Being a sneaky, go where you aren’t supposed to, cracker, the kind of thing that most people think of when you say “hacker”, is pretty damn hard. There are two kinds – those who get caught and those who don’t. The ones that you should be afraid of are the ones who have come and gone without leaving a trace, and can come back and do it again at will. The round-trip ticket.
The same thing goes for stalkers, snipers, special operations forces, spies, cheating spouses, and crooked politicians.
Those who get caught and those who don’t. Pretty simple really. And from where do you think we inform our opinions about these kinds of people? That’s right, from the one’s who get caught.
We tend to do the same thing when it comes to creative thinkers; we value those who can get “outside the box” more than we do those who know how to bring what is found outside back into the box. In simplest terms, we esteem the kid who knows how to escape from boarding school in daring and spectacular ways, but gets caught in the process more than the kid who knows how to walk out the front door in broad daylight and bring back in the contraband. In fact, in the grand scheme, it seems we esteem them less than the kids who never even try to break the rules as well.
Getting away from the conventional wisdom isn’t any good if all you do is end up in some altered reality state that is unsharable. Being able to learn from and re-teach to others the salient lessons of unconventionalism is what makes the difference between a rebel and a revolutionary. It is what turns the rejection of conventional wisdom into the acceptance of progressive wisdom; wisdom that comes from convergent thinking.
You can’t even begin to engage in convergent thinking if you haven’t first engaged in divergent thinking; you have to walk away before you can come back.
This kind of refolding and refactoring of ideas is the real mark of creative thinking because it possesses utility, not just novelty. The world is filled with original ideas that never actualized themselves into anything of use other than portfolios of business process patents and tall tales of imagined glory (which really amounts to the same thing).
This isn’t just the domain of madmen and intellectual hedonists, but no group will ever manifest creativity without the cultural embrace of their willingness to walk away, and to bring something back to show and tell.