimal results.

The French psychologist Alfred Binet, inventor of the IQ test, used to remind the world of a simple truth: those who are the most intelligent when they die are not necessarily the ones who are the most intelligent when they are born. The same is true for unicorns. There is no dichotomy between DNA and education, between genius and experience, between predisposition and training, between natural gifts and hard work; you need both. Genius, DNA, and nature take inspiration from environmental contexts and social interactions, which activate them, wake them up, mature them, and allow them to grow and progress. Natural unicorns without a growth mindset will end up failing to exploit their own qualities and will be overtaken by individuals who have much less natural talent but who apply the right experience and determination, with time and energy invested in their growth. A unicorn with a growth mindset is an explosive mixture.

And finally, I should clarify something: the status of the unicorn is an ambition, a tension, an aspiration toward an ideal profile. Ronaldo, Serena Williams, Tom Brady, Magic Johnson, and Sachin Tendulkar, to return to the sporting metaphor, are not 100 percent unicorns, but they have drawn nearer to that status than many others in their fields. They are surrounded by many other unicorns who play and compete in the UEFA Champions League, in the NBA, the NFL, the Grand Slam, the Cricket World Cup, boasting exceptional performances without claiming the role of superstars. They are 70, 80, or 90 percent unicorns. In other words, we don’t need everyone to become a Maradona or a Steve Jobs; we can all be incredible innovators even in our imperfect status of being almost unicorns. What’s important is to have some basic characteristics and then continue to move toward perfection, through continuous training, with courage, passion, and devotion.

There are two characteristics among the unicorns’ gifts listed earlier, however, that need to be standard in every human category, whatever role people have. These characteristics are kindness and sincerity. If all of the companies in the world—big and small, public and private—celebrated these values, then we would have more efficient enterprises, better businesses, and a happier society. The schools of our planet, as well as teaching math, literature, geography, philosophy, physics, and finance, should educate people in kindness and sincerity. And then schools should teach the ability to dream, the practice of curiosity, empathy, the art of execution, respect, tolerance of discomfort, storytelling, and all the other gifts that make up unicorns. And the schools should do so not in an accidental way, through the lucky example of a few special teachers who embody these same attributes, but in a strategic and systematic way, with textbooks and seminars, to help grow awareness of the value of these virtues both for the students and for the teachers themselves. This kind of approach to education would create many more leaders for our companies, our communities, and our society as a whole and would create better conditions for collective social progress.